The signifying dish: Autobiography and history in two black women's cookbooks

Feminist Studies

Volumn 25, Issue 2, 1999, Pages 449-469

  Zafar, Rafia ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 0038929340     PISSN: 00463663     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/3178690     Document Type: Review

References (62)

1. John Egerton, Southern Food: At Home, on the Road, in History (1987; reprint, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 16.
2. As one historian has written, "the spread of southern cooking to the North in our own day, like the spread of so much else in southern culture, has represented, above all, the triumph of its black component." See Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1974; reprint, New York: Vintage Books, 1976), 543.
3. The popular Charleston [South Carolina] Junior League's Charleston Receipts (Charleston: Junior League of Charleston, 1950), a community cookbook organized by a white women's volunteer organization, has perpetuated these stereotypes for five decades. A "Southern" cookbook, Charleston Receipts depends for its renowned gentility on the recipes, ingredients, and labor culled from the Blacks who labored in white kitchens. Cuisine elements deemed simple when offered elsewhere by African American practitioners here become classic when presented by white upper-middle-class employers. Sometimes thanked directly and sometimes not, the Black cooks are demeaned via quaint illustrations and even more quaint dialect; they become, in Patricia Yaeger's words, "edible labor." See her "Edible Labor," Southern Quarterly 30 (winter-spring 1992): 150-59, especially her remarks on the effaced Black cook/server (156). I have made an analogous observation elsewhere of how the politically vanquished become the rhetorically cannibalized. See Rafia Zafar, "The Proof of the Pudding: Of Haggis, Hasty Pudding, and Transatlantic Influence," Early American Literature 31 (1996): 133-49.
4. The popular Charleston [South Carolina] Junior League's Charleston Receipts (Charleston: Junior League of Charleston, 1950), a community cookbook organized by a white women's volunteer organization, has perpetuated these stereotypes for five decades. A "Southern" cookbook, Charleston Receipts depends for its renowned gentility on the recipes, ingredients, and labor culled from the Blacks who labored in white kitchens. Cuisine elements deemed simple when offered elsewhere by African American practitioners here become classic when presented by white upper-middle-class employers. Sometimes thanked directly and sometimes not, the Black cooks are demeaned via quaint illustrations and even more quaint dialect; they become, in Patricia Yaeger's words, "edible labor." See her "Edible Labor," Southern Quarterly 30 (winter-spring 1992): 150-59, especially her remarks on the effaced Black cook/server (156). I have made an analogous observation elsewhere of how the politically vanquished become the rhetorically cannibalized. See Rafia Zafar, "The Proof of the Pudding: Of Haggis, Hasty Pudding, and Transatlantic Influence," Early American Literature 31 (1996): 133-49.
5. Patricia Turner, Ceramic Uncles and Celluloid Mammies: Black Images and Their Influence on Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 43.
6. Much of culinary tradition and method is handed down orally, whatever the society. That cookery is "embodied knowledge" in Lisa M. Heldke's words, whether practiced by white or Black women, accounts for its denigrated status in a society that privileges pure reason; see Lisa M. Heldke, "Foodmaking as a Thoughtful Practice," in Cooking, Eating, Thinking: Transformative Philosophies of Food, ed. Deane W. Curtin and Lisa M. Heldke (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 203-29, esp. 218-20. The doubly low status of the Black woman predicts their nearly subterranean level in U.S. society, and by way of a corollary, the belief in their gastronomic labors as unworthy of notice.
7. In addition to the Darden sisters and Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor, Prettyman's essay discusses Black women chefs Edna Lewis and Cleora Butler; we arrive at some of the same conclusions. See Quandra Prettyman, "Come Eat at My Table: Lives with Recipes," in Southern Quarterly 30 (winter-spring 1992): 131-40.
8. As Doris Witt has remarked, "The cookbook is a privileged textual site among blacks because of their overdetermined over representation in American kitchens, both public and private"; she also discusses the mammy figure with particular reference to turn-of-the-century American culture. See "In Search of Our Mothers' Cookbooks: Gathering African-American Culinary Traditions" [indexed as Doris Smith], Iris: A Journal about Women 26 (fall/winter 1991): 22-27.
