Aesthetic Pleasure in Twentieth-Century Women's Food Writing by McLean, Alice;

Short description:

This book explores the aesthetic pleasures of eating and writing in the lives of M.F.K. Fisher, Alice B. Toklas, and Elizabeth David. Each of these women pioneered an idiosyncratic form of writing that challenged the rigidly gendered bounds of nineteenth-century food writing to establish a twentieth-century tradition that celebrates female appetite.

Long description:

This book explores the aesthetic pleasures of eating and writing in the lives of M. F. K. Fisher (1908-1992), Alice B. Toklas (1877-1967), and Elizabeth David (1913-1992). Growing up during a time when women's food writing was largely limited to the domestic cookbook, which helped to codify the guidelines of middle class domesticity, Fisher, Toklas, and David claimed the pleasures of gastronomy previously reserved for men. Articulating a language through which female desire is artfully and publicly sated, Fisher, Toklas, and David expanded women’s food writing beyond the domestic realm by pioneering forms of self-expression that celebrate female appetite for pleasure and for culinary adventure. In so doing, they illuminate the power of genre-bending food writing to transgress and reconfigure conventional gender ideologies. For these women, food encouraged a sensory engagement with their environment and a physical receptivity toward pleasure that engendered their creative aesthetic.

"Recommended." -- C. Holt-Fortin, SUNY Oswego, Choice

"McLean presses page-after-page the importance of dining, and so the literature about it...being so genuinely gastronomic makes the book a pleasure to read... McLean’s intelligent and fascinating account provides unmatched delectation for the meals-into-words tragics among us, people who might entitle a thesis something like, ‘Eating into thinking’, as I once did." – Aristologist, "Women and gastronomy," Michael Symons

"Part cultural history of the sexual politics of food writing, part historical survey of female pleasure as articulated through physical appetite, and part examination of the way food can serve as metaphoric material for a feminine literary voice and sensibility, Aesthetic Pleasure in Twentieth-Century Women’s Food Writing makes a clear and persuasive case for the power of women’s gastronomic writing to make significant interventions into the social underpinnings of food culture in England and America." --Susan Derwin, University of California, Santa Barbara, Gastronomica

Table of Contents:

Introduction  1. The Gendering of Appetite in Nineteenth-Century Food Writing  2. Forging a Space for Female Desire: M. F. K. Fisher on the Art of Eating  3. A Queer Appetite: The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book  4. A Sensual Engagement: Elizabeth David’s Gastronomic Cookbooks  5. From "Aesthetic Choice" to a "Diaporic Aesthetic": Patience Gray, Vertamae Smart Grosvenor, and Monique Truong