Eat My Words: Reading Women's Lives through the Cookbooks They Wrote

Abstract

Eat My Words: Reading Women's Lives through the Cookbooks They Wrote. By Janet Theophano. (New York: Palgrave, 2002. Pp. xviii +362, acknowledgments, introduction, photographs, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95 cloth, $18.95 paper) In Eat My Words, Janet Theophano offers theory and technique for reading cookbooks as primary documents, going well beyond obvious texts such as marginalia in individual copies and taking into account less-obvious texts, such as mass-produced works. She includes cookbooks that are both single-authored-Hopestill Brett's seventeenth-century housekeeping book or Buwei Yang Chao's 1945 volume, How to Cook and Eat in Chinese-and collectively authored, for example the 1972 Rochester Hadassah Cookbook. After providing theory and instruction on reading between the lines, as it were, Theophano demonstrates the technique on actual cookbooks, examining these as though they were personal journals. She shows that a cookbook, far more than simply a guide to roasting chicken or baking pound cake, is a primer of the woman who wrote it: we become acquainted with the woman as we experience her writings. We become aware that learning how to make a particular dish is not nearly so interesting as constructing the details of these cookbook writers' lives and the cultures that inform them, for their books are "maps of the social and cultural worlds they inhabit" (13). Each of the seven chapters introduces the reader to a variety of cookbook authors, with a documentary description of their lives and an exhaustive analysis of each woman's cookbook. Theophano looks at the cookbooks as a woman's way of identifying and defining herself in her culture: "As icons of cultural identity, a culture's cuisine may be used to mark the complex negotiations groups and individuals undertake in a new land" (50). In this way the past and the present merge as foodways are adapted and adopted depending on place of origin and current home region, the woman's willingness and ability to likewise adapt and adopt, and the availability of various ingredients. In chapter one, "Cookbooks as Communities," we are introduced to Hopestill Brett and her 1678 receipt book. Beyond collecting recipes, Brett used the book as a record of her household inventory and as a repository for home cures. Through this book we learn of Brett's status in society and her views on that status, as well as on her community, religion, and culinary and housekeeping abilities. In this chapter Theophano recounts also the story of Jane Janviers, whose mid-nineteenth-century collection includes the recipes of family, friends, and neighbors-this known because of the marginalia, as in, "Eliza melts the butter in the Molasses, then beats the eggs and milk in last," and "Mrs. Barre's Recipe for Citron Melon . …