Food writing

The 18th century gastronomer Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin is a common interest for both Ford Madox Ford and Gertrude Stein's modernist projects. This essay is especially interested in how food writing, culinary work, and sensations like taste, a theory of which Brillat-Savarin developed, can influence other senses as explored by modernist writers. Stein and Ford’s historicist approach to writing and thinking about civilization, especially about food culture, can be understood in the context of their appreciation for Brillat-Savarin.

Three food history notes:

1. on the "second restaurant", opened by Jean-François Vacossin and his wife in Paris in 1767 and visited by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

2. on the 5th century dinner to which Vortigern was invited by Hengist and Horsa (according to later sources)

3. on the authorship of the book "The Oyster: where, how and when to find, breed, cook and eat it" (1861), often wrongly attributed to Eustace Clare Grenville Murray, but really written by Herbert Byng Hall and illustrated by John Cruikshank

"Women and gastronomy: Review essay inspired by Alice L. McLean's Aesthetic Pleasure in Twentieth-Century Women's Food Writing: The innovative appetites of M.F.K. Fisher, Alice B. Toklas and Elizabeth David, 2012", The Aristologist: An Antipodean Journal of Food History, Number 2, 2012: 172-180

In celebration of National Translation Month, September 2019, we’ve put together a sampler full of excerpts from four novels, a memoir, a book of essays, and a collection of short stories, translated from Russian, French, and Uzbek.

Titles excerpted:

Farewell, Aylis: A Non-Traditional Novel in Three Works by Akram Aylisli, translated by Katherine E. Young
Night and Day by Abdulhamid Sulaymon o’g’li Cho’lpon, translated by Christopher Fort
Beyond Tula: A Soviet Pastoral by Andrei Egunov-Nikolev, translated by Ainsley Morse
Russian Cuisine in Exile by Alexander Genis & Pyotr Vail, translated by Angela Brintlinger & Thomas Feerick
Where There is Danger by Luba Jurgenson, translated by Meredith Sopher
21: Russian Short Prose from an Odd Century, edited by Mark Lipovetsky
The Raskin Family: A Novel by Dmitry Stonov, translated by Konstantin Gurevich & Helen Anderson with a foreword and afterword by Leonid Stonov

Tang Lusun (1908-1985) and Wang Zengqi (1920-1997) produced their food writing in the form of familiar essays, respectively, in the late martial law period of Taiwan (the 1970s and 1980s) and the early reform era of China (the 1980s and 1990s). This article examines their essays, especially those on Republican Beijing (Beiping) and wartime Kunming, to explore how narratives of autobiographical, individual culinary experience can develop into sharable or comparable social experience addressing the historical rupture of 1949. Shifting the focus of the theoretical notion of authenticity from the self to the individual's phenomenal perception and the contested arena of social communication concerning historical memory, this article shows that literary practices such as the generic feature of the I-narrator in the familiar essay, the textual construction of chronotopes of food, and (re)publications across the Taiwan Strait have shaped and reshaped "authentic culinary experience" in their texts in response to changing power structures, social interests, and affective needs of the reader.

This paper explores the experience of reading about food in Barthes’s text on Japan, as well as elsewhere in his oeuvre, in order to ask whether the affective engagement reading about food creates can constitute a kind of being-together with Barthes, and each other, as mediated his texts. By recourse to research from cognitive literary studies, it argues that reading about food reminds us of our own embodiment, and brings a great deal of pleasure to the reading experience. In relation to wider questions of community raised by Barthes’s work, it argues for the strength of this being-together between Barthes and his readers, and therefore introduces a new consideration into the process of reading Barthes whereby the reader is on her own, but no longer alone.

Ford Madox Ford's food writing in popular and glossy magazines forms an important, if neglected, part of his literary legacy. I argue in this essay that his writing in these periodicals, largely from the period 1920-1939, constitute part of a broader body of work experimenting with the rhythms, variations, substitutions and repetitions of both culinary labour and his Impressionist prose. Allowing him to reach a wide audience, and part of a tradition of modernist writing in popular magazines, Ford's writing and food experiences are both sublime and ordinary, gesturing to how food makes such expansion and daily transformations possible.

When I first read Oh, for a French Wife! my gaydar twitched. When I read the Sydney Morning Herald obituary notice of his death, it went into overdrive: no mention of a wife or children, the kind of obituary of that time, April, 1982, whose coding could be read by other homosexuals, like me, but not by the general public. This paper uses the framework of gay male culture and camp developed by gay academic David Halperin to read three cookbooks authored or co-authored by Moloney as gay culture/camp texts.: Oh, for a French Wife! (1953), Cooking for Bachelors (1959 later republished as The Young Gourmet’s Cookbook 1968) and Cooking for Brides (1965). The paper places the books in the context of the gay culture in Australia of the 1940s – 1970s.

