This post is the fifth in our series providing a literature review of cookbook scholarship. Click here for the first post of the series: cookbooks as scholarly resources and here for the second post of the series: environmental countercultural cookbooks and here for the third: postwar sexism and feminist response in cookbooks and here for the fourth: lesbian and queer cookbooks.
Cookbooks can act as political documents: the ingredients referenced in cookbooks not only show researchers the kinds of foods that were available, but also cultural values. Researcher Stephanie Hartman argues that 1960s and 1970s American commune cookbooks demonstrated the ways that cooking and eating can bring together pleasure and politics in unexpected ways. Sociologist Stacy Williams has likewise used cookbooks to examine how activists have used these writings to work towards gender equality (2014). Williams builds on this argument in further work, examining how American feminists at the turn of the 20th century used cookbooks to popularize radical frames that fundamentally challenged widespread beliefs about women’s role as political citizens. These cookbooks demonstrated that women could incorporate new practices into their lives without abandoning their traditional feminine roles (2016). In another piece, Williams demonstrates that American liberal feminists in the 1960s-1980s likewise leveraged cookbooks to challenged the traditional division of domestic labor, support women’s involvement in the paid workplace, and increase women’s control of economic resources by suggesting utilizing time-and labor-saving cooking methods, encouraging men to cook, and proposing that women make money from cooking (Segal 2016). Social anthropologist Rachael Scicluna has shown how the kitchen acted as a political, contested and subversive place for London’s older lesbians at the end of the 20th century and early 21st century and has argued that the 1987 feminist cookbook, Dena Attar’s Turning the Tables, elucidated this point. Sciculna points to Attar’s introductory lines that the cookbook “might inspire you to cook but it might equally inspire you to stay out of the kitchen as much as you can” (Attar 1987: 17), to argue that the act of “publishing a feminist cookbook, for instance, was a satirical provocation towards the larger discourse on the role of women in society” (2017: 192). Cookbooks can deliver or intertwine separate political strands. However, we must be aware of the limitations of the scholarship on cookbooks. American studies scholar, Hélène Le Dantec-Lowry, commenting on Theophano’s work, notes that much of the scholarship that relies on cookbooks as source material ends up focusing on the experiences of straight, white, middle class women’s experiences (2008). Cookbooks' recipes are part of their politics.
Recipes can reveal aspirations as much as realities. Whether or not people actually cooked all of these dishes within their homes, these food items were part of the cultural milieu in which people constructed their own identities, through the consumption, production, and discussion around food and dining. As part of her edited volume, Laurel Foster demonstrated how British feminists used culinary discourse to present recipes for change in the early 1970s, primarily within feminist magazine and newsletter culture (2010: 147-168). Stacy Williams likewise turned to recipes within newspaper culture to better understand the prefigurative politics of women’s temperance and suffrage movements (2017). Both authors underline the methodological potential of recipes as a site of study.
The above paragraphs serve merely as an introduction to the literature on the manner in which cookbooks and recipes are political documents.