Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Magazine Movements
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: Portsmouth, England
STATE:
COUNTRY: United Kingdom
NATIONALITY:
http://www.port.ac.uk/school-of-media-and-performing-arts/staff/laurel-forster.html * http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/magazine-movements-9781441177452/ * http://www.bloomsbury.com/author/laurel-forster * https://www.linkedin.com/in/laurel-forster-83b54280/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 2003002352
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n2003002352
HEADING: Forster, Laurel, 1962-
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670 __ |a Floyd, Janet. The recipe reader, 2004: |b CIP t.p. (Laurel Forster) ds (b. Sept. 19, 1962)
670 __ |a Magazine movement, 2015: |b eCIP t.p. (Laurel Forster) data view screen (Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at the University of Portsmouth, UK)
PERSONAL
Born September 19, 1962.
EDUCATION:University of Winchester, B.A., 1992; University of Sussex, M.A., 1993, D.Phil., 1999.
ADDRESS
CAREER
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Laurel Forster is senior lecturer in the School of Media and Performing Arts of Portsmouth University. She studied at the University of Winchester, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in English and drama before attending the University of Sussex. There she studied literature and cultural studies, earning both a master’s and a D.Phil. Forster’s research and teaching focus on women’s cultures, print media, and feminism. She is most interested, according to her faculty profile, in “women’s magazines and their cultural contexts,” ranging across “magazines, lifestyle television, television drama, novels, short stories and science fiction.”
The Recipe Reader
Forster has edited two books: The Recipe Reader: Narratives, Contexts, Traditions, (with Janet Floyd) and British Culture and Society in the 1970s: The Lost Decade (with Sue Harper). The contributors to The Recipe Reader draw from a variety of sources from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to analyze recipes. According to the University of Nebraska Press Web site, the essays “address questions raised by the recipe and its context, cultural moment, and mode of expression.” The book’s chapters focus, among other topics, on African American cookery; the homemaking and cookery books of Mrs. Beeton; the introduction of new foods to England during the Victorian era, as imported from India; the domestic science fad of the early twentieth century; and the introduction of television cookery programs.
Teresa Mangum, writing in Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, noted that The Recipe Reader contains “fascinating essays” that “capture lost voices.” She further commented that “memories, and associations attached to food, recipes and recipe books are crucial to family networks, gender politics, and social transformation as well as tradition.” Readers, she said, “will come away from this rich repast of recipes longing for more.” In Gastronomica, Anne Bower observed that “narrativity, postcolonial theory, deconstruction, feminism, performance theory, and other critical approaches can and should be applied to cookbooks” and that Forster and Floyd have contributed “to the previous scholarship in this area.” She found the essays that “provide a feminist perspective” particularly instructive, in that they “focus is on conflicts within individuals or groups, as women find themselves struggling with traditional-domestic versus liberationist impulses.” She ended by saying that The Recipe Reader offers “plenty of insights.”
British Culture and Society in the 1970s and Magazine Movements
The essays written for British Culture and Society in the 1970s looks at the decade in the context of the plethora of transformations that took place. This was a time, according to the Cambridge Scholars Publishing Web site, that was “sometimes florid, innovatory, risk-taking and occasionally awkward and inconsistent.” The contributors examine a host of cultural phenomena: the New Age and its attendant changes; “aesthetics and politics”; labor movements; television humor; the fictional “Wombles,” creatures who collected and recycled garbage; and much more. Kevin M. Flanagan, reviewing the book online at Screening the Past, called out the book’s “very ambitious scope, with coverage of everything from politicized urban development schemes . . . to the rhetoric of feminism in the era’s women’s magazines.” He further commented that “media studies scholars interested in the transmission of cultural values via broadcast entertainment in the public interest will find a number of original case studies.” Flanagan found that British Culture and Society in the 1970s “provides a fine compliment to the emergent reconsideration of British attitudes of a still-obscured decade.”
Forster’s first single-authored text is Magazine Movements: Women’s Culture, Feminisms and Media Form. Not all women’s magazines are the same in form or content. In this book. Forster goes beyond stereotypes to examine a range of magazines and even television magazine programs (e.g., Woman’s Hour and Houseparty), presenting a case study in every chapter. C. Johanningsmeier, writing in Choice, pointed out that academics have looked at the role of magazines in either fostering or challenging gender stereotyping. The critic concluded that the author’s “extensive archival research, incisive analysis, and jargon-free writing makes this book a pleasurable as well as an educational experience.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Choice, June, 2016, C. Johanningsmeier, review of Magazine Movements: Women’s Culture, Feminisms and Media Form, p. 1470.
