(Re) Mixing Up Literacy: Cookbooks as Rhetorical Remix

Abstract

Exploring literacy practices of home cooks, this article analyzes how cookbooks are remixed by users (with writings, clippings and other ephemera added to the text throughout its use). The practice of remixing the text with further editing by its user/audience illustrates the multilayered literacies at work in establishing authorship within the domestic space. The article builds its argument around one remixed cookbook as a case study, describing the remix-literate practices of the user, as the woman who used this cookbook remixed the text and genre to fit her needs and interests. This literacy practice is argued as a remix, which results in a transformation of the text itself and of the authority of the user. Both the original authorship (the act of compiling recipes from the church community) and the remixed authorship (the added ephemera and handwritten editing done by the user of this particular copy) are analyzed in tandem.