Are Cookbooks Literature?

Are Cookbooks Literature?

(c) Copyright (2016) by Kathleen Spaltro

All Rights Reserved

People often typecast literature as including only fiction, drama, and poetry, but any piece of excellent writing—whether functional or aesthetic in purpose, whether fictional or nonfictional—qualifies as literature. Functional to a fault, cookbooks nevertheless can aspire to literary excellence. The pleasure of reading cookbooks depends on the imagination and quirkiness of their authors.

Some cookbooks, of course, restrain themselves to giving pleasure only to readers' mouths, noses, and stomachs. On this principle, I acknowledge a cookbook as a valuable acquisition if it gives me a recipe that I make frequently and a few others that I make occasionally. From one collection of New Orleans seafood recipes, I extracted the catfish courtbouillion recipe that I have served on brown rice for 35 years. In another New Orleans collection,  I found a recipe for a divine treatment of crawfish; in yet another, I discovered muffins made with whole-wheat flour, molasses, and nuts, as well as shrimp Diane, which we eat denuded of much of its butter but clothed in all its yummy mushrooms.

           

Even more utilitarian were the Romertopf recipe collections that I searched when I figured out how to cook our Thanksgiving turkey in a clay pot. I needed only to understand the basic technique of braising meat in soaked clay before reinterpreting a turkey recipe in terms of this technique.

Although useful, such cookbooks have no merit as literature and give no pleasure to mind or memory. Very different are cookbooks that possess biographical interest, such as James Beard's autobiography with recipes, "Delights and Prejudices," or the cookbooks that preserve the recipes associated with Truman Capote's childhood in Depression-era rural Alabama.

Beard discusses in minute detail his memories of the food prepared by the chef of his family's hotel, Let, and by his own mother, an Englishwoman unhappily married to Beard's American father, responsible for running hotels in Portland, Oregon, and productive of an enormous baby named James. Three themes punctuate "Delights and Prejudices": Beard's fear, respect, and dislike of his mother; his covert affection for his father; and his remarkable "taste memory" and obsession with the food of the Pacific Northwest of his youth. Besides enjoying Beard's memories, I make Elizabeth Beard's black fruitcake every year. I also laugh when I read Beard's overconfident assertion, "Several years ago 'Life' had a picture story on how to skin an eel…. I trust everyone cut it out and put it in his files."

Truman Capote, for his part, in his stories "A Christmas Memory" and "The Thanksgiving Visitor," memorializes his distant cousin "Sook" Faulk, the elderly companion of Capote's childhood as well as the Faulk family cook. Capote's aunt Marie Rudisill created two cookbooks based on his association with the Faulk household: "Fruitcake" and "Sook's Cookbook." Each very interestingly depicts the Faulk family, small-town Alabama in the Thirties, and Southern foodways. My husband adapted the delicious recipe for chicken Jefferson (chicken sautéed in butter, baked with sherry, and covered with a shrimp and mushroom sauce).

Still other cookbooks transcend biography to attain more general historical or cultural interest. A World War II-era cookbook includes recipes for the intriguingly named nun's cake and for the disgusting-sounding pork cake. A collection from the Southern Italian region of Basilicata unenthusiastically discusses pork blood as an ingredient, along with baking chocolate, orange zest, red wine, and anisette, in pork blood cake.

I was just as interested, and considerably more enthusiastic, about the revelations of New England cookery offered in "Mrs. Appleyard's Kitchen" by Louise Andrews Kent, an author from Massachusetts and Vermont. I have baked Mrs. Appleyard's graham bread with either molasses or maple syrup, and friends of mine for years enjoyed her huckleberry gingerbread, which mysteriously includes neither ginger nor huckleberries. Even more than for her recipes, however, I reread "Mrs. Appleyard's Kitchen" for the sheer joy of Kent's deftly worded prose.

A few samples of Kent's wit follow. "When [Mrs. Appleyard] is feeling economical she does not make cake. She prefers a raw carrot stick to any cake that has been constructed from motives of economy." "She can … honestly say that when poured over some rusty nails and left standing for a few days, [commercial vinegar] makes a very fine wart-remover…. Probably Mrs. Appleyard could think of other uses for it, but she would rather talk about cider." "Do not try, Mrs. Appleyard says, to hurry this process. If you do, you will produce a rubber substitute as resilient as a ping-pong ball, but not nearly so edible." "…the cheese was interesting and unique—something like Camembert that had met some Limburger in a bad temper." "She may even learn to cherish tripe—that dishonest dish that looks like a waffle, feels like a raw eel, and tastes like an umbrella."

first published in The Woodstock Independent