Eat My Words

Reading Women's Lives Through the Cookbooks they Wrote

Janet Theophano

• Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
• Year: 2024
• eBook ISBN: 9781250111944
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Social History

"An engrossing study of how individual women and entire communities have, for centuries, expressed themselves through culinary instruction." —Francine Prose, Elle

Some people think that a cookbook is just a collection of recipes for dishes that feed the body. In  Eat My Words: Reading Women's Lives through the Cookbooks They Wrote, Janet Theophano shows that cookbooks provide food for the mind and the soul as well. Looking beyond the ingredients and instructions, she shows how women have used cookbooks to assert their individuality, develop their minds, and structure their lives. Beginning in the seventeenth century and moving up through the present day, Theophano reads between the lines of recipes for dandelion wine, "Queen of Puddings," and half-pound cake to capture the stories and voices of these remarkable women.
Theophano begins with seventeenth-century English estate housekeeping books that served as both cookbooks and reading primers so that women could educate themselves during long hours in the kitchen. She looks at  A Date with a Dish, a classic African American cookbook that reveals the roots of many traditional American dishes, and she brings to life a 1950s cookbook written specifically for Americans by a Chinese émigré and transcribed into English by her daughter. Finally, Theophano looks at the contemporary cookbooks of Lynne Rosetto Kaspar, Madeleine Kamman, and Alice Waters to illustrate the sophistication and political activism present in modern cookbook writing.

"Janet Theophano [is] . . . changing the way old cookbooks are perceived." — The Oakland Press
"She is at her very best when penetrating her material, like a light shining through paper, to illuminate the characters of her women authors." — Toronto Star

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Notice
• Dedication
• List of Illustrations
• Epigraph
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Cookbooks as Communities
• Chapter 2. Cookbooks as Collective Memory and Identity
• Chapter 3. Lineage and Legacies
• Chapter 4. Cookbooks as Autobiography
• Chapter 5. Cookbooks, Literacy, and Domesticity
• Chapter 6. Becoming an Author: Cookbooks and Conduct
• Chapter 7. Recipe and Household Literature as Social and Political Commentary
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author
• Praise for Janet Theophano’s Eat My Words
• Newsletter Sign-up
• Contents
• Copyright