Call for Contributors: FALL 2023
The next issue of The Recipes Project will explore 'Recipes as Literature,' and we'd love to feature your work!
Dear Readers,
We are currently accepting pitches for contributions to our Fall 2023 series on the theme ‘Recipes as Literature.’
In this series we look at the literary nature of recipes, analysing why writers choose to capture a dish, treatment, or process in the form of a recipe, transform practices of making into something textual and static, and what the tone, narrative, and style of a text reveals about its author’s preconceptions and desires. The series builds on the rich scholarship of historians and critics like Rebecca Laroche, Kim F. Hall, Jennifer Park, and Wendy Wall to consider the recipe author’s often invisible role as translator and intermediary, including what is captured on the page and what is left behind.
Recipes only capture a tiny fraction of the world’s food cultures, healing practices, magic, and art, and as such they are highly intentional texts. While for some—including in the eyes of the law—the recipe’s bareness and perceived functionality precludes it from being a creative text, their brevity and alleged practicality should not be conflated with artlessness.
RRecipes come in as many styles—curt, playful, commanding, intimate—as any other literary text. Some authors attempt to convey authority whilst others cultivate informality; some are clearly full of love for their subject matter whilst others seem bitterly resentful of the fact that the recipe exists in the first place.
Turning a physical act into a textual one requires interpretation - in cooking, for example, certain elements of a dish and the cookery process by necessity must be left out, whilst others need elaboration. A recipe writer’s assumptions about their audience can be seen spelled out in shrinking and expanding ingredients lists, bracketed explanations and substitutions, and addendums. Recipes, even at their most bare, are bridges between reader and author, whose translations and motivations can and should be critiqued and analysed.
We are looking for original research topics as well as on pedagogy and archival collections. We welcome contributions from researchers, archivists, teachers, and those with professional background in recipes. Please send a brief pitch (2 or 3-sentences) as well as an abbreviated CV to the series editors Esme Curtis (esmerosecurtis@gmail.com) and Jessica Clark (jclark3@brocku.ca) any time before 15 September 2023. We are particularly interested in works that expand beyond English language-texts across global contexts, as well as innovative approaches to the theme. The theme is broadly defined, but feel free to get in touch with us by email If you would like to talk with us about whether your proposal fits the theme. Accepted proposals will then be invited to join the quarterly volume on 'Recipes as Literature’. For full instructions, please see Open Call for Contributors [https://recipes.hypotheses.org/open-call-for-contributors]
Examples of Potential Topics (not exhaustive):
Recipes as a genre
Recipes in literature
Recipes as formula
Recipes as fantasy
Creation and disruption of a “canon”
Recipes and print culture
Recipes and the publishing industry
Recipes and copyright
Commercialization or commodification of recipes