9. Geneviève Fabre and Robert O'Meally, History and Memory in African-American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 7. In their introduction, Fabre and O'Meally extend and apply French historian Pierre Nora's term lieu de memoire to African American culture.
10. Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor, Vibration Cooking, or, the Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl (1970; reprint, New York: Ballantine Books, 1986, 1991); subsequent references (all to the 1991 edition) appear in parentheses in the text, unless otherwise noted. Carole and Norma Jean Darden's Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine: Recipes and Reminiscences of a Family (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1978) is also in paper, but I have used the original hardcover. Subsequent citations to this edition appear in parentheses in the text. The continued popularity of these two works can be attested to by their publication history: Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine has been in print pretty much continuously since its first publication; Vibration Cooking is now in its third edition. Much anecdotal evidence indicates hardcover first editions of Vibration Cooking are often borrowed from, and never returned to, their original owners.
11. Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor, Vibration Cooking, or, the Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl (1970; reprint, New York: Ballantine Books, 1986, 1991); subsequent references (all to the 1991 edition) appear in parentheses in the text, unless otherwise noted. Carole and Norma Jean Darden's Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine: Recipes and Reminiscences of a Family (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1978) is also in paper, but I have used the original hardcover. Subsequent citations to this edition appear in parentheses in the text. The continued popularity of these two works can be attested to by their publication history: Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine has been in print pretty much continuously since its first publication; Vibration Cooking is now in its third edition. Much anecdotal evidence indicates hardcover first editions of Vibration Cooking are often borrowed from, and never returned to, their original owners.
12. [Abby Fisher] What Mrs. Fisher Knows about Old Southern Cooking (1881; reprint, with notes by Karen Hess, Bedford, Mass.: Applewood Books, 1995), 72.
13. The National Council of Negro Women, Historical Cookbook of the American Negro (Washington, D.C.: Corporate Press, 1958).
14. Emblematic of a kind of ripple effect, similar celebrations of one's origins, as well as one's political activism, arose in other groups. In terms of cultural origins, the impetus to celebrate one's identity came to be known in the 1970s as the "ethnic revival"; along with this rise in various Americans' perceptions of themselves as "Italian" or "Greek" came a corresponding interest in ethnic cookbooks and restaurants. (Ethnic cookbooks, as such, appeared well before the 1970s.) In terms of a political affiliation expressed through an alternative venue, cookbooks and / or food also became a way to express a certain lifestyle and / or social change. One volume that provides examples of both impulses is Ita Jones's The Grubbag: An Underground Cookbook (New York: Vintage, 1971), a cookbook that grew out of a column in the Liberation News Service; Jones refers to her upbringing in Texas and her search for ethnic origins. For discussions of such politically oriented endeavors, see Warren Belasco, Appetite for Change: How the Counterculture Took on the Food Industry (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989, 1993); and Curtin and Heldk e.
15. Emblematic of a kind of ripple effect, similar celebrations of one's origins, as well as one's political activism, arose in other groups. In terms of cultural origins, the impetus to celebrate one's identity came to be known in the 1970s as the "ethnic revival"; along with this rise in various Americans' perceptions of themselves as "Italian" or "Greek" came a corresponding interest in ethnic cookbooks and restaurants. (Ethnic cookbooks, as such, appeared well before the 1970s.) In terms of a political affiliation expressed through an alternative venue, cookbooks and / or food also became a way to express a certain lifestyle and / or social change. One volume that provides examples of both impulses is Ita Jones's The Grubbag: An Underground Cookbook (New York: Vintage, 1971), a cookbook that grew out of a column in the Liberation News Service; Jones refers to her upbringing in Texas and her search for ethnic origins. For discussions of such politically oriented endeavors, see Warren Belasco, Appetite for Change: How the Counterculture Took on the Food Industry (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989, 1993); and Curtin and Heldk e.