Gastronomica, fall, 2005, Anne Bower, review of The Recipe Reader: Narratives, Contexts, Traditions, p. 125.
Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, spring, 2006, Teresa Mangum, review of The Recipe Reader, p. 172.
ONLINE
Cambridge Scholars Publishing Web site, http://www.cambridgescholars.com/ (May 31, 2017), synopsis of British Culture and Society in the 1970s: The Lost Decade.
Screening the Past, http://www.screeningthepast.com/ (May 31, 2017), Kevin M. Flanagan, review of British Culture and Society in the 1970s.
University of Portsmouth Web site, http://www.port.ac.uk/ (May 30, 2017), author faculty profile.*
DR LAUREL FORSTER
Qualifications: PhD, MA, BA
Role Title: Senior Lecturer – Media
Address: Eldon Building, Winston Churchill Avenue, Portsmouth PO1 2DJ
Telephone: 023 9284 5570
Email: laurel.forster@port.ac.uk
Department: School of Media and Performing Arts
Faculty: Creative and Cultural Industries
Biography
I work as Senior Lecturer in the Media Studies department of the University of Portsmouth, with interests in print media and feminism, and particularly in women’s magazines.
Teaching Responsibilities
Both my teaching and research have an emphasis on critical and cultural theories, and my research and publications explore ways in which creative expression relates to the cultural and social context.
Research
My research interests fall into a number of related areas including women’s writing, women’s cultures, feminism, and media representations of women. I have a particular research and publication interest in women’s magazines and their cultural contexts. Magazines, lifestyle television, television drama, novels, short stories and science fiction are all media forms and genres which interest me and have informed my writing. Recent publications include work on feminism and women’s magazines; modernism, war and May Sinclair; and 1970s British television. I am presently writing a monograph on women’s magazines, looking at the political and social impact some magazines have had on British women’s history.
Laurel Forster
Laurel Forster is Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at the University of Portsmouth, UK. Her research interests and her range of publications contextualize the portrayal of women and women's cultures in magazines, women's writing and on television.
- See more at: http://www.bloomsbury.com/author/laurel-forster/#sthash.WGmxDgy5.dpuf
Forster, Laurel: Magazine movements: women's culture,
feminisms and media form
C. Johanningsmeier
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries.
53.10 (June 2016): p1470.
COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Full Text:
Forster, Laurel. Magazine movements: women's culture, feminisms and media form. Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. 285p bibl index ISBN
9781441172631 cloth, $110.00; ISBN 9781441177452 pbk, $32.95; ISBN 9781441106018 ebook, $28.99
(cc) 53-4254
HQ1180
2014-37449 CIP
Ever since the publication of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique in 1963, academic studies have sought to gauge the extent to which massmarket
commercial magazines directed toward female readers in the US and UK have either contributed to gender stereotyping or offered arenas
in which women could contest stifling gender roles. Forster (media studies, Univ. of Portsmouth, UK) makes a solid, important contribution to
this ongoing debate by investigating a group of British "magazines" published from the mid-20th century to the present that have been almost
entirely overlooked by scholars. These include not only print magazines--Arena Three (1964-71), the first openly lesbian magazine in Britain;
Mukti (1983-87), aimed at South Asian women; and a number of overtly feminist magazines--but also the television magazine Houseparty (1972-
81) and various radio magazines. The most fascinating chapter examines the history and significance of the Cooperative Correspondence Club
(1935-90), a small group of women with diverse geographic, religious, and class affiliation, which twice monthly hand-produced a copy of a
magazine, comprising individual women's letters, that circulated among the group's members. Forster's extensive archival research, incisive
analysis, and jargon-free writing makes this book a pleasurable as well as an educational experience. Summing Up: *** Highly recommended.
