Cookbook Politics

By Kennan Ferguson

An original and eclectic view of cookbooks as political acts

Cookbooks are not political in conventional ways. They neither proclaim, as do manifestos, nor do they forbid, as do laws. They do not command agreement, as do arguments, and their stipulations often lack specificity — cook "until browned." Yet, as repositories of human taste, cookbooks transmit specific blends of flavor, texture, and nutrition across space and time. Cookbooks both form and reflect who we are. In Cookbook Politics, Kennan Ferguson explores the sensual and political implications of these repositories, demonstrating how they create nations, establish ideologies, shape international relations, and structure communities.

Cookbook Politics argues that cookbooks highlight aspects of our lives we rarely recognize as political—taste, production, domesticity, collectivity, and imagination—and considers the ways in which cookbooks have or do politics, from the most overt to the most subtle. Cookbooks turn regional diversity into national unity, as Pellegrino Artusi's Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well did for Italy in 1891. Politically affiliated organizations compile and sell cookbooks—for example, the early United Nations published The World's Favorite Recipes. From the First Baptist Church of Midland, Tennessee's community cookbook, to Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking, to the Italian Futurists' proto-fascist guide to food preparation, Ferguson demonstrates how cookbooks mark desires and reveal social commitments: your table becomes a representation of who you are.

Authoritative, yet flexible; collective, yet individualized; cooperative, yet personal—cookbooks invite participation, editing, and transformation. Created to convey flavor and taste across generations, communities, and nations, they enact the continuities and changes of social lives. Their functioning in the name of creativity and preparation—with readers happily consuming them in similar ways—makes cookbooks an exemplary model for democratic politics.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: May 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9780812297126

Book preview

COOKBOOK POLITICS

COOKBOOK POLITICS

KENNAN FERGUSON

Copyright © 2020 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for

purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book

may be reproduced in any form by any means without

written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10987654321

A Cataloging-in-Publication record is available

from the Library of Congress

ISBN 978-0-8122-5226-2

CONTENTS

Introduction

1Democracy: The Recipe, the Cookbook,

and the Forms of Politics

2Nationalism: Why States Need Cookbooks

3International Relations: Mastery, Sensibility, and Relational Cooking

4Community: Cookbooks as Collectivity

5Ideology: Food, Fast and Slow

Conclusion: How Taste Matters

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION

Cookbooks are not usually conceived of as political texts. They do not seem political because the demands they make upon us do not seem to be ones concerned with power or authority. They do not declaim, as do manifestos. They do not constrict, as do laws. They do not command accord, as do arguments. Their stipulations are often vague (until browned) and their audiences inattentive (how many cookbooks are bought simply for the ideals of cooking and the beauty of the photography?). Even their narrative form is different from that of most books: they fail to tell a story, and one dips into them depending upon one’s time, appetite, and taste.

But cookbooks do form who we are, in ways large and small. Tell me what you eat, Anthelme Brillat-Savarin famously wrote, and I will tell you what you are. Cookbooks are repositories of human taste, meant to transmit particular blends of flavor, texture, and nutrition across space and time. They are locations of shared sensation, where collective affective dynamics have material (and materialized) traces, the printed, textualized locale of taste and identity.

Discovering the implications of these repositories is the central concern of this book. Why we turn to cookbooks—what they do for, and to, us—turns out to be a philosophically complex question. Books are generally not so closely linked with our sensorial lives, even though they often represent sensation. Cookbooks, on the other hand, operate specifically on our bodies, but they do so through their reader—a cook. And their authority comes not through traditional lines of political power, such as law or force, but from a diffuse and experiential guidance. Betty Crocker’s Cookbook becomes someone’s favorite precisely because it aligns closely with the cook’s history, traditions, imagination, and aspirations.¹ So such an investigation concerns not only roasts, carrots, and brownies but also aesthetics, printing processes, and assumptions about domesticity, history, and location.

In this book, as in an actual cookbook, the reader is encouraged to pass over those aspects of the book that are not to their taste. Different sections will be used differently by different people. Historians may appreciate the particularities of food distribution and cooking technologies; cooks may be inspired (or revolted) by the mixtures of ingredients or by preparation techniques; philosophers will want to argue with the book’s theoretical foundations and conclusions. One does not need to read the chapter on the genres of cookbooks to make sense of cookbooks in international relations. Even within chapters, certain sections may be distracting, uninteresting, or unintelligible to certain readers. While some of the overly technical issues (say, a conflict between two twentieth-century French philosophers) appear only in the endnotes, other theoretical arguments do form and shape the content of the chapters. And yet, while this is a book of philosophy, no technical philosophical training is needed to read this book, especially for the reader who is more concerned with other aspects of cookbooks.