16. Fewer than fifteen books were published by Black presses in the first part of the 1960s, while about 160 books by similar firms appeared between 1970 and 1974. Donald Franklin Joyce's research on the Black press demonstrates this sharp rise in the number and output of Black-owned presses post-1960; he also discussed the exchanges and competition between white-and Black-owned publishers. See his Gatekeepers of Black Culture (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983), esp. 78-79, and 147.
17. Ruth L. Gaskins, A Good Heart and a Light Hand: Ruth L. Gaskins' Collection of Traditional Negro Recipes (Annandale, Va.: Turnpike, 1968). Although Quandra Prettyman's essay and Howard Paige's Aspects of Afro-American Cookery (Southfield, Mich.: Aspects Publishing Co., 1987) each provide bibliographies in their publications, Doris Witt's Black Hunger: Food and the Politics of U.S. Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999) provides the most complete bibliography to date on Black cookbooks (the bibliography was compiled with the assistance of David Lupton).
18. Ruth L. Gaskins, A Good Heart and a Light Hand: Ruth L. Gaskins' Collection of Traditional Negro Recipes (Annandale, Va.: Turnpike, 1968). Although Quandra Prettyman's essay and Howard Paige's Aspects of Afro-American Cookery (Southfield, Mich.: Aspects Publishing Co., 1987) each provide bibliographies in their publications, Doris Witt's Black Hunger: Food and the Politics of U.S. Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999) provides the most complete bibliography to date on Black cookbooks (the bibliography was compiled with the assistance of David Lupton).
19. Ruth L. Gaskins, A Good Heart and a Light Hand: Ruth L. Gaskins' Collection of Traditional Negro Recipes (Annandale, Va.: Turnpike, 1968). Although Quandra Prettyman's essay and Howard Paige's Aspects of Afro-American Cookery (Southfield, Mich.: Aspects Publishing Co., 1987) each provide bibliographies in their publications, Doris Witt's Black Hunger: Food and the Politics of U.S. Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999) provides the most complete bibliography to date on Black cookbooks (the bibliography was compiled with the assistance of David Lupton).
20. See Anne E. Goldman "'I Yam What I Yam': Cooking. Culture, and Colonialism" in De/Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women's Autobiography, ed. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 169-95, esp. 171-73, which takes issue with Susan J. Leonardi's invocation of a female-centered, cross-class recipe exchange. See Leonardi's "Recipes for Reading: Summer Pasta, Lobster à la Riseholme, and Key Lime Pie," PMLA 3 (May 1983): 340-47, for the origins of this debate.
21. See Anne E. Goldman "'I Yam What I Yam': Cooking. Culture, and Colonialism" in De/Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women's Autobiography, ed. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 169-95, esp. 171-73, which takes issue with Susan J. Leonardi's invocation of a female-centered, cross-class recipe exchange. See Leonardi's "Recipes for Reading: Summer Pasta, Lobster à la Riseholme, and Key Lime Pie," PMLA 3 (May 1983): 340-47, for the origins of this debate.
22. Despite the growing numbers of Black Americans in the professional and middle classes, the percentage of Black poor remains too large for any American to feel complacent. That there has long been an identifiable "middle" or "upper" class in African America is undeniable: see Jessica B. Harris's "Heirloom Recipes from a Southern Family: A Big-Flavored Meal in the African-American Tradition" (Food and Wine, February 1991) for a gastronomic exegesis of this phenomenon.
23. Think, for example, of the "high-class" volumes of Julia Child, with their implication that the cook will spend hours in the kitchen and frequently use expensive ingredients; note again Smart-Grosvenor's above-quoted remark on this implied distinction between "white" and "Black" food-"white folks act like . . . there is some weird mystique [about food]" (3).
