Recipes for Reading

The community cookbook is a familiar item in many kitchens. Usually compiled by women and sold to raise funds for a charitable cause, these collections of recipes may seem to be utilitarian objects that exhibit little if any narrative interest. But this is hardly the case. In Recipes for Reading, scholars from a variety of disciplines examine community cookbooks as complex texts deserving serious study.

The contributors contend that such cookbooks have stories to tell about the lives and values of the women who wrote them, stories that are autobiographical in most cases, historical in some, and fictive in others.