What Makes a Cookbook Political?

The preeminent claim of this book—that cookbooks operate in political ways—will already raise suspicions. Most cookbook authors, readers, and users consider cookbooks very differently: as entirely apolitical works. If a cookbook is merely a repository of techniques (e.g., cook this for forty-five minutes, stirring once), as they presume, then it seems more like a manual than a political text. From this viewpoint, cookbooks are devoid of politics, and to claim that they operate along lines of power, distinction, and community seems counterintuitive at best, provocatively misleading at worst.

As an introductory exercise (not as a template for the forthcoming chapters), consider four ways in which one might admit cookbooks as having or doing politics, arranged from the most overt to the most subtle and so far unrecognized. Briefly, they are these: They could be organized and sold by political organizations and fundraisers affiliated with particular political parties. They also could be seen as replicating and reinforcing political barriers and boundaries. They might act to perpetuate practices of ideology or community. And most counterintuitively, there might be a politics of their very form: the format of the cookbook.

The first category consists of those cookbooks put together for overtly political party purposes, either to raise money for a political cause or to reinforce kinds of political loyalty. In 1984, for example, a group of American political activists collected recipes from prominent Democratic Party politicians and their wives to compile a cookbook entitled How to Cook Reagan’s Goose.² Meant to raise money, the cookbook also highlighted important party actors and activists while also presumably reinforcing the affiliations that those cooking from it would feel with the policies of those politicians. To make Easy Chicken Cacciatore, a favorite dish of then-Senator Howard Metzenbaum of Ohio, for instance, would connect the cook to the Democrats, strengthening party affiliation along domestic lines.³ Many other United States cookbooks produced by local and national political affiliates also attempt to encourage women to cook like a Republican or Democrat in order to strengthen party identification, organization, and fundraising.⁴

But these are uncommon kinds of cookbooks, unusual both in their production and in their distribution. (What sort of gourmand would buy a cookbook in order to cook the dishes favored by a politician with national aspirations?) Far more common, and certainly more familiar, are the second kind of political cookbooks: those that replicate and reinforce political boundaries or barriers. The national cookbook, one that concentrates on Chinese food or Mexican cooking, is typical of this kind. Such a book implicitly presumes the universality of a nation, promising the cook that she can experience and recreate the food of that state.⁵ Sometimes written for an external audience (as when an Italian cookbook is published by a British publisher in English), and sometimes for an internal audience (as when an Italian cookbook is published by an Italian press in Italian), such a book not only presumes the naturalness of the Italian people but also reinforces their collective identity through food culture.

Of course, the nation is not the only sort of political boundary that cookbooks emphasize and reduplicate. Throughout this book, various cookbooks will be examined that emphasize regionality as more important. Cookbooks can focus on cities, such as New Orleans. They may emphasize the continuity and homogeneity of larger regional areas; a book dedicated to Tuscan food or to the flavors of Provence marks out those places as different from the rest of the country. In each case, the affiliations among a large set of recipes work precisely because they buy into and reinforce the presumption that certain proximities of taste and culture coincide with geography; that a region and its food emerge naturally from one another. The geographically bounded cookbook proves an enduring staple in the cookbook publisher’s larder.

Other cookbooks, however, enact and reflect other affiliations that are not spatial. This third type of political cookbook concerns itself not with a region but with cultural, ethnic, or social affiliations. Many cookbooks reproduce cuisines of different groups within nation-states. Recipes in a cookbook of American soul food may share certain regional affiliations (kinds of food available primarily in the southern U.S. states), but ultimately serve more as a stand-in for race, in that they are concerned with traditionally African American forms of community food. Whites may cook from a soul-food cookbook, but the operating concept of the recipes themselves are widely understood to emanate from and reproduce Black experience. Dishes—and the cookbooks that transmit and reproduce them—can be eminently racial or ethnic.

A different kind of cookbook might emerge from other social and cultural forms that overlap with but are not reducible to racial identities. They may be oriented around a recreational pastime, like a back-country camping cookbook. They may emerge from a specific church, like a community cookbook created by the First Baptist Church of Midland, Tennessee. They may emphasize lifestyles (a barbecue cookbook), tradition (a family cookbook), or seasonal resources (a cabbages and greens cookbook). They may bespeak ideological commitments, such as vegetarianism, or technological desires, such as molecular gastronomy, both of which overlap thickly with class and cultural identity. Some cookbooks imply cosmopolitan audiences, who enjoy tastes from around the world, and others locate the cook and diners in a canonic time and place, presenting dishes just like ones you remember from childhood.