Lower-division undergraduates through faculty.--C. Johanningsmeier, University of Nebraska at Omaha
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Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Johanningsmeier, C. "Forster, Laurel: Magazine movements: women's culture, feminisms and media form." CHOICE: Current Reviews for
Academic Libraries, June 2016, p. 1470. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA454942665&it=r&asid=64260a7cbebc197442b5eeabe513b022. Accessed 15 May
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A454942665
University of Tulsa
Review
Reviewed Work(s): The Recipe Reader: Narratives, Contexts, Traditions by Janet Floyd and Laurel Forster
Review by: Teresa Mangum
Source: Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, Vol. 25, No. 1, Emotions (Spring, 2006), pp. 172-176
Published by: University of Tulsa
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phy, Earth Hori zon, she says that at the deepest levels of ourselves we are not, however, individual: "we are incurably collective" (p. 245). And part of this collectivity is nonhuman: "It is not that we work upon the Cosmos, but that it works on us. I suffer because I achieve so little in this relation, and rejoice that I have felt so much. As much as I am able, I celebrate the Earth Horizon" (p. 246). Thus, even as Austin argued for an inclusive and authentic "American" literature, she admits to the act of writing such to be a life-long challenge and evolution itself.
This is an extremely valuable study of Austin at a time when American binaries continue in the intellectualization of the human, of culture, of nature, let alone the endless canonical debates about American literature. For those who cannot travel to the Huntington Library or whose patience (understandably) runs thin in attempts to read the Austin canon-but most for those who omit from analysis the necessity of place-based study perhaps the cogent and readable arguments in this study will illuminate and even convince.
SheUey Armitage University of Texas, El Paso
THE RECIPE READER: NARRATIVES, CONTEXTS, TRADITIONS,
edited by Janet Floyd and Laurel Forster. Aldershot, Hants: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2003. 246 pp. $99.95.
This past holiday season, as has often been the case, I found myself rummaging through usually neglected cookbooks in search of recipes for candied sweet potatoes and cornbread dressing. Though I now live in the Midwest and have long forsaken the fried fare of my youth, I still need the South in my mouth, as we Southerners say, on holidays.
As I paged through recipes for delicacies like collards, greens, and black eyed peas, a small notation took my breath. There, in a simple note "Very good. Needs more brown sugar"-spoke my Mother, who died sev eral years ago. Briefly, I lived in the memory of past holidays, of generations of family cooks, of gratitude for the love my mother communicated best through food. Of course, I made the recipe. And I added a spill of brown sugar.
The fascinating essays in Janet Floyd and Laurel Forster's The Recipe
Reader similarly capture lost voices. They remind us page by page that nourishment is the simplest of the profound needs "food" fulfills. Collectively, the essays demonstrate that as the repository of our knowl edge, memories, and associations attached to food, recipes and recipe books are crucial to family networks, gender politics, and social transfor mation as well as tradition.
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Like those rare cooks who learn to share a kitchen, the editors speak in one voice through their introduction. Recipes, they explain, are "persis tently drawn into cultural debates around health and purity, about lifestyle and individualism, and into definitions of the national past, present and future" (p. 1). While several of the essays concentrate on "cookery books," to use the British phrase, the editors point to the ubiquity of the recipe itself in newspapers, novels, magazines, oral histories, government docu ments, private papers, diaries, calendars, grocery story leaflets, on aprons and dishes, and, I would add, in abundance on "The Food Channel" or websites from Epicurious to Weight Watchers. Ravenous readers can sign up for recipe websites that provide a week's worth of recipes, accompanied by grocery lists. Those who prefer to cook as well as dine in company can join a bevy of cooks at a neighborhood franchise of "Dream Dinners," "My Girlfriend's Kitchen," or "Let's Dish." There, customers create casseroles from company recipes as they move through an assembly line of prepared ingredients.
The essays in this collection offer intriguing and capacious claims for the textual, cultural, and social status of the omnipresent recipe. Recipes provide narratives and also prompt them from imaginative readers. Recipes demand to be partnered with other recipes and presented appropriately in the company of table settings, course arrangements, even guest lists. Recipes inspire gastronomic feats of creativity and economic ingenuity not only in the combination of flavors and the creation of personal "receipt books" but also in the tricks required to stretch a meager budget for an abundant feast. At the same time, recipes weave themselves into the fab ric of other genres such as travel literature, memoirs, and fiction.
To capture the rich history, diversity, and cultural work of the recipe, the volume includes essays from various disciplinary perspectives. The essays range across time, social classes, and ethnic communities. Collectively, the essays emphasize how the textual choices, narrative structures, format, and circulation of recipes transform this seemingly innocuous genre into an extension of women's reach beyond the home into public, even explicitly political spheres of influence and activity.
