“edibles like bits of our
bodies can be firm, hot, juicy, soft, moist”
-Jeremy MacClancy
When I got married
for the first time thirty-five years ago, my farm-bred aunts gave
me two cookbooks: The Joy of Cooking and Betty Crocker’s
Dinner in a Dish. I knew how to make basic things,
hot dogs and beans, meatloaf, macaroni and cheese, the staples of
my working-class family. So while those two cookbooks represented
practicality for a new bride, they were also a step up from the
Farm Bureau cookbook my mother and aunts relied on. Those women
didn’t buy cookbooks because they had slick, erotic photo
layouts and sophisticated recipes. Nor did they give them to me
in acknowledgment of entry into an elite class of food consumers.
They may have been aware of the Continental underpinnings of The
Joy, but they presented it to me as a pragmatic tool for my
new role as a wife. Those cookbooks offered instruction and promised
good food; beauty and attractiveness were secondary.
For its wealth of information and useful instructions, The
Joy is still my choice for the cookbook to take to a desert
island. Dinner in a Dish, with color pictures of such exotic
delights as Chicken Madras, a curried chicken and vegetable dish,
was slightly more glamorous in format. But the directions emphasized
ease and economy, everything in one dish. The color photo of Chicken
Madras bore little resemblance to the real Indian curries I have
eaten and prepared in my later life. The inexplicit fantasy, however,
of a life vastly different from my own hinted at the extravagant
illusions, which would soon come to be the standard in cookbooks.
Once we rise above subsistence level, food is always more than just
nourishment, which is why we don’t eat those protein pills
and astronaut tablets my grade school Weekly Reader promised.
In America, especially in the middle-aspiring-to-upper classes,
we have moved beyond need consumption of food to a hyperaesthetic
consumption—“that is, to an aesthetics unbound by natural
constraints” (Shapp and Seitz 2). We have available to us
not only an unlimited supply of fruits and vegetables from around
the world in all seasons, but also an unlimited supply of cookbooks
designed to guide us in our consumption of other cultures and classes.
Walk into any bookstore or surf the Internet, and there, displayed
like tomatoes or ripe fruit, are the published cuisines of Asia,
South America, Europe, and fusions of those, plus newly specialized
subcategories of our fascination with eating: in addition
to dessert, fish, barbeque, soup, and bread, we find regional, gendered,
dietary, and erotic cookbooks such as 50 Ways to Feed Your Lover,
Intercourses, Love To Eat, Eat To Love, and Food as
Foreplay.
As surely as winter tomatoes tantalize us into buying them when
we know they are out of season, these books set up a dream of class-dictated
sophistication. Just as tomatoes in January suggest and create
desire for something not readily attainable for most of us in the
northern hemisphere, so the cookbooks offer a world that is not
only beyond our grasp, it is a world primarily created by the publishing
and restaurant industries. Indeed, Umberto Eco claims it is a world
created, a “hyperreal “ world “where the images
of products and practices have gained ascendancy over [and] even
supplanted the actual” (qtd. in Finkelstein 207). In “Dining
Out,” Joanne Finkelstein maintains that humans become confused
between the fashionable and the genuinely enjoyed (207). When we
are bombarded by images of elegance and sophistication, we lose
our ability to distinguish what we genuinely like and value. And
the American Dream of success, which implies a change of social
class, invites a social anxiety that is peculiarly vulnerable to
the manipulations of “experts.” In a culture overflowing
with riches, albeit not available to all its members, desire for
these riches as symbols of economic and social success becomes a
ruling ethos.
According to Theodor Adorno, “The culture industry is corrupt;
not because it is a sinful Babylon but because it is a cathedral
dedicated to elevated pleasure.” Elevated pleasure is presented
in Marxist terms as bourgeois desire, the desire to consume in the
attempt to emulate a perceived upper class, to vicariously consume
a lifestyle otherwise unattainable. Jeremy MacClancy, in Consuming
Culture, maintains that “food books aimed at the upper-middle
class market seem more concerned with presentation than with cuisine”
(118). The photograph that follows exemplifies such a concern
with presentation, rather than cuisine (Yanes). The photographer
has centered the floating island dessert, but the eye is drawn quickly
to the blue flowers and the gently lit figs, emphasizing the elegant,
slightly erotic setting of the dessert almost more than the food
itself.
