Eat My Words: Reading Women's Lives Through the Cookbooks They Wrote by Janet Theophano

Author:Janet Theophano
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781250111944
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2016-01-25T23:00:00+00:00

Figure 5.9 Marginalia from Mrs. Putnam’s receipt book (1854) critiquing the author.

Cookbooks, as they are used in daily life, are works-in-progress. They are added to, altered, and transformed to suit the idiosyncratic needs of each household. As texts poised between generations, genders, occupations, and statuses, cookbooks are welcoming sites for pen, pencil, and print.

Thus, cookbooks invite editorializing. Printed books often have blank pages for the reader to add recipes of her own. Well-known authors like Marion Harland asked readers to test the recipes and submit changes and recommendations to her. Improvements on the author’s work were claimed to be welcome. This invitation to the reader is not altogether different from manuscripts that offered three or four versions of the same recipe, using the expression “another way.” Other manuscripts simply added several recipes for the same bread, pie, or pudding learned from different sources and, most likely, at different times.

All of these documents show how kitchens and cookbooks were places where women could and did practice reading and writing and where they also taught others to do so. Manuscript recipe books and printed cookbooks provided women the opportunity to read, write, and reflect and to engage in reverie and fantasy while working in the kitchen. In the process of learning and practicing their literacy skills on the pages of their cookbooks, pasting in recipes from other printed sources, and editorializing, women were not only readers and writers, they became authors.

Women did not merely receive texts but participated in their creation. Thus, as each woman created a book of her own, she engaged in book production. A few women took the next step and used cooking knowledge and writing as a sanctioned path to cultural authority, economic independence, and public visibility.

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