Books that Cook

As I am out of town this week, I am asking colleagues in the St. Mary’s English Department to contribute articles to my website.  Jennifer Cognard-Black teaches a course called “Books that Cook” that is so popular that it has a two-year waiting list of students who want to get into it.   You will understand why after you read the article.  Jennifer also heads our Women, Sex, and Gender Studies program and teaches courses in fiction writing and 19th century British and American literature.  The article is reprinted from The River Gazette (Winter 2004), a St. Mary’s publication.

 by Jennifer Cognard-Black

An old Scottish proverb says, “Eating and drinking wants but a beginning.”  The beginning of my interest in teaching a food fiction class came from a rummage-bin purchase of Nora Ephron’s Heartburn, a novel of which I knew nothing but that already felt friendly, given that Ephron’s When Harry Met Sally is one of the world’s perfect movies.  As I laughed out loud at Ephron’s quirky, New York wit, I came across a recipe for lima beans and pears embedded in an anecdote about the narrator’s mother, Bebe Samstat—a recipe that began, in that bossy recipe voice, “Take 6 cups defrosted lima beans. . . .”

I was struck by Ephron’s decision to include a bona fide recipe.  What better device to create a full, complex character than to have me cook and consume this dish, “re-embodying” the character in my own flesh and blood.  The word turned food turned flesh:  the act seemed sacred.  Here I stopped reading, bought pears and lima beans, cooked up the dish, and I became Bebe Samstat.  Such transformation seemed magical.  Mystical.  Dare I say it:  Biblical.

 With (almost) the zeal of a born-again, I sought recipe novels, and my finds grew into the reading list for my current course.  In addition to Heartburn, they include trade paperbacks Like Water for Chocolate, Fried Green Tomatoes, and Chocolat, as well as the lesser-known novels Debt to Pleasure and The Priest Fainted.  Lucille Clifton steered me to the memoir-cookbook-travelogue Vibration Cooking.  Another foodie suggested We Are What We Ate, a collection of food memories.  And I was partial to Big Night and Eat Drink Man Woman, films that weave intrigue, love, and family farce with sensual scenes of cooking and eating.

Yet a reading list does not a course make.  As I spoke to others about my idea to teach a class on cooking in literature—a class I started calling “Books that Cook”—I often got the arched-eyebrow response.  While there is no dictionary to define it, the connotation of the arched eyebrow is “You English folk will teach anything and call it literature.”  How could a college-level course on glorified cookbooks have rigor?  Method?  “Meat”?

My answer:  critical thinking.  The course would teach students to think of the literatures of food in critical ways.  Culturally, the idea of food is both elastic and contradictory.  It symbolizes birth, rebirth and death.  It represents the natural as well as the artificial.  It can mean both health and poison, war and peace, surfeit and hunger, art and commodity.  But how to get at these complexities?  In my classroom, I decided, we would ask how these texts create their narrators, express meaning through language, and remake their readers.  From the rhetorical, we would discern the cultural.

Thus, on the first day of class, we began by brainstorming associations Americans have with strawberry shortcake.  We covered everything from the doll to the Fourth of July to Mom’s down-home cooking to the Dolly Madison cheats in the produce section.  Setting that aside, we then looked at three recipes for strawberry shortcake from three classic cookbooks:  Fanny Farmer (1896), The Joy of Cooking (1931), and Betty Crocker (1950).  Read chronologically, students saw that cookbook language and form has changed over time.  Once chatty and confessional, they have become technical and scientific.  In other words, they have evolved from a storytelling, “feminine” voice (prosy, anecdotal) into a how-to “masculine” one (ingredients, directions, quantities).

From here, we examined 1990s Hollywood shortcakes from Emeril and Jamie Oliver.  Students noted how Emeril and Oliver combine the feminine with the masculine.  Sometimes they use a domestic, confessional voice; other times, they assert their authority as “master chefs” (never “cooks”) in their precision, knowledge, and haute cuisine twists on the old favorite (Emeril’s “New Orleans Chocolate Strawberry Shortcake”).

Asking students to connect these five recipes back to our initial associations, they understood that real-world foodstuff like strawberry shortcake has diverse and contradictory associations.  It can express traditional femininity (Mom or the Betty Crocker housewife) or highbrow masculinity (Oliver’s “Short Crust Strawberry Pastries”).  The dish represents itself as traditional and homemade (Farmer, Joy), but its success relies on artificiality and advertising (the children’s toy, Dolly Madison).  Strawberry shortcake also symbolizes car-commercial nationhood (white, middle-class, fourth-of-July America), but it originated in a Native American recipe.  The first Anglo invaders appropriated the indigenous method of baking crushed strawberries with cornmeal by crossing it with the British scone, once called a “short cake.”  As a cultural symbol, then, strawberry shortcake is not just strawberry shortcake.

As the finale to this first class, we concluded by reading a children’s book, Cook-a-Doodle-Do, which includes a recipe for (what else) strawberry shortcake.  Once we’d read the book out loud, I brought out an actual shortcake mirroring the one on the front cover.  But rather than simply serve it and bid the students farewell, I asked them to consider how “eating the book” transforms the experience of reading a story.  We’d spent an entire class talking about language and form in cookbooks.  Now I wanted them to talk about readers.

 Their ideas were fascinating.  If readers cook and consume a recipe from a story, the story moves beyond the sense of sight.  It is now tasted, smelled, touched, even heard.  The story takes up actual space.  Whereas a book’s pages are 2-D, food is 3-D; the story now has weight, texture, shadow, depth.  Fantasy becomes reality.  Identification becomes performance.  Mind becomes body.  And the story is ingested, incorporated into the reader at the cellular level.  The story literally comes alive.

