In 1877 George F. Keller (1846–1927?) commented on America’s ethnic melting pot and exclusionism by drawing “Uncle Sam’s Thanksgiving Dinner,” showing a chaotic dining scene (see Figure 34.1).1 Uncle Sam is served (uncooked) turkey by an African-American domestic and is accompanied by nine male diners. All have food in front of them: the Frenchman has frogs and wine, the German sauerkraut and sausages, the Russian holds a bottle with a label saying “Acid,” and, to the disgust of the Irish (having potatoes and whisky) and the Englishman (having pie and tea), the Chinese is eating a rat.2 This was not the first time that nations and peoples were pictured by means of foodways.3 In 1803, for example, English cartoonist James Gillray (1757–1815) drew a party of five German men who ferociously devoured sauerkraut and sausages (with beer jugs pell-mell on the floor).4 Later, typecasting nations through food occurred regularly.

This essay describes how the modern cookbook and recipe structure we know today emerges from its adolescent form in the early republic and argues that American notions of “good taste” are foregrounded in a transatlantic economic system. As a textual object, the cookbook functions in a number of registers: it creates a distinct American identity that is based on a value system; it equates eating with virtue and nation-building that develop notions of taste and taste-making; and it is predicated on a transatlantic system of production. Focusing on the ingredient list and accompanying paratextual elements of a recipe can illuminate a broader story of how slave labor in the Caribbean contributes to an early American culinary and cultural identity.

Foster argues for an expansion of the designation autobiography so that it signifies a consciously composed narrative of one’s own life experiences or a portion of one’s experiences. Foster observes when institutions collect the personal papers of ordinary people, the bus drivers and butlers, clerks, factory workers, farmers, nurses and nannies, even their own staff, in addition to those accumulated by the celebrated and the notorious, they find themselves in possession of scrapbooks, diaries, and other printed stories previously unknown. Still, such autobiographical works are more readily found in attics than in archives. They often are consciously compiled, handmade, homemade, spiral bound, tied, glued or artfully bound in specially purchased “albums,” “memory books,” “conference proceedings,” souvenir programs, organization minutes, and so forth. An expanded definition of African American autobiography that includes these texts provides a richer, more complex and textured view of what African American lived experience has been across time.

Chapter 4 observes the development of soju in Korea during the Chosŏn period, which is characterized by its localization with regard to methods and culture. This period is important to the history of soju, because the spirit spread rapidly throughout Korea and settled into its role as an important Korean alcohol, along with other kinds of alcoholic beverage that had been consumed since antiquity. Soju evolved, leading to its documentation in a variety of sources, including cookbooks that provided households with recipes using soju, medical books containing guides for medical applications of soju, and official documents testifying to the governmental use of soju in domestic and diplomatic gift-giving, an important political activity in premodern government. Soju continued to spread as well: from Korea, the spirit traveled to countries like Japan, as either a diplomatic gift or a trade commodity, creating the opportunity for its transformation into a local Japanese beverage still popular today.

In “Hemingway and Pleasure,” David Wyatt (re)introduces readers to Hemingway as a sensualist. Wyatt suggests that Hemingway’s deep, if complicated, appreciation of pleasure and sensuality has been occluded by years of criticism that focus the moral implications of pleasure and the idea that Hemingway’s stoicism and sense of discipline put him at odds with the release of enjoyment – basically the theme as iterated in A Moveable Feast: “Hunger is Good Discipline.” Wyatt argues that contemporary culture’s fascination with artisanal food and drink and with raw, natural experiences have provided a path to recovering Hemingway’s sense of pleasure. He canvasses recent popular and scholarly works that celebrate Hemingway’s love of food, drink, sex, art, and good living in general as he reads specific passages from Hemingway’s work to demonstrate the author’s consistent interest in these experiences. Critics examined include Nicole J. Camastra and Hilary Kovar Justice, among others. Wyatt finally argues that, for Hemingway, pleasure challenges us to be fully present and to have the desire of pleasure renewed in the face of the certainty that all pleasure must end.

“Black Power in the Kitchen” excavates African American women’s culinary writing, which has been relegated to the margins of the US and African American literary canon. This chapter provides an overview of key developments in the black female-authored cookbook from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. It examines early cookbooks that exploited the “Jemima Code” for their authors’ individual advancement, the community cookbook that served the larger goals of racial uplift, and the experimental and diasporic aesthetic of soul food writing. Authors under discussion include Malinda Russell, Abby Fisher, Freda DeKnight, and Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor, among others. What emerges from this account is a new understanding of how black feminist politics underwrites these literary texts, and opens up possibilities for understanding how these texts, in turn, bare on wider aesthetic practices in the United States – specifically, by reconfiguring the kitchen table as a writing table.

This chapter connects the art and science of eating well known as gastronomy to the literary and social histories of modernism. It foregrounds how modernist writers both advance and satirize gastronomic principles of good taste and refined dining, and in doing so prompt explorations of popular versus high culture and nationalism versus cosmopolitanism. The analysis compares Italian avant-garde artist and writer F.T. Marinetti’s The Futurist Cookbook (1932), Wisconsin poet Lorine Niedecker’s New Goose volume (1946), and California culinary figure M.F.K. Fisher’s cookbooks from the 1940s. The Futurist Cookbook implicitly adapts the nationalism of nineteenth-century French gastronomy to the ideology of twentieth-century fascism by promoting technologically fabricated dishes and steel-like Italian citizens. In contrast, Niedecker’s New Goose uses lyric poetry to expose the hunger of small-scale farmers during the Second World War, a period when affluent gourmands continued to patronize urban restaurants. Finally, Fisher’s cookbooks employ modernist narrative techniques in the cookbook genre while expressing dissent with the broader status of gastronomy during wartime.

This chapter introduces the reader to literary representations of food as well as the literary facets of culinary texts ranging from early modern receipt books and nineteenth-century cookbooks to contemporary culinary memoirs and food blogs. It highlights the complexities of food culture and foregrounds the role that food has played in the formation of racial identities, gendered bodies, national tastes, cultural memory, and social capital. Tracing the rich range of historical and theoretical approaches to literary food studies that have emerged over the past two decades, it offers an overview of how food and its literature came to be taken seriously by literary scholars. Finally, this section establishes the parameters of the Companion, and provides a chapter-by-chapter introduction to its contents.