Elegy and Remembrance in the Cookbooks of Alice B. Toklas and Edna Lewis

Cookbooks can be thought of as more than collections of instructions for preparing individual dishes and meals. Scholars increasingly see cookbooks as a genre worthy of study containing texts with parameters and characteristics unique to its form and bearing markers shared by more self-consciously literary texts.¹ Susan J. Leonardi is often said to have inaugurated the study of recipes as literature with her keen observation that recipes are narratives in their own right and that the texts in which they dwell are well worth our consideration: “A recipe is, then, an embedded discourse, and like other embedded discourses, it can have a variety of relationships with its frame, or its bed” (340). Yet there have long been studies of food, if not cookbooks per se; one need only go to the library catalogue to find a wealth of earlier works.² More recently, Anne L. Bower suggests that we read cookbooks as a literary genre in and of themselves. As she writes, there are various “ways in which ‘nonliterary’ texts can be read and valued. In turn, increasing awareness of the processes at work in nonliterary texts may inform new readings of the ‘literary’” (“Bound” 14). By reading cookbooks carefully, Bower argues, we learn new ways to read traditional literary works. Elaborating on that idea, Bower maintains that cookbooks serve as a form of the romance, recalling Jan Longone’s remark that many people read cookbooks “like novels” (qtd. in Bower, “Romanced” 35).³ For Bower, women readers of cookbooks, like the readers of popular novels, indulge in both escapism and fulfillment, simultaneously upholding norms of heterosexual domesticity and fulfilling fantasies about laying aside, if only temporarily, the role of mother/wife/nurturer.⁴ Diane Tye has noted that even though “recipes have been regarded both as too trivial and too formulaic to merit study” (36), a collection of these instructions themselves, such as the ones neatly typed up and left behind by Tye’s late mother, can function as “life stories” (32) or autobiography, a point observed by various scholars.⁵ Cookbooks and the recipes within them present opportunities for authors to script a self, tell an exotic tale, recall a history, or as I will argue, mourn a lost loved one or memorialize a vanished place.

Chef and caterer Edna Lewis’s The Taste of Country Cooking (1976), a cookbook “dedicated to the memory of the people of Freetown [Virginia]” (v), an African American community of former slaves and their descendants, and The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book (1954), written by the expatriate American whose fame is inextricably linked to her long-time companion Gertrude Stein, and ostensibly a meditation on “the differences in eating habits and general attitude to food and the kitchen in the United States and [France]” (xix), share certain generic structures, yet these similarities can reflect or obscure each woman’s ethnic identity or autobiographical elements. Early on in each text, the author explicitly acknowledges the role that creating a cookbook plays in recapturing a time or place in the writer’s past. In “A Word with the Cook,” Toklas “must confide that this book with its mingling of recipe and reminiscence … was written as an escape from the narrow diet and monotony of illness [but also from] nostalgia for old days and old ways” (Alice xix). As David E. Sutton has observed about hunger in a different context, “Deprivation in the present creates … a space for the bubbling up of memories of hunger past, of another kind of history from below” (168). In the front matter to her work, Lewis thanks her sister “for spending many hours over the hot stove cooking, canning, and preserving to refresh our memories” (xi). Their respective sets of culinary instructions and the ways in which these directions are presented demonstrate how cookbooks participate in multiple genres and function as methods of fixing memory.⁶ Some memories stem from a literal hunger, others from an appetite for a past metaphorically expressed through recipe collection.

Colleen Cotter’s assertion that a recipe serves as a “written reduction of...