The Recipe Reader: Narratives - Contexts - Traditions

by Floyd,Janet

• ISBN13: 9780754608646
• ISBN10: 0754608646
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-11-28
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Over the last decade there has been an intense and widespread interest in the writing and publishing of cookery books; yet there remains surprisingly little contextualized analysis of the recipe as a generic form. This essay collection asserts that the recipe in all its cultural and textual contexts - from the quintessential embodiment of lifestyle choices to the reflection of artistic aspiration - is a complex, distinct and important form of cultural expression. In this volume, contributors address questions raised by the recipe, its context, its cultural moment and mode of expression. Examples are drawn from such diverse areas as: nineteenth and twentieth-century private publications, official government documents, campaigning literature, magazines, and fictions as well as cookery writers themselves, cookbooks and TV cookery. In subjecting the recipe to close critical analysis, The Recipe Reader serves to move the study of this cultural form forward. It expands the range of writers under consideration, and brings new perspectives, contexts and arguments into the existing field of debate about cookery writing.

Table of Contents

Notes on Contributors	vii
Acknowledgements	x
The Recipe in its Cultural Contexts	1	(14)
Janet Floyd
Laurel Forster
TRADITIONS
Of Recipe Books and Reading in the Nineteenth Century: Mrs Beeton and her Cultural Consequences	15	(16)
Margaret Beetham
Redefining `Rudimentary' Narrative: Women's Nineteenth-Century Manuscript Cookbooks	31	(21)
Andrea K. Newlyn
`Talking' Recipes: What Mrs Fisher Knows and the African-American Cookbook Tradition	52	(20)
Andrew Warnes
Domesticating Imperialism: Curry and Cookbooks in Victorian England	72	(16)
Susan Zlotnick
`In Close Touch With her Government': Women and the Domestic Science Movement in World War One Propaganda	88	(17)
Celia M. Kingsbury
INDIVIDUAL INTERVENTIONS
The Importance of Being Greedy: Connoisseurship and Domesticity in the Writings of Elizabeth Robins Pennell	105	(22)
Talia Schaffer
Simple, Honest Food: Elizabeth David and the Construction of Nation in Cookery Writing	127	(20)
Janet Floyed
CONTEMPORARY CONTEXTS
Liberating the Recipe: A Study of the Relationship between Food and Feminism in the early 1970s	147	(22)
Laurel Forster
Regulation and Creativity: The Use of Recipes in Contemporary Fiction	169	(18)
Sarah Sceats
Nigella Bites the Naked Chef: The Sexual and the Sensual in Television Cookery Programmes	187	(18)
Maggie Andrews
Adapting and Adopting: The Migrating Recipe	205	(14)
Marina de Camargo Heck
Bibliography	219	(16)
Name Index	235	(6)
Subject Index	241