Cookbooks are Our Texts

Abstract

Cookbooks are more than mere devices for presenting recipes. They inform the practice of cooking and much more. They contain information about ethnic identity, treasured folklore, gender patterns, and religious performances. They are chronicles of public and personal record. Importantly, food cultures not only strengthen a community’s group patterns, they also sustain those configurations longer than most other customs. But food is ephemeral; it is filled with meaning and then disappears. Cookbooks endure displaying social patterns and cultural meaning. In this essay, the examination of a succession of Iraqi Jewish cookbooks exposes patterns of adjustment and conservation as the community flees its homeland and settles in Montreal, Canada.

More than Meals: A Narrative Criminological Analysis of Inmate‐Authored Cookbooks

“…These books provide glimpses of the way in which a community controls its own narrative. Research has examined community cookbooks through feminist and critical race perspectives (Bardenstein ; Collings Eves ; Dubisar ; Ferguson ; Fleitz ; Gvion ; Janowski ; West ; Williams ), and through the lens of geography and place (Bardenstein ; Baumel Joseph ; Epp ; Mecklenburg‐Faenger ; Neuhaus ; Novero ; Nussel ; Pilcher ; Ransom and Wright ) to establish the types of ‘story’ told by a variety of voices. Bower () created a typology of cookbooks by thematically analysing what she called the ‘home plots’ of these types of texts.…”

“…While the literature on community cookbooks is quite robust, research focused on these types of cookbooks authored by the institutionalised population is difficult to locate (for the exception, see Rouhan ()). This is a significant gap, for scholarship that analyses cookbooks from critical perspectives suggests that when food, particularly familiar food, is insufficient, its symbolic, communal importance is magnified by the role its absence plays in the body and in the memory (Baumel Joseph ; Bower ; Christensen ; Epp ; Ferguson ; Gvion ). Additionally, food is a powerful aspect of incarceration (Brisman ; Collins and Thompson ; Gibson‐Light ; Rouhan ; Smoyer ), intimating that explorations into inmates’ expressions of their relationships with food should be prioritised.…”