The Culinary Imagination
From Myth to Modernity
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- £12.99
Publisher Description
From the recipe novel to the celebrity chef, renowned scholar Sandra M. Gilbert explores the poetics and politics of food.
In this stunning and important work, the prominent critic, poet, and memoirist Sandra M. Gilbert explores our relationship with food and eating through discussions of literature, art, and popular culture. Focusing on contemporary practices, The Culinary Imagination traces the social, aesthetic, and political history of food from myth to modernity, from ancient sources to our current wave of food mania.
What does it mean to transform raw stuff into cooked dishes, which then become part of our own bodies; to savor festive meals yet resolve to renounce gluttony; to act as predators where in another life we might have become prey? Do the rituals of the kitchen have different meanings for men and women, for professional chefs and home cooks? Why, today, do so many of us turn so passionately toward table topics, on the page, online, and on screen? What are the philosophical implications of the food chain on which we all find ourselves?
In The Culinary Imagination, Gilbert addresses these powerful questions through meditations on myths and memoirs, children’s books, novels, poems, food blogs, paintings, TV shows, and movies. Discussing figures from Rex Stout to Julia Child and Andy Warhol, from M. F. K. Fisher and Sylvia Plath to Alice Waters and Peter Singer, she analyzes the politics and poetics of our daily bread, investigating our complex self-definitions as producers, consumers, and connoisseurs of food. The result is an ambitious, lively, and learned examination of the ways in which our culture’s artists have represented food across a range of genres.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A rich stew of associations are served up in this rambling, flavorful survey of the cultural and literary meanings of food. Poet and critic Gilbert (Death's Door) noshes from a vast buffet of eras and genres: scriptural eating, from Eve's bite of the apple to the Last Supper; "food memoirs" that tell a life's story through meals; abundant modernist fare, from Proust's luscious madeleine to a Hemingway campfire cookout; kitchen-themed poems, mysteries, and movies, including the Pixar animated epic Ratatouille, which turns restaurant hygiene on its head; contemporary diet primers and bulimia confessionals. Sprinkled throughout are recipes, menus, and the author's spicy recollection of her Sicilian-American family's socio-gastronomic rites. Gilbert presents no particular thesis, but does tease out a theme: food's role as the sine qua non of bodily reality, and thus intertwined with carnality, female eroticism, bourgeois pleasure, and, in Sartre's Nausea, existentialist revulsion at virtually everything. The topics she covers are so many and wide-ranging that they sometimes feel shallow. But when Gilbert sinks her teeth into a subject a vivid evocation of Julia Child's magnetic personality, a skeptical take on slow-food romanticism her evocative prose and shrewd analyses make for an intellectual feast. Photos.
