A cookbook can be considered an autobiography.
The very title of early American food writer M. F. K. Fisher’s “The Gastronomical Me” suggests that to write about food is to write about oneself. Her collection of essays, which depicts events from her childhood, her life in France, the beginning of World War II, the ending of her first marriage and the suicide of her second husband, are told through a culinary lens. The embedded recipes suggest a cookbook but one that is more than a list of ingredients and instructions.
Cookbooks as autobiographies tell personal stories and are a testimony of one’s existence. Simply by writing one’s name on the first page of a book is an act of autobiographical writing.
Writing about food is a way to record one’s life, giving permanence to the fleeting pleasures of eating and the value of cooking. In composing recipes, cookbook authors jot down notes in the margins, store paper ephemera like grocery lists and magazine articles and save photos between the pages of the cookbook. As a result, cookbooks become a hybrid of written forms: a diary, a journal, a travelogue, an essay and a scrapbook.
As personal narratives, cookbooks connect food and the self in a textual representation, telling how we come to be the people we claim to be through writing the stories and recipes of our lives. Cookbook writers self-consciously shape their identities by selecting memories and preserving them in images and recipes.
Yet, cookbooks are not bound to a chronological sequence. Instead, recipes are like distinct, fragmented life events made whole and coherent in a cookbook.
Cookbooks are evidence of one’s life and community participation, as they are documentations of eating practices and food trends. A cookbook isolated from its author and time period cannot be properly understood, nor can recipes isolated from their origins. Like Benedict Anderson’s “imagined communities,” there is a sense of community in cookbooks because a non-space-bound comradeship is built based on shared interests and values between the author and reader.
Returning to “The Gastronomical Me,” Fisher explains why she writes about food: “(W)hen I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it … and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied … and it is all one.” Through her own discrete “I,” Fisher represents other intangible hunger pains we all share.
Like Fisher, cookbook writers-slash-autobiographers are compelled to write their recipes and experiences of food, driven by emotional and social hunger for love, attention and acceptance. Other urges, such as the need for defining a personal and collective identity, are also met in cookbooks. Gabrielle Hamilton’s “Blood, Bones & Butter” offers a contemporary version of cookbooks-cum-memoirs that trace their development as women and professionals.
Personal twists to a traditional dish allow one to leave his or her mark and seasonings at the kitchen table and beyond.