The first and longest section, "Traditions," brings together six essays, which begin with the rise of Mrs. Beeton's cookery empire and end with the simultaneous launchings of World War I and domestic science. Building upon her previous work on nineteenth-century women's maga zines, Margaret Beetham takes on the formidable industry referred to as Mrs. Beeton in "Of Recipe Books and Reading in the Nineteenth Century: Mrs. Beeton and Her Cultural Consequences." In this concise, detailed study, Beetham discusses the emergence of the modem cookbook from printed "receipt" books (that included "recipes" for bleaching, brewing,
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and varnishes alongside hints for preparing food), all purpose "household manuals," and women's magazines, including six-penny monthlies such as Woman at Home as well as penny weeklies. In 1861, Beeton's Book of Househokl M anagement rose above the fray. Beeton was the first to catego rize food into categories, to list recipes alphabetically, and even to use var ied fonts to clarify instructions. Beeton thus elevated domestic labor into the science of domestic management.
Andrea K. Newlyn focuses on more intimate recipe collections in "Redefining 'Rudimentary' Narrative: Women's Nineteenth-Century Manuscript Cookbooks." These home-grown American cookbook collec tions trace a narrative trajectory from a disorderly and unhealthy house to a productive, cozy home, all through the agency of housewives. Newlyn's account of letters, which intermingle advice, affection, and recipes, is espe cially poignant. Andrew Warnes focuses on one specific American cook ing community in '"Talking' Recipes: What M rs . Fisher Knows and the African-American Cookbook Tradition." Many of these cookbooks record oral traditions along with food practices as when a literate transcriber attempts to reproduce both the voice and instructions of an illiterate ex slave. Contemporary writers like Vertemae Smart Grosvenor share this insistence on the "immediacy of speech" (p. 54), incorporating story telling, dialect, and colloquialisms to honor African American history and traditions.
The last two essays in this section forge intriguing connections between global aggression and food. Susan Zlotnick's "Domesticating Imperialism: Curry and Cookbooks in Victorian England" wittily analyzes the transfor mation of curry into a British staple. Zlotnick speculates that in their role as "moral redeemers of the nation" British women welcomed "a hybrid like curry, the mongrelized offspring of England's union with India" into their kitchens in order to erase "its foreign origins" (and much of its heat) (p. 74). Zlotnick suggests contradictory British desires to be incorporated into the empire and terror of being consumed (literally or figuratively) were resolved in the domestication of foreign foods. The essay maps the fortunes of curry in cookbooks and even novels like Vanity Fair. The path ends, ironically, with the return of curry (a near parody of true Indian cuisine) to India as a gift from the English. This section closes with Celia M. Kingsbury's '"In Close Touch With Her Government': Women and the Domestic Science Movement in World War One Propaganda." Here the political role of women and their recipes is explicit. Kingsbury discusses the
U.S. government's orders to "culinary soldiers" to fend off food shortages before and during World War I, a call that echoed through cookbooks, classes, magazine articles, and leaflets.
Section Two, "Individual Interventions," highlights the ways individual
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women have elevated the recipe from domestic humility to gastronomic exclusivity. Talia Schaffer's "The Importance of Being Greedy: Connoisseurship and Domesticity in the Writings of Elizabeth Robins Pennell" examines The Feasts of Autol ycus (1896), a collection that con sisted of essays published in the Pall M all M agazine by an art critic turned food critic. Pennell's book illustrates the contradictions into which food forced the aesthetic New Woman. Cookery becomes "the dark side of aes theticism" where "art met the body" (p. 123), as evidenced by ironic jux taposition: the artistry of geniuses and labor of menial servants, the heart of the domestic realm that only won respect when undertaken by male chefs and, in Pennell's case, a practice better understood by its critics (usu ally men) than its practitioners. The second essay in this section is Janet Floyd's "Simple, Honest Food: Elizabeth David and the Construction of Nation in Cookery Writing." David's strategy for improving British cuisine was to import French and Mediterranean specialities. Ironically, argues Floyd, David inspired more daydreams than dining since many of the ingredients in her recipes were impossible to procure in Britain between 1940-60, when she published. David becomes a curious cosmopolitan whose longing for "authentic" regional cuisines paradoxically rendered her travels in search of food into a representation of national futility.
