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

By Janet Theophano

Book Overview

Some people think that a cookbook is just a collection of recipes for dishes that feed the body. In Eat My Words: Reading Women's Lives through the Cookbooks They Wrote, Janet Theophano shows that cookbooks provide food for the mind and the soul as well. Looking beyond the ingredients and instructions, she shows how women have used cookbooks to assert their individuality, develop their minds, and structure their lives. Beginning in the seventeenth century and moving up through the present day, Theophano reads between the lines of recipes for dandelion wine, "Queen of Puddings," and half-pound cake to capture the stories and voices of these remarkable women.The selection of books looked at is enticing and wide-ranging. Theophano begins with seventeenth-century English estate housekeeping books that served as both cookbooks and reading primers so that women could educate themselves during long hours in the kitchen. She looks at A Date with a Dish, a classic African American cookbook that reveals the roots of many traditional American dishes, and she brings to life a 1950s cookbook written specifically for Americans by a Chinese migr and transcribed into English by her daughter. Finally, Theophano looks at the contemporary cookbooks of Lynne Rosetto Kaspar, Madeleine Kamman, and Alice Waters to illustrate the sophistication and political activism present in modern cookbook writing. Janet Theophano harvests the rich history of cookbook writing to show how much more can be learned from a recipe than how to make a casserole, roast a chicken, or bake a cake. We discover that women's writings about food reveal--and revel in--the details of their lives, families, and the cultures they help to shape.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1403962936
• ISBN13: 9781403962935
• Release Date: September 2003
• Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
• Length: 384 Pages
• Weight: 0.91 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 8.4" x 5.5"

Customer Reviews

Very interesting and fun

I thoroughly enjoyed this book and reading the author comments. Good reading and great insight into the daily lives of it's heroins!

An excellent blend of culinary history and biography

Eat My Words isn't just a recipe collection; nor is it a survey of cookbook history: it reads between the lines of recipes through the ages to consider the women who developed them, from 17th century English estate housekeeping books to primers which encouraged women to educate themselves. Eat My Words is very highly recommended as an excellent blend of culinary history and biography.

A Scholarly Read

I picked up this book off the shelf because I am very interested in cooking and collect cookbooks. It wasn't light reading, but was very interesting. Like the women the author discusses I too collect recipes from family, friends and other sources to make a cookbook of my own. Mine is in 3 separate binders, a modern equivelant to those that women have been making for hundreds of years. The discussions of women, food and the preparation of it were interesting. I was motivated to weed out my own cookbooks and reorganize my own recipes to better represent who I am and how my family eats. It is a legacy of my own to hand down to my own children. A scrapbook of our eating habits.