Introducing RECIPES AS LITERATURE
Introducing RECIPES AS LITERATURE
The Autumn 2023 issue of The Recipes Project, co-edited by Esme Curtis and Jessica Clark
By Esme Curtis, Autumn 2023 Guest Editor, with Jess Clark
Despite their veneer of practicality, readers of The Recipes Project will know that many recipes are much closer to fiction than they first appear. They inevitably capture multifaceted dishes in a single dimension. Sometimes this is purposeful, and a recipe’s very creation can be a form of rhetoric: a spirited argument that this is how a dish should be made. Other times, they exist without any desire for the reader to follow their instructions at all. Dave Chang’s recipe for 48-hour short ribs opens with an earnest recommendation not to attempt it. J. Kenji Lopez-Alt has (half-)joked that he hopes no one has ever tried to follow his essay-length recipes verbatim.
It is this complicated niche which recipes occupy, somewhere between fiction and formulae, that makes considering their literary nature so fascinating. At the Recipes Project and beyond, scholars have explored recipes as a literary genre, including the ways that conventions and devices function across texts. This series contributes to this work, further interrogating the complex relationship between text and experience in a variety of locations and contexts. In Su Hyeon Cho’s essay on harisa, a sacred porridge, for example, she notes how such simple things as portion sizes can be used to preserve memories of gathering even in times when communities become scattered. And, in John Broadway’s piece, he reflects the wider implications of the standardisation of ingredients in recipes and considers how our portrayal of the culinary world plays a key role in shaping it.
Rüstem Ertuğ Altınay’s piece Failed Interpellations also takes a philosophical approach, considering the sometimes surprisingly heartwarming consequences of a particular recipe’s well-meaning but simplistic approach to culture and class. GJ Sevillano’s piece, meanwhile, on Transpacific Kitchens considers the intimacy of cooking from someone else’s cookbook; how ‘consuming’ autobiographical cookbooks forces a reader to confront the material realities of the life of a kusinera (chef).
We hope you enjoy each post and are looking forward to sharing them with you over the coming weeks. Please join us every Thursday for a new instalment on recipes as literature.
Coming up in the Autumn 2023 edition of The Recipes Project:
Towards an Inclusive Recipe Literature by John Broadway (now available)
Recipes for Sacred Porridge in Post-Earthquake Turkey by Su Hyeon Cho (available November 2)
Transpacific Kitchens: The Makings of a Diasporic Kusinera by GJ Sevillano (available November 9)
Failed Interpellations: European Recipes in Translation and their Turkish Readers by Rüstem Ertuğ Altinay (available November 16)
Open research from Geeta Budhraja, Rhiannon Scharnhorst, Laura Garland, Jennifer Cognard-Black and more!
Join us at The Recipes Project every week from now until the end of November to read more about Recipes as Literature!