24. Exceptions could be found in the collectively authored community or "charity" cookbooks, volumes compiled by a group of women whose initial motives were often financial (to rebuild a church, to raise funds for relief organizations) but whose final product could speak to both individual desires for recognition and an acknowledgment of woman's worth. See Marion Bishop, "Speaking Sisters: Relief Society Cookbooks and Mormon Culture," in Recipes for Reading: History, Stories, Community Cookbooks, ed. Anne L. Bower (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997), 89-104. In the same volume, Ann Romines's essay, "Growing Up with the Methodist Cookbooks" (75-88), attests that such community cookbooks were the most-used texts her family owned. Bower's fine anthology collects a number of essays on community cookbooks-as autobiographies, as cultural histories, as women's alternative media.
25. Exceptions could be found in the collectively authored community or "charity" cookbooks, volumes compiled by a group of women whose initial motives were often financial (to rebuild a church, to raise funds for relief organizations) but whose final product could speak to both individual desires for recognition and an acknowledgment of woman's worth. See Marion Bishop, "Speaking Sisters: Relief Society Cookbooks and Mormon Culture," in Recipes for Reading: History, Stories, Community Cookbooks, ed. Anne L. Bower (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997), 89-104. In the same volume, Ann Romines's essay, "Growing Up with the Methodist Cookbooks" (75-88), attests that such community cookbooks were the most-used texts her family owned. Bower's fine anthology collects a number of essays on community cookbooks-as autobiographies, as cultural histories, as women's alternative media.
26. Anne E. Goldman, Take My Word: Autobiographical Innovations of Ethnic American Working Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 42.
27. Anne E. Goldman also finds the irreverence and sass of Smart-Grosvenor similar to Hurston's; see Take My Word, 47-49.
28. Black Hunger discusses the evolution of Smart-Grosvenor's volume over its three editions and two-plus decades.
29. In a well-known moment of gastronomic essentialism, the fictional Chloe of Uncle Tom's Cabin exclaims: "look at my great black stumpin hands. Now, don't ye think dat de Lord must have meant me to make de pie-crust, and you [Mrs. Shelby, the slave's "mistress"] to stay in the parlor?" (Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin [1852; reprint, New York: Harper Classics, 1965], 27).
30. Doris Witt's "'My Kitchen Was the World': Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor's Geechee Diaspora," in Black Hunger, refers to other works by Smart-Grosvenor, notably "The Kitchen Crisis" and Thursdays and Every Other Sunday Off: A Domestic Rap (Garden City, N.J.: Doubleday, 1972) that are specifically concerned with the status of domestic servants.
31. Doris Witt's "'My Kitchen Was the World': Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor's Geechee Diaspora," in Black Hunger, refers to other works by Smart-Grosvenor, notably "The Kitchen Crisis" and Thursdays and Every Other Sunday Off: A Domestic Rap (Garden City, N.J.: Doubleday, 1972) that are specifically concerned with the status of domestic servants.
32. An expatriate social set and culinary doings are the well-known subjects of Alice B. Toklas's The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook (1954; reprint, New York: Harper Perennial, 1984).
33. Toklas may have had more entrée into French society than Smart-Grosvenor by virtue of being white, but the African American counts wealthy people among her set as well. On the other hand, Smart-Grosvenor was not, early on, immune from heterosexism. In the preface to the second edition (1986) she decides not to excise a homophobic remark; in the most recent printing (1991), the offensive sentence-"I wouldn't pay no faggot six hundred dollars to dress me up like a fool" (page 152 in the 1986 edition)-is expunged.
34. So sure is Smart-Grosvenor of her value as an author and person, rather than as a "mere" cook, that she includes an entire chapter of her correspondence, a move Robert Stepto might refer to as self-authenticating.
35. For the Toklas recipes, see pp. 30 and 230 in The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook. Those of us who cook from the books we read will notice at least one divergence in philosophy, if not in method, in the two works. Although Toklas and Smart-Grosvenor share a respect for their audience-cooks' expertise and common sense, Smart-Grosvenor insists: "I never measure or weigh anything. I cook by vibration. . . . The amount of salt and pepper you want to use is your own business" (p. 3).