According to Iggers, the advent, in 1963, of Julia Child’s
television show The French Chef began a revolution in middle
class approach to cooking and to food in itself (29). Television
was the perfect medium for the dissemination of bourgeois culture,
and the Baby Boomers, raised on TV, were right there absorbing Julia’s
dictates about food. MacClancy claims: “In the ways in which
the Boomers’ parents strove to acquire knowledge of painting
or classical music, the Boomers have made cooking the art, the social
currency” (210).
Additionally, the consumption of a food culture by the middle-aged
middle classes seems to be displacing sex and the consumption of
sexuality. As we avidly discussed our sexual exploits and liberation
during the sixties, so we now avidly discuss the meals we’ve
cooked and the restaurants we’ve eaten in. Among educated
Boomers, cookery books have attained the status of art object or
sex manual or both. Of course, there have been cookery books since
ancient times, but they were specialized for an elite audience of
master cooks. The advent of cookery books for the common man or
woman in the nineteenth century, however, marks the beginning of
the commodification of such objects. Once the production of recipes
moved from the hands of individual women sharing recipes, perhaps
as a gift for a new bride, to the publishing houses, the very nature
of the books begins to change from use object to sign object.
Reay Tannahill points out in Food in History, “As
the middle class required their tables to reflect their status,
traditional recipes were not adequate. Cookery books were the answer”
(322). The very titles of early books like Eliza Acton’s
Modern Cookery for Private Families published in 1845 and
Isabella Beaton’s famous Book of Household Management
in 1861 suggest the consumer’s concern with class issues:
being modern and managing a household well. In 1896 Fannie
Farmer published The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book. The
idea that recipes from a cooking school were somehow superior to
those from one’s mother and aunts may say all there is to
say about the class aspirations of the consumers of such texts.
Still an attempt was made to provide for the working classes, for
whom the production of nutritious meals remained a life necessity,
rather than an expression of class. Juliet Carson, in New York in
the 1870s, published Fifteen Cent Dinners for Workingmen’s
Families (Tannahill 325). This last, I suspect was the nineteenth
century equivalent of my working-class Dinner in a Dish,
from which I fed my husband and myself and a variety of friends
on about ten dollars a week in the mid-sixties.
This rehearsal of publishing history directs us to the change in
the perception and consumption of the cookbook. Cookbooks, while
they may be full of good recipes, useful in themselves, fulfill
another function for the upper middle-class consumers who purchase
them, one more attractive for publishers because it takes us beyond
necessity, into the realm of surplus and hence profits. Glossy,
lushly illustrated, these cookbooks sell, not instructions for basic
food preparation, but themselves as objects to be consumed as status
symbols. Unlike the cookbooks of my early married life, which
hieratically guided the new cook, most recent cookbooks aimed at
the affluent, upwardly mobile middle class, invite the reader to
consume, not primarily the food, but the book itself.
They demand to be touched and fondled, to be gazed at and swallowed.
They are laid out on coffee tables or displayed in kitchens. The
language of the commentaries and the lush photo layouts combines
to create an erotic object, a thing to titillate and seduce. Indeed,
the recipes may never be used.
I now want to explore the ways in which eroticism is used to commodify
these texts, to move them away from their basic or use-function
of providing practical knowledge. No longer primarily instructional,
such texts have become embodiments of an ideology of consumption
vastly removed from the essential business of cooking and eating
food, the maintenance of life. Barthes suggests in an essay
called “Ornamental Cookery” which focuses on the French
magazine Elle, a magazine read, according to Barthes, by
working-class women, that images of the food presented in Elle
emphasize its appearance and garnishments, not its nutritional value.
Cooking “according to Elle is meant for the eye alone,
since sight is a genteel sense.” The garnishes and dressings,
the tabling and plating are a “diversionary sleight of hand”
which distracts the reader from the reality of her inability to
afford the foods themselves (78). Nor, we might add, can the
working classes afford the time, the leisure, the equipment, the
space, to produce these meals that signify a middle-class lifestyle,
which must remain a working class fantasy.
