9 - Queering the Cookbook

Summary

In the late nineteenth century, cookbooks began to describe in detail a heteronormative economy in which a wife was cooking for her husband and family in return for the love, financial security, respect, and protection her husband provided. This ideological frame, brought about by social change in household structure and the distribution of labor, helped to establish cooking and eating as modes to narrate changing sexual economies in the twentieth century. This chapter tracks the historical development of heteronormativity in cooking advice as well as how literary texts have exploited the idea of cooking as central to the performance of hegemonic femininity, and also occasionally contested that idea. It also discusses how the heternormativity of cookbooks was sometimes questioned by authors of cooking advice. Not only did cookbook authors start to challenge the gender binary traditionally promoted in cookbooks as well as the normative assumption that women prepare food for the men they love, but they also innovatively reformulated the rules of the genre, thereby making its normative claims visible while creating a space to narrate alternative tales of love and sexuality.