36. In this, Smart-Grosvenor can be said to anticipate Alice Walker's well-known claiming of Black women foremothers, In Search of Our Mother's Gardens: Womanist Prose (New York: Harvest/HBJ, 1984); see esp. 3-14.
37. Freda de Knight, A Date with a Dish: A Cook Book of American Negro Recipes (first published in 1948; revised and reprinted as The Ebony Cookbook: A Date with a Dish [Chicago: Johnson, 1962, 1973]). Thanks to Doris Witt for the dating. References to A Date with a Dish and several other Black cookbooks are absent in the 1991 preface, although she does refer to John Pinderhughes. Smart-Grosvenor may not have been aware of the existence of Black cookbooks, in part due to the relative obscurity of many such works; Witt and Lupton's Black culinary bibliography (in Black Hunger) lists about forty Black-authored cookbooks before 1970; a good number were published by small presses or brought out by the authors themselves.
38. Freda de Knight, A Date with a Dish: A Cook Book of American Negro Recipes (first published in 1948; revised and reprinted as The Ebony Cookbook: A Date with a Dish [Chicago: Johnson, 1962, 1973]). Thanks to Doris Witt for the dating. References to A Date with a Dish and several other Black cookbooks are absent in the 1991 preface, although she does refer to John Pinderhughes. Smart-Grosvenor may not have been aware of the existence of Black cookbooks, in part due to the relative obscurity of many such works; Witt and Lupton's Black culinary bibliography (in Black Hunger) lists about forty Black-authored cookbooks before 1970; a good number were published by small presses or brought out by the authors themselves.
39. Although it may not need saying, I'll note it anyway: the positions I sketch out here, between individual and community, between Smart-Grosvenor and the Dardens, are not absolute; elements of each outlook are found in both texts. Perhaps it's best to say that each cookbook emphasizes a different authorial stance.
40. The term "thick description" is Clifford Geertz's; for amplification, see "Thick Description: Toward the Interpretative Theory of Culture" in Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 3-30.
41. Susan Kalcik has explored the transmission of ethnic identity through food, as I will return to shortly. Elizabeth and Paul Rozin have noted that flavor may function symbolically: having ethnic "tastes" places an individual within a specific group; similarly, foods with a particular taste identify themselves as belonging to a particular community. See Elizabeth Rozin and Paul Rozin, "Some Surprisingly Unique Characteristics of Human Food Preferences," in Food in Perspective: Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Ethnological Food Research, Cardiff, Wales, ed. Alexander Fenton and Trefor Owen (Edinburgh: John Donald Publishers, 1981).
42. Irma McClaurin reminds me that the book was published in 1978 and so before the current suburbanization of the Black middle class. That Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine remains in print, and has even been transformed into a play in the 1990s, may speak to its continuing, reinvented appeal as a nostalgia item for the contemporary Black bourgeoisie.
43. The food pages of Essence attest to the bind between the need for quick, easy meals and the desire for "heritage" recipes; thanks again to Irma McClaurin, for reminding me of the continuing, if changing, significance of Sunday dinner.
44. Chitlins, or chitterlings, are pig intestines; they "are testament to the down-home doctrine that nothing in the hog is inedible." See Rick Bragg, "Atlanta Journal: A Delicacy of the Past Is a Winner at Drive-Ins," New York Times, 10 Nov. 1996, Final edition, sec. 1, p. 20.
45. See Lena Williams, "Preparing Soul Food Can Now Be as Easy as Opening a Can," New York Times, 26 May 1993, C3.
46. Quoted in Bragg, 20. Latter-day proscriptions against pork by Muslims and others in Black America wishing to separate themselves from a slave past may also have effected the turn away from pork products.
47. The avoidance of certain foods on the part of younger people speaks in part to a related desire to distance themselves from hardship and social ostracism. See my remarks on Pierre Bourdieu and his concept of the "foods of necessity," n. 44.
