Recipes for Reading: Summer Pasta, Lobster à la Riseholme, and Key Lime Pie
- 1 May 1989
- journal article
- Published by Modern Language Association (MLA) in PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America
- Vol. 104 (3), 340-347
- https://doi.org/10.2307/462443
Abstract
Recipes, whether in cookbooks or in other texts, exemplify embedded and gendered discourse. In the 1951 edition of Irma Rombauer's The Joy of Cooking, Marion Becker's editorial altering of the proportions between “bed”—the narrative that frames the recipes—and recipe erodes the bed and erodes as well the usefulness of the recipes. More cognizant than Becker's text of the importance of this bed, E. F. Benson's comic novel Mapp and Lucia both embeds the recipe for those masculine—whether male or female—readers unaware of the recipe's social significance and establishes a connection between recipe with-holding and narrative. Nora Ephron's Heartburn uses the recipe and its social meanings to play with notions of reproducibility both literary and culinary and thereby elaborates a connection, implied in the early versions of Joy, between recipe sharing and narrative production and consumption, a connection that “Recipes for Reading” itself attempts to reproduce.Keywords
This publication has 1 reference indexed in Scilit:
- The Reproduction of MotheringPublished by University of California Press ,1978