Translate that idea to cookbooks themselves, and we have fantasy
and desire used to set up expectations which cannot be met, but
which nonetheless entice us to purchase expensive, gorgeously illustrated
cookbooks, sign objects which promise to bestow class status on
the purchaser, but which have little or no use-value in themselves.
The recipes may be good, but the consumer of such cookbooks does
not actually need to use them. We need only put them on the bookshelf
in the kitchen or, in some cases, on the coffee table where they
display our commitment to a certain class identity and bourgeois
status. We could describe such cookbooks, the French Laundry,
for instance, as decorative in a bourgeois way, meaning that the
ornamental value or quality of the thing overwhelms or exceeds the
use to which the item may be put. On the other hand, proletarian,
to return to The Joy, is usually construed as functional,
the simple things of the working man. Indeed, we can look at The
Joy as a type of codification of the work of chefs who were
artists in their own right, but who worked for a living. It is basically
a manual for the production of good food, though it is both shaped
by the culture that produced it, and it shaped a generation or two
of consumers. For while The Joy doesn’t exoticize
or eroticize the Other, manifested in ingredients such a strong
green extra virgin olive oil or saffron or Persian rose water, organic
meat or free-range chicken, it does provide recipes that might seem
exotic or beyond the means and skills of the average working-class
cook. Nevertheless, its purpose remains. It is intended as a functional
set of directions for making good food.
Another favorite of the new middle class Boomers, Moosewood
(in all its manifestations), with its line drawings, coarse
paper, its lists of ingredients, and menu suggestions, attempts
to look like a proletarian cookbook. Old hippies, who have sidled
into the middle class, but who want to pretend that they remain
connected to their counter-culture roots, purchase the Moosewoods
to give themselves the illusion that they have not left the revolution
behind. When, in fact, its vegetarianism, its emphasis on natural
foods, its fusion of international recipes remain bourgeois to the
core. For many food snobs, authenticity is measured by foreignness,
the otherness from the consumer’s usual experience. No longer
is The Joy’s Italian tomato sauce sufficient for one
interested in consuming middle-class culture. Now she must move
onto marinara sauces from any one of a number of excellent Italian
cookbooks. And peasant sausage and bread reappear as specialty items,
ironically priced beyond the means of most of the class from which
they originate.
Since we often equate exotic and erotic, such foods and the books
that tell us how to consume them are packaged within material representations
of those very qualities. Publishers use eroticism in two ways: verbally
and visually. Verbally, for example, we find this description of
bananas in an otherwise non-sexy book on fruit: “Each
enormous shoot unfurls sheaths of gigantic, oblong leaves. A mature
shoot disgorges one flower stalk which hangs down under its mighty
bunch of many combs or hands of bananas. The hands point upwards,
sheltered by succulent, purple bracts the size of plates, along
the length of the stalk, and a mass of male flowers adorns the end
. . . The fruits are green, ripening yellow, sweet, notoriously
shaped and unforgettably scented” (Flowerdew 146).
And figs, those luscious little seductions, are described as having
“large fruits,” being “reliably prolific,”
and having “sweet, red flesh” (54).
Visually cookbooks package food as magazines and other media package
women. A kind of food pornography exists in many of these cookbooks.
Airbrushed, touched up, and manicured just as photos in “girlie”
magazines are, these photos have little to do with reality.
And they cheat the viewer just as surely as those soft-core porn
photos cheat the one looking at them. No matter what I do, my food
will never look like it does in the picture because the picture
has been doctored, the food sprayed with oil, glazed, carefully
lighted for effect. Feminist commentator Rosalind Coward calls
this photographic style “foodpornography” (qtd. in MacClancy
141-42). The photos are cropped and airbrushed. Note
the slick surfaces and filtered light, the hypertexture of the food
itself.
Not only do the photos partake of the soft-core porn style of photography,
but the content is also arranged more than a little suggestively
as this photo of that seductive food, chocolate, illustrates (Murrin):
So despite the eroticism of this last and the slick beauty of the
books from which the photos come, we are left with the uneasy feeling
that the loveliness is a shill for something else. The books intrigue
and entice us, but they also frustrate us. Books like The French
Laundry and China: The Beautiful Cookbook attempt
to convince us that owning them will somehow assuage the anxieties
we have about changing social classes. Such books lined up on my
bookshelf tell the world that, despite my blue-collar, lace-curtain
Irish childhood, I have arrived in the educated upper-middle class.
