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Chapter 5 - The Art of the Recipe

American Food Writing Avant la Lettre

from Part I - Origins

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 June 2018

By
J. Michelle Coghlan
Edited by
Gitanjali G. Shahani
Gitanjali G. Shahani
Affiliation:
San Francisco State University
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Summary

This essay offers an analysis of artful recipes—or, recipes artfully merged into books we wouldn’t immediately describe as cookbooks. While MFK Fisher’s oeuvre and experimental cookbook-cum-memoirs like The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook are well-known modern literary forms of the artful recipe, Coghlan argues that far less attention has been paid to the nineteenth-century American food writing that anticipates and enriches our understanding of the aesthetic pleasures at the heart of Fisher’s essays and the modern recipistolary canon of which they are part. Her essay takes up the matter of American food writing “avant la lettre” by turning to the exuberant—and now largely forgotten—food essays of expat American writer Elizabeth Robins Pennell.
Type
Chapter
Information
Food and Literature , pp. 115 - 129
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2018

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