Each of these forms of community identification is enacted through cookbooks that explicitly delineate kinds of membership in a group. But even though they appeal to the consumer by expressing kinds of belonging, most purchasers and users think of them more as appealing to mere taste. The fact that these kinds of belonging are not necessarily recognized as being explicitly about social and cultural positioning makes them all the more powerful and desirable. If one is merely interested in preparing an engaging meal, one can ignore the myriad societal implications of the food being prepared.

Such cookbooks mark one’s desires as well as one’s social commitments. What your table looks like becomes a representation of who you are. What you feed your family or your guests embodies the kind of parent or host you are. How else to explain the emergence of an entire category of cookbooks meant to be lovingly read rather than used for instruction: cookbooks with impossibly complex recipes, exotic ingredients, and full-page glossy photographs? Many people (not merely cooks) find reading such a book pleasurable in itself, more for the imagined sensations of opulence and sumptuousness than for any literal eating of the dishes, which are rarely prepared. Many cookbooks present a life slightly different from the reader’s own, providing a window into a potential life of luxurious sensation.

This approach to reading a cookbook—looking at it for the pictures, leafing through it in bed, even opening one at random—highlights the fourth way in which cookbooks act politically. Their very form, the way in which they are put together and used, breaks up the presumptions of what instructions do and what books are. In politics, we too often conflate instructions with obligatory demands. But recipes and cookbooks are not laws or jurisprudential codes. They suggest and direct without demanding or policing. They entice rather than enforce. They thus allow us to rethink how authority, commands, and directions operate.

Even the reasons and form of a cookbook upend assumptions about continuity and directionality. Consider the kind of authority a cookbook author assumes. This is not an authority arrived at through formal education (advanced degrees are not particularly useful in writing a cookbook) or democratic representation (we neither elect authors nor vote for cookbooks). Cookbooks do not attempt to convince or overtly argue. The reader assumes that the author has come to her or his position through extensive cooking experience, but is rarely in a position to authenticate that assumption.

The main exception to this is what is commonly called a celebrity cookbook. However, these, like gastroporn cookbooks, will be largely absent from subsequent chapters. One might wrongly assume that Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking emerged from her television celebrity; in truth, it was the other way around, and it was the reception of her French cookbooks that gave her the opportunity to appear on television. More common is the television personality, such as Gordon Ramsey or Padma Lakshmi, whose onscreen cooking or judging is converted into one or more cookbooks that trade on that renown.⁶

Celebrity has a complex relation to authority: the actions, decisions, and techniques of the famous elicit interest, often regardless of how their fame was achieved. When the actor Stanley Tucci or the musician Ziggy Marley publishes a cookbook, people will read it for insight into their lives and characters, though they also trust the authors to know something about Italian and Jamaican food, respectively.⁷ Some celebrity cookbooks are meant to evoke health or fitness: the title of the model Chrissy Teigen’s cookbook, Cravings: Recipes for All the Food You Want to Eat, implies but does not promise recipes for thinness.⁸ Such cookbooks offer a kind of closeness to celebrities—one cannot be them, but one can share an aspect of their lives. A particularly intimate aspect, in fact: one can bodily experience the same thing they do, namely the tastes that can be replicated by the recipes within their cookbooks.

Such recipes create what Wendy Wall has identified as transportive fantasies: the ability to imaginatively place oneself in a profoundly different situation.⁹ Cookbooks provide proximity to fame, the raptures of wealth, nostalgia for a different time, a recollection of ancestors, transport to an exotic landscape, escape from a fixed social hierarchy.¹⁰ This power—one created by the reader in consort with the text—can operate regardless of the actual preparation of a recipe. A cookbook can be a pleasure to read, even if one never intends to prepare one of its dishes.

No matter their level of authority, cookbook authors cannot tell their readers how to experience and use their texts. Rare is the purchaser who reads a cookbook front to back, making sure to miss nothing. Instead, cookbooks invite their readers to cross-reference, to dip into and out of sections and pages and ingredients. Reading cookbooks, even for pleasure, rarely resembles reading other kinds of books, since their order, form, and accessibility differs profoundly from that of novels, histories, and even manuals. The politics of the particularities of this form put the reader, not the author, in charge of the process.

These four political dynamics are