Cooking For The Culture

An intimate celebration of New Orleans food and its Black culture from a born-and-raised local chef. Toya Boudy’s father grew up in the Magnolia projects of New Orleans; her mother shared a tight space with five siblings uptown. They worked hard, rotated shifts, and found time to make meals from scratch for the family. In Cooking for the Culture, Boudy shares these recipes, many of which are deeply rooted in the proud Black traditions that shaped her hometown. Driving the cookbook are her personal stories: from struggling in school to having a baby at sixteen, from her growing confidence in the kitchen to her appearances on Food Network. The cookbook opens with Sweet Cream Farina, prepared at the crack of dawn for girls in freshly ironed clothes—being neat and pressed was important. Boudy recounts making cookies from her commodity box peanut butter; explains the know-how behind Smothered Chicken, Jambalaya, and Red Gravy; and shares her original television competition recipes. The result is a deeply personal and unique cookbook.

"Tracks the interplay of creativity, competition, desire, and nostalgia in the discrete ways people relate to food and cuisine in different societies"--

The essays collected here explore the power and sensuality that food engenders within literature. The book permits the reader to sample food as a rhetorical structure, one that allows the individual writers to articulate the abstract concepts in a medium that is readily understandable. The second part of Cooking by the Book turns to the more diverse food rhetorics of the marketplace. What, for example, is the fast food rhetoric? Why are there so many eating disorders in our society? Is it possible to teach philosophy through cookery? How long has vegetarianism been popular?

Many homes in Newfoundland still have well-stocked pantries of bottled moose or rabbit, freezers of corned capelin, and eider ducks at the ready, waiting for a special meal. Food, Culture, Place celebrates the land these foods come from and encourages everyone to put more traditional foods back on their plates. Lori McCarthy and Marsha Tulk have been collecting and cooking their way through the wild foods of Newfoundland for decades. This book showcases their experiences and shares the stories they have captured through their work and the people they have met. Through it all runs a deep love of everything that it takes to harvest, hunt, and prepare these foods to be enjoyed. Fish are caught, game hunted, berries and plants foraged. Food is prepared, preserved, and stored. Throughout are recipes for traditional dishes, regional delicacies, and modern preparations for today's home cook.

Elegantly written by a distinguished culinary historian, Food Is Culture explores the innovative premise that everything having to do with food—its capture, cultivation, preparation, and consumption—represents a cultural act. Even the "choices" made by primitive hunters and gatherers were determined by a culture of economics (availability) and medicine (digestibility and nutrition) that led to the development of specific social structures and traditions. Massimo Montanari begins with the "invention" of cooking which allowed humans to transform natural, edible objects into cuisine. Cooking led to the creation of the kitchen, the adaptation of raw materials into utensils, and the birth of written and oral guidelines to formalize cooking techniques like roasting, broiling, and frying. The transmission of recipes allowed food to acquire its own language and grow into a complex cultural product shaped by climate, geography, the pursuit of pleasure, and later, the desire for health. In his history, Montanari touches on the spice trade, the first agrarian societies, Renaissance dishes that synthesized different tastes, and the analytical attitude of the Enlightenment, which insisted on the separation of flavors. Brilliantly researched and analyzed, he shows how food, once a practical necessity, evolved into an indicator of social standing and religious and political identity. Whether he is musing on the origins of the fork, the symbolic power of meat, cultural attitudes toward hot and cold foods, the connection between cuisine and class, the symbolic significance of certain foods, or the economical consequences of religious holidays, Montanari's concise yet intellectually rich reflections add another dimension to the history of human civilization. Entertaining and surprising, Food Is Culture is a fascinating look at how food is the ultimate embodiment of our continuing attempts to tame, transform, and reinterpret nature.

"A Taste of Power is an investigation of the crucial role culinary texts and practices played in the making of cultural identities and social hierarchies since the founding of the United States. Nutritional advice and representations of food and eating, including cookbooks, literature, magazines, newspapers, still life paintings, television shows, films, and the internet, have helped throughout American history to circulate normative claims about citizenship, gender performance, sexuality, class privilege, race, and ethnicity, while promising an increase in cultural capital and social mobility to those who comply with the prescribed norms. The study examines culinary writing and practices as forces for the production of social order and, at the same time, as points of cultural resistance against hegemonic norms, especially in shaping dominant ideas of nationalism, gender, and sexuality, suggesting that eating right is a gateway to becoming an American, a good citizen, an ideal man, or a perfect mother. Cookbooks, as a low-prestige literary form, became the largely unheralded vehicles for women to participate in nation-building before they had access to the vote or public office, for middle-class authors to assert their class privileges, for men to claim superiority over women even in the kitchen, and for Lesbian authors to reinscribe themselves into the heteronormative economy of culinary culture. The book engages in close reading of a wide variety of sources and genres to uncover the intersections of food, politics, and privilege in American culture."--Provided by publisher.

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