And the world may believe that. I have education and a house full
of books. My kids go to good colleges, and we can travel without
being the ugly American. We eat well. But those gorgeous cookbooks
remind me that although I may be able to make quail wrapped in pig
caul, I don’t have the sophistication to appreciate the dish.
My farm-raised parents didn’t count pig caul or headcheese
as sophisticated food. Farmers made head cheese and pigs feet because
they had to, because of economic necessity. But it was never served
to company. And so I struggle with the outward signs of food sophistication
that symbolize a certain class and cultural awareness that seems
snobby and tyrannical. Do I need to be told what to eat? Am I relegated
to the working class again if I enjoy meatloaf? Am I less
sophisticated if I think that use-objects are good in and of themselves?
I love to look at those glamorous books; they are like fairy tales
for grown-ups, with similar erotic undertones. If I wish hard enough
the castle and the prince will be mine, translates to if I wish
hard enough I will fulfill a dream of sophistication, of elite belonging
to a select group with arcane knowledge and refined tastes. I love
the fantasy, and it makes me angry. It feeds into all the class
consciousness that the United States pretends to be free of. One
of our cultural myths tells us we don’t have caste markers
here. One can make of herself whatever she wishes. Except
that we can’t do that. Class insecurities that come with changing
social classes in one lifetime derange our dreams, drive us to consume
the proper media and capitalist-defined class markers but do not
tell us how to internalize the values of that class. By accepting
the illusion of belonging to an elite class in a supposedly classless
society, I deny who I am and others like me. I no longer want to
be democratic and egalitarian; I accept the revolution of the elite
that Christopher Lasch wrote about (Iggers 48). And this, it seems,
runs contrary to everything my education has tried to lead me to.
I have been educated beyond my class in taste, manner, and career,
but not to a true egalitarian ethic. That does not give me the right
to feel superior, but it does give me much pause. One of the great
gifts of this country and the modern world is diversity. Julia Child
and the Rombauers help make available and understandable sophisticated
eating to a huge working-class population in the process of transforming
itself into the middle class. The cheerful egalitarian delight of
Julia Child in good food, and The Joy’s sophisticated
but accessible recipes seem to provide a model for an attitude toward
food that allows enjoyment and sophistication without the class
pressure that causes indigestion. Thus, of all the cookbooks I have
and will probably acquire in future, The Joy remains the
one I give to new brides, the one I would keep if I could only have
one. I love it for its use value, not as a sign of anything. And
so I return from whence I came, The Joy would still be my
choice to take to that lonely, desert island.
Works Cited
Adorno, Theodor and Minima Moralia. Reflections from Damaged
Life. (First
published in German in 1951.) London (NLB). 28 Feb 01.
http://www.ldb.org/adorno.
Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. New York: Hill and Wang,
1972.
Finkelstein, Joanne. “Dining Out: The Hyperreality of
Appetite.” Eating
Culture. Ed. Ron Schapp and Brian Seitz. Albany: SUNY Press,
1998.
Flowerdew, Robert. The Complete Book of Fruit: A
Practical Guide to Growing
and Using Fruit and Nuts. New York: Penguin Studio, 1996.
Iggers, Jeremy. The Garden of Eating: Food, Sex, and the Hunger
for Meaning.
New York: Basic Books, 1996.
MacClancy, Jeremy. Consuming Culture. New York:
Holt, 1992.
Moosewood Collective. Sundays at Moosewood Restaurant.
New York: Simon
and Schuster, Fireside, 1990.
Murrin, Orlando, ed. Dangerous Desserts. San Francisco:
Soma, 1998.
Rombauer, Irma and Marion Rombauer. The Joy of Cooking.
New York: Bobs
Merrill, 1964.
Schapp, Ron and Brian Seitz, eds. Eating Culture. Albany:
SUNY Press, 1998.
Tannahill, Reay. Food in History. New York: Three
Rivers Press, 1988.
Yanes, Romulo, photographer. The Best of Gourmet, 1994.
New York: Random
House. 1994.
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