The collection closes with four essays comprising "Contemporary Contexts." Laurel Forster's "Liberating the Recipe: A Study of the Relationship Between Food and Feminism in the Early 1970s" offers a fas cinating look at the difficulty with which early feminist magazines negoti ated the form of conventional women's magazines, including the ever pre sent recipe. She concludes that once Marxist-feminist arguments cri tiquing housework appeared, recipes "seemed to encompass and express the incompatibilities of reality and utopia" (p. 163). In feminist novels, however, Sarah Sceats finds an abiding fascination with the relationships between women and food. "Regulation and Creativity: The Use of Recipes in Contemporary Fiction" demonstrates the innumerable ways recipes articulate hungers, desires, constraints, and community in a great sweep of novels.
Maggie Andrews shifts attention to televised recipes in "Nigella Bites the Naked Chef: The Sexual and the Sensual in Television Cookery Programmes." Asking why recent cooking shows feature such erotic sounds and shots of eating, Andrews speculates that these two shows in particular express anxiety about the blurring of boundaries between public and pri vate, men's and women's physical pleasures, and sexual and maternal feel ings (in the case of the sensual/maternal female cook). Finally, Marina de Camargo Heck closes the volume with "Adapting and Adopting: The Migrating Recipe." The essay, based on a survey and oral history drawn
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from immigrant populations of Sao Paulo, explores the place of food in memory-and the deeply interwoven connections between food and iden tity, sexuality, desire, and class and ethnic or national affiliations. This is a fitting conclusion to a work devoted to the persistence, renovations, and revelations of the recipe.
My ambition to offer a tasting menu feels more like a romp through my local food co-op's Friday afternoon free-sample extravaganza. In fact, all three courses of this smart, instructive, imaginative, and carefully researched collection deserve to be savored. Ashgate, alas, offers pricey fare. Nevertheless, consumers will come away from this rich repast of recipes longing for more.
Teresa M angum University of Iowa
THE VICTORIAN WOMAN QUESTION IN CONTEMPORARY
FEMINIST FICTION, by Jeannette King. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. 210 pp. $65.00.
In this comprehensive study of contemporary feminist fiction, Jeannette King brings together novels by British and North American women writ ers, including Margaret Atwood, Andrea Barrett, A. S. Byatt, Angela Carter, Victoria Glendinning, Toni Morrison, Michele Roberts, and Sarah Waters. Whether based on historical events, in the case of Atwood's Alias Grace and Morrison's Beloved , or entirely fictional, the texts reveal their authors' complete engagement with the "Victorian Woman Question," and King demonstrates how these novelists incorporate Victorian writings on science and medicine as well as contemporary feminist theory into their literary re-creations of the nineteenth century.
Beginning with an overview of how the Victorians conceptualized fem ininity, in which she draws from the writings of Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, Havelock Ellis, and W. R. Greg, among many others, King estab lishes a context for the fiction she will discuss. Such ideas about sexuality, maternity, and reproduction strongly determined Victorian gender politics, and their afterlife continues. King argues, "amongst the various Victorian discourses explored in feminist fiction of the 1980s and 1990s, scientific discourse is one of the most significant-if only as a subtext. If this is so, it is perhaps because science is again playing a major role in our current 'knowledge' about gender and sexuality" (p. 176).
The subsequent chapters focus on a variety of Victorian "sciences" evolution, criminal deviance/psychology, spiritualism, degeneration, and anthropology-perceptively illustrating how, in each of these areas, ideas of gender difference were adapted to reinforce the patriarchal status quo by
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Review: The Recipe Reader
Reviewed Work(s): The Recipe Reader by Janet Floyd and Laurel Forster Review by: Anne Bower
Source: Gastronomica, Vol. 5, No. 4 (Fall 2005), pp. 125-126 Published by: University of California Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/gfc.2005.5.4.125 Accessed: 31-05-2017 21:10 UTC
The past twenty years have seen a remarkable change in how recipe collections are read. Scholars in women’s studies, cultural studies, anthropology, nutrition, history, literature, and other fields have all contributed to our growing ability to fully read recipe collections. We now understand that narrativity, postcolonial theory, deconstruction, feminism, performance theory, and other critical approaches can and should be applied to cookbooks. Janet Floyd and Laurel Foster’s Recipe Reader benefits from and adds to the previ- ous scholarship in this area.
