I have spent the last month immersed in cookery books; old ones from the 17th through to the mid 20th century. They are mainly handmade books — collations of recipes, medicines and kitchen wisdom from women in humble circumstances. I’ve met some extraordinary collators. One of those is Anne Hughes, the wife of an English…
Category: Food & Gender
A woman’s place?
“The dinner in its turn was highly admired; And Mr. Collins begged to know which of his fair cousins the excellence of its cookery was owing. But here he was set right by Mrs. Bennet, who assured him with some asperity that they were very well able to keep a good cook, and that her…
Food as biography
Laura Shapiro’s book What She Ate demonstrates a fact: food provides a window into our lives. Indeed, food can shed light on issues of identity, longing, fear, and need. While biography may traditionally treat what’s on the plate as incidental, Shapiro’s work does not. “Food happens every day,” she argues. “It’s intimately associated with all…
Sex in the Kitchen
Sex in the kitchen is not what it used to be. For men of my father’s generation, the kitchen stove was a woman’s place and home cooking an almost entirely feminine task. Men did other things. Granted, the kitchen sink was sometimes less gendered territory, but the distance between the tasks of cooking and washing…
Southern Fare III
With my beloved far away in rural Texas, I’ve been re-reading Michael Lee West’s Consuming Passions, a delightfully written memoir of food and family in the South. It makes me wish even more I was there with her. West’s personal observations about gender in the kitchens of her Tennessee childhood illustrate how much has changed in…
EATING HEAVEN 