Eat My Words: Reading Women's Lives Through the Cookbooks They Wrote (review)

Folklorists and others who study foodways have been aware for some time of Janet Theophano's research into cookbooks through her many papers, published articles, and presentations. Eat My Words has been greatly anticipated and proves to be a welcome addition to the growing body of scholarship that is defining and advancing an important, but greatly undervalued, field of study. It is an ambitious undertaking, and represents the author's long-term and continuing study of the written documents that comprise what she calls "household literature" (pp. 227–68).

In its consideration of documents from the seventeenth century to the present, Eat My Words provides common ground for connections not only between historians and folklorists, but also with students of women's experience in the old world and new. Further, the book reaches out to the large and disparate community of people who create, publish, and collect cookbooks. The author's use of a first-person narrative about her search for and discovery of books, documents, and literary fragments over a ten-year period provides an unusual but ultimately helpful thread that exposes not only the objects of Theophano's search, but also her multiple interpretations of them as autobiography, social history, inheritance, and literature.

Therein lies both the strength and weakness of Eat My Words. Theophano is skillful, disciplined, and also creative in her pursuit of the greatest evidentiary use and value that can be wrung from household documents. Eat My Words convincingly argues for the utility of what may be termed "compiled cookbooks" and collections of household information organized and preserved as cookbooks—information that reveals much more than eating habits or preferences. The author's use of these documents as maps of social relationships is particularly welcome and well argued. The value of household literature in constructing an image of women's lives as household members and as women, however, ultimately rests upon issues involving access to literacy and opportunities to publish that provide a means of measuring the social progress women seek across lines of class, color, and religious belief. Theophano's handling of these complex issues displays a sensitivity to coverage—African American and Asian American, rich and poor, Christian and Jewish—but the book is not wholly successful in accounting for such distinctions as they pertain to the varied availability of means to read, write, publish, and distribute literature that expresses women's experience and values.

Of greater concern, perhaps, is the extent to which the fruits of Theophano's considerable labors may be applied. Eat My Words properly affirms the importance of the card-file, loose-leaf binder, or cookbook to which recipes, clippings, and coupons have been added—an object found in almost every American home. But the book ultimately speaks to and argues for the legacy of a far smaller and more select group of household authors, from whose experience it is difficult to divine lessons that apply more widely. Ultimately, some readers may find it difficult to discern what Eat My Words is truly "about." Regardless of whether its path is clear, however, Eat My Words is an expedition into relatively uncharted territory, guided by a skilled and thoughtful commander, whose insights into foodways, household literature, and women's lives more than justify the undertaking.