The book is divided into three sections: “Traditions,” in which fi authors investigate nineteenth- and early twentieth- century cookbooks; “Individual Interventions,” wherein we are introduced (separately) to the idiosyncrasies of two English culinary writers, Elizabeth Robins Pennell and Elizabeth David; and “Contemporary Contexts,” which asks readers to consider food and feminism, recipes in contemporary fiction, the sexual and sensual aspects of television cookery shows, and the ways in which immigrants adhere to and adapt their recipes along with their ethnic identities. “The Recipe in Its Cultural Contexts,” an introduction by editors Janet Floyd and Laurel Forster, precedes this fi array of well-researched and well-written material and discusses “the breadth of con- texts through which the recipe may be understood” (p.8).
This book takes its place in the line of works focused specifically on opening up the rhetoric of cookbooks and recipes. Some studies that I’ve found particularly helpful are the following (arranged in order of publication date).
• Lynne Ireland, “The Compiled Cookbook as Foodways Autobiography,” Western Folklore 40 (1981); reproduced in A Taste of American Place, Barbara G. Shortridge and James R. Shortridge, eds. (Lanham, md: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998).
• Laura Shapiro, Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1986).
• Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, “Recipes for Creating Community: The Jewish Charity Cookbook in America,” Jewish Folklore and Ethnology 9 (1987): 8–12.
• Susan J. Leonardi, “Recipes for Reading: Pasta Salad, Lobster a la Riseholme, and Key Lime Pie,” pmla 104 (1989): 340–347.
• Donna Gabaccia, “Of Cookbooks and Culinary Roots,” We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1998).
• Andrew Smith, Centennial Buckeye Cook Book (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2000).
• Sherrie Inness, Kitchen Culture in America: Popular Representations of Food, Gender, and Race (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001).
• Janet Theophano, Eat My Words: Reading Women’s Lives through the Cookbooks They Wrote (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).
• Jessamyn Neuhaus, Manly Meals and Mom’s Home Cooking: Cookbooks and Gender in Modern America (Baltimore, md: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).
I hope that my own edited collection, Recipes for Reading: Community Cookbooks, Stories, Histories (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997), has also contributed to the discussion of recipes as readerly, if fragmented, narratives.
Despite the work already done to uncover the many ways that recipes create and lend meaning to other forms of discourse, The Recipe Reader contributes some new subjects for analysis and presents new perspectives on works many
of us have read before. For example, while I’ve listened to conference presentations and read some analyses of celebrity chefs and tv cook-show hosts, “Nigella Bites the Naked Chef: The Sexual and the Sensual in Television Cookery Programmes” by Maggie Andrews helped me better under- stand that the shows and their stars “speak to a range of anxieties and insecurities in relation to the pleasures of eating, gendered identity formation, domesticity and the place of television within the ‘family’” (p.189). Likewise, I’m already familiar with the notion that nineteenth-century women,
in different parts of the world, have played important roles in forming national identities by adopting and fusing previ- ously discrete culinary traditions and ingredients. However, Susan Zlotnick’s “Domesticating Imperialism: Curry and Cookbooks in Victorian England” fascinated me because
I hadn’t previously known about the way Victorian British women “incorporated Indian food, which functioned metonymically for India, into the national diet and made it culturally British” (p.73).
As one might expect, a number of these essays provide
a feminist perspective. This stance is particularly interesting given, in a number of cases, the focus is on conflicts within individuals or groups, as women find themselves struggling with traditional-domestic versus liberationist impulses. Talia Schaffer shows us how Elizabeth Robins Pennell managed to “work both sides of this divide” (p.105) through the language of aestheticism. Janet Floyd analyzes Elizabeth David’s negotiations among “gastronomy, the high literary aspirations, the rejection of modern [war-worn] Britain, the colonial
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and post-colonial world-view”(p.137), demonstrating David was torn between presenting herself as a career woman and as a domestic figure (p.139). Laurel Forster’s piece, “Liberating the Recipe: A Study of the Relationship between Food and Feminism in the Early 1970s,” also discerns tensions, even among the most radical writers of the women’s liberation movement, between mainstream ideas about food and iden- tity and more experimental attitudes toward women’s relationships to domestic, career, and personal issues.
While I have focused on a few of the essays I found to be the most eye-opening, I certainly don’t mean to discount any of the fine work here. If you’re a recipe reader—and
if you’re reading this, I’m betting that you are—you’ll find plenty of insights and substantial exploration within the pages of The Recipe Reader.
—Anne Bower, Ohio State University–Marion