This idea that a text can come alive has been a way to ground and structure our work as a class.  One of my assignments is a Recipe Recollection, where the students trace part of the collective memory of their own families by doing research on, and then writing about, the personal and cultural history of a recipe.  My student’s Recollections suggest that readers think about reading in a whole new way—as living text.  In other words, the essays go beyond just reading about food to asking a reader to re-experience food as a metaphor but also, always, in the reader’s own body.  Re-taste.  Re-feel.  Re-see.

To get a taste of these voices, read (re-taste) the following student excerpts:

Food is culture.  Eli Park-Yanovitch explains that how we define ourselves (as cultured or uncultured) has something to do with how food defines us:  “A combination of a desire for ‘class’ and pecuniary deficiency has made my family masters of thrift-food shopping.  We make rich marinara sauces out of $.89 cans of whole, peeled tomatoes and leftover red wine, alfredo sauces by pouring heavy cream, butter and pepper over hot fettuccini noodles and tossing until thick.”  In turn, Maggie Stubbs challenges distinctions between high and low culture with her defense of instant mashed potatoes:  “I don’t think it’s that I’m not cultured; I think it’s that I was raised in a different culture.  Not one slightly solidified-thick-lukewarm spoonful of instant mashed potatoes makes it down my throat without me thinking of my mom, my brother, the summertime, or the Price is Right.  Instant mashed potatoes will always be nostalgic for me, and you would be wise not to ever say anything bad about them.” 

Food is family.  Candace High and Sarah Hughes discern part of their family histories in shrimp pasta salad and pierogis.  “I used to think that the salad made my parents get along,” writes Candace.  “My mother never made anything he liked, but when she made shrimp pasta salad, he was filled with sweet, simple comments like ‘babe, you did good this time.’”  Sarah comments that as she’s grown up, “I’ve learned that my family is not the idyllic family that seems to materialize on ‘pierogi-day.’  There are tensions and cracks in the dough that holds my family together, and as these tensions arise, my Nana struggles to patch them together before the substance of our family oozes away. . . .  Roll, fill, pinch.  Over and over.  No cracks.  No holes.  Nana supervises, and we defer.”

Food repels.  The same food can trigger radically different associations.  While Stacey Hamlet claims addiction to cranberry-orange chutney (putting it on crackers, mashed potatoes, and scrambled eggs), her mother does not think the condiment looks trustworthy—“it reminded my mom entirely too much of casseroles, where you couldn’t distinguish each ingredient after they’d been cooked together.”  But where chaotic food is disquieting to Stacey’s mom, it is the most everyday of foods that causes an aversion in Korrie DeLaney:  “A rule of thumb for any baking enthusiasts with children, don’t leave a six-year-old unattended while thousands of unsuspecting chocolate-chip cookies are strewn across every stationary object—no good will come of it.”  Too many cookies made Korrie terribly sick, but it also inverted for her the Christmas ritual of Mom baking cookies:  Mom bakes illness, not happiness and home.

Food laughs.  Ashley Walker links her New Hampshire citizenship to a debate over real vs. fake maple syrup:  “This may seem obvious, but that store-bought, chemical-flavored maple syrup is not real.  The following items are figments of your maple-syrup imagination:  Mrs. Butterworth’s, Aunt Jemima, sugar-free.  If it comes in a clear plastic container with an easy-to-use no-spill top, you’ve got a problem.”  Tom Evans believes that in order to be a Redskins fan, you need “a burning mouth” to “take your mind off the abysmal game”:  “You could tell what team the Skins were playing,” remembers Tom, “just from my dad’s chili for that week—when they played the Cowboys, we couldn’t feel our tongues for a week.”  And Melissa Adams undermines assumptions about good cooking being in the genes.  Despite her grandmother’s marvelous corn pudding, Melissa admits, “I’m not a good cook.  I’m the stereotypical, cute, Bridget Jones type chef who everyone chuckles at as she blows up hotdogs, burns steamed rice, and melts pasta.  Any kitchen with me in it should have an Enter At Your Own Risk sign.”

 Food is re-memory.  “When I think of my birthday blueberry pie,” writes Mali Fenton, “I don’t think of allusions or symbols.  I think of my mother’s tan, strong arms stirring, her eyes blue as berries, her voice laughing.  It’s not the food that reminds me of books; it’s seeing the book on a shelf that reminds me of the pie and my mother.  Maybe a book about blueberries doesn’t stir one memory in you; maybe you’ve never made the pie in your life.  But it could be a book about meatloaf that conjures up your grandma’s wrinkled face, or a song about lemons that invokes your sister.  You find the book in your house, the song plays on the radio, and once again you taste the food in your mouth, feel the crumbs on your chest, and hear the laughter of your family in every re-imagined bite.”

Note Mali’s turn to the second-person “you.”  You, you, you, says Mali, moving the essay past the limits of type and ink, insisting that the reader to co-create meaning through food.  In a communion ceremony, the reader/participant eats and drinks “in remembrance of me.”  Indeed, eating (or refusing to eat) syrup or chili or cookies or instant mashed potatoes is an act of remembrance:  it is the memory of the body, not the text.  It is living memory.  It is re-memory.

 Another Scottish proverb is “Eat to live and not to eat.”  Ultimately, my Books that Cook class is an experiment in just that—not living to eat (an arched-eyebrow English class) but, rather, eating to live:  asking how we write food, and how food writes our lives.