48. "[In 1808] Congress finally prohibited the slave trade. Absalom Jones and other black preachers began delivering annual thanksgiving sermons on New Year's Day, the date of the prohibition of trade and also the date of Haitian independence in 1804." See Gary B. Nash, from Forging Freedom, quoted in Ntozake Shange, If I Can Cook/You Know God Can (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998), 6.
49. "[In 1808] Congress finally prohibited the slave trade. Absalom Jones and other black preachers began delivering annual thanksgiving sermons on New Year's Day, the date of the prohibition of trade and also the date of Haitian independence in 1804." See Gary B. Nash, from Forging Freedom, quoted in Ntozake Shange, If I Can Cook/You Know God Can (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998), 6.
50. Howard Paige, "African American Emancipation Day Celebrations," informal talk, August 1991, Greenfield Village Museum, Dearborn, Michigan.
51. Compare my observation with a similar one of Doris Witt's, on the handling of greens by the same cook: "Grosvenor manages to recreate the social context of recipe exchange, yet she simultaneously refuses to give us anything but thoroughly imprecise and unscientific suggestions on what to, and not to, do with greens. She offers a nuanced analysis of the social forces which come into play in the economy of recipe exchange." See "In Search of Our Mothers' Cookbooks," 25.
52. Surprisingly, although intent on recapturing the exact tastes and smells of the past, the Darden sisters show less resistance to modernization.
53. Harris, "Heirloom Recipes from a Southern family," 50.
54. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 178. His discussion of "the paradoxes of the taste of necessity" (177-79) has relevance beyond his original control group of French women and men.
55. Jessica B. Harris, Iron Pots and Wooden Spoons: Africa's Gifts to New World Cooking (New York: Atheneum, 1989), 15, 11.
56. That the practice is fading I surmise from the few student hands raised in response to my query "Do you know what pot likker is?" I, on the other hand, having lived with a grandmother who was raised in part in a southern Black community, was frequently admonished to drink my pot likker.
57. Cookbooks in the late 1990s regularly suggest smoked turkey wings as substitutes for pork in various dishes; baked macaroni and cheese, a staple at Black American family functions, can not be traced back to West Africa.
58. For a discussion of how ethnic groups persist as such and yet change in composition and style, see Fredrik Barth, introduction to Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference (Boston: Little Brown, 1969), 9-30.
59. For example, Benedict Anderson, in Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), notes that "communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity / genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined" (15). Although Anderson goes on to write of the ways groups construct themselves around print media, one can extrapolate his ideas to the manner in which a Black cultural identity is re-created, or created, through cookbooks.
60. Susan Kalcik discusses this phenomenon in her essay, "Ethnic Foodways in America: Symbol and the Performance of Identity," in Ethnic and Regional Foodways in the United States: The Performance of Group Identity, ed. Linda Keller Brown and Kay Mussell (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984), 37-65, esp. 39.
61. The writings of Jessica B. Harris, John Pinderhughes's Family of the Spirit Cookbook: Recipes and Remembrances from African-American Kitchens (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990), Cleora Butler's Cleora's Kitchens and Eight Decades of Great American Food: The Memoir of a Cook (Tulsa: Council Oak Books, 1985), and other, more recent books all display similar literary / historical / culinary instincts. Although each presents food and its role in the author's life differently, all cooks choose to collect, compile, and record recipes taken from family, travels, friends, or an individual career as chef and caterer. All take care to explain why one might want to conflate a cookbook with a historical or personal narrative.
62. The writings of Jessica B. Harris, John Pinderhughes's Family of the Spirit Cookbook: Recipes and Remembrances from African-American Kitchens (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990), Cleora Butler's Cleora's Kitchens and Eight Decades of Great American Food: The Memoir of a Cook (Tulsa: Council Oak Books, 1985), and other, more recent books all display similar literary / historical / culinary instincts. Although each presents food and its role in the author's life differently, all cooks choose to collect, compile, and record recipes taken from family, travels, friends, or an individual career as chef and caterer. All take care to explain why one might want to conflate a cookbook with a historical or personal narrative.