Este ensayo discutirá algunas de las formas de circulación de la escritura gastronómica que indican una transformación en los hábitos de lectura y en la forma de interactuar con otros lectores, a la vez que demuestran una continuidad con funciones sociales que la escritura gastronómica ha desempeñado por mucho más tiempo. Se enfocará también en la reflexión sobre la materialidad del texto gastronómico, y en la interacción entre medios impresos y digitales al interior de un mismo proyecto gastronómico, Food52.

This paper seeks to look at the culinary associations of Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies to explore the metaphor of food as it is employed by Lahiri to delineate different shades and nuances of the lives of mostly the expatriate people, concentrating especially on how food negotiates the unease in living in an adopted land. The first section of this paper introduces the critical issues related to food and eating, and the second section moves on to the analysis of her short story collection Interpreter of Maladies, relating the stories to the issues discussed in the first section of the paper.

In his essay 'A Winter Feast', literature professor Paul Schmidt unveils the layers of meaning that Pushkin wove into the description of a New Year’s feast in Eugene Onegin. But unusually, Schmidt continues his essay making the jump from literary criticism to food studies by musing on the various items on the menu without reference to Onegin, but rather to the cultural and philosophical context of food, bringing in such varied references as Brillat-Savarin and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Studying food writing through the lens of literary criticism allows us to penetrate the social and symbolic meanings of food more deeply, while also linking food writing, and thereby food studies, with the fields of culture and literature.

Keywords:  food writing, food studies, literature, literary criticism, gastrocriticism

Abstract:
In this chapter I seek to queer the genre of food writing, to render it athwart. I explore the writing of MFK Fisher who I argue who lets us see how food writing reveals and produces the full force of what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari call  “the obligatory, necessary, or permitted interminglings of bodies”. These bodies – texts, descriptions of food, feeding and eating, render messy any distinction between and among them. This calls forth a style of writing that seeks not the comfort of an identity in food but rather revels in what food can unleash. Drawing on EK Sedgwick’s understanding of queer as athwart, I argue that food writing has the potential to make present the materiality of eating, writing and food and exemplify the always attendant “cruel optimism” (Berlant) of those pairings.

The POROI Symposium on “The Rhetoric of Food,” inspired by this emerging debate about what should constitute valid analysis of food, features articles examining not food-related writing per se, but rather how such writing, as a corpus, has served as an intellectual fingerprint on meaningful acts of inquiry in current food research and in the composition process of food-related texts. Drawn from the rich linguistic, cultural, and rhetorical power that food has wielded as a trope, each article in the Symposium describes a discernible, overall intellectual trajectory of food- focused studies over time.

... David Schleifer. ... Edna Lewis' constant rationale is that she does things in ways meant to make food taste "good." Discussing Virginia ham, smoked shoulder, bacon, and sausages, she writes, "I think their good flavor appeals to nearly everyone." She declares, "I do not believe in ...

At the age of 56, well into her second marriage and a grandmother herself, novelist Isabel Allende decided to find out whether aphrodisiacs are all they are made out to be. She wrote Aphrodite: The Love of Food and Food of Love after extensive research into erotic literature across some centuries and continents, and this foundation of age-old wisdom also means that the book, while published in 1998, remains a timeless source of inspiration and enjoyment.

Keywords:  food writing, aphrodisiacs, literature, Isabel Allende, food studies, gastrocriticism

Two of my recipes are my contribution to the Book.http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/invited/5112100/1df860def8f825ebcb9cdf8f0360f3f43c837616
This cookbook contains recipes from all over the world, from almost every continent, and from some of the richest and most remarkable cultures that span our globe. In it, you’ll find everything from Banana Bread to Beef Pho, Spicy Spaghetti to Sichuan-Style Eggplant, and Couscous to Cole Slaw. The unique aspect of this collection is that each of these dishes, in some form or another, has been shared, eaten, and enjoyed in the classroom of Claude Hurlbert. Claude taught his students to be mindful of each other in many ways: through narrative, through peace, through ecological sustainability, through cultural harmony, and, most memorably, through food.
This book aims to celebrate the diverse ways that food brings people together. It reminds us that each person in a classroom is a unique individual, bringing to the table a different worldview from the person sitting in the next desk. Sometimes, we can see diversity; other times, it goes unnoticed until we start to share our stories. However, each of us has something that we’re burning to tell the world, and one of the ways we can convey our cultural narrative is through food.
These recipes are more than just dinner. They represent the many lives that Claude has touched over the years. For his former students, this book breaks down the barrier created by cohorts and brings us all together through delicious recipes and the meaningful stories that lie just beneath the surface of the simmering broth.
And every time you use this cookbook, don’t forget to ask yourself, as Claude would, “What did you do today to deserve this great meal?”