A taste of power : food and American identities / Katharina Vester.

ISBN:

9780520284975

9780520284982

Title:

A taste of power : food and American identities / Katharina Vester.

Author:

Vester, Katharina, author.

Personal Author:

Vester, Katharina, author.

Edition:

First edition.

Physical Description:

xv, 162 pages ; 24 cm.

Series:

California studies in food and culture ; 59

Contents:

"For all grades of life?" the making of a republican cuisine -- In search of an American cuisine: national identity and food -- "All my bones were made of Indian corn" : maize, revolution, and democracy -- An American painter's palate : Raphaelle Peale's food still lifes -- Domestic virtue and citizenship in Lydia Maria Child -- "Bread of our mothers" : Sylvester Graham and the health of the nation -- Cooking contest : regional, transnational, and class-based cuisines in the Antebellum U.S -- A republican cuisine -- "Wolf in chef's clothing" : manly cooking and negotiations of ideal masculinity -- Why the way to the heart is through the stomach -- "Men, meet the kitchen" : inventing manly cooking -- Flesh, blood, and Hemingway : campfire cooking and rugged masculinities -- Hardboiled cooking, femmes fatales, and American Noir -- Silver Spoons in their hands : the rise of the gourmet -- Playboys in the kitchen: manly cooking in the 1950s and 60s -- "Will cook for sex" : recipes for manly cooking -- "The difference is spreading" : recipes for lesbian living -- "Serving heteronormativity/queering the menu" -- Labor of love : gender-normativity and contradiction in 19th century cookbooks -- Tender Mutton: Gertrude Stein's household advice -- "La cuisine c'est la femme" : the Alice B. Toklas cook book -- What lesbians eat : identity, food and same-sex desire -- How to cook with lesbians -- Digestif : power, resistance and food.

Subject Term:

Food -- Social aspects -- United States.

Cooking, American -- History.

Food habits -- United States -- History.

Cookbooks -- Social aspects -- United States.

Format:

Books

Publication Date:

2015

Publication Information:

Oakland, California :

University of California Press,

[2015]

Available:*

Shelf Number	Material Type	Copy	Shelf Location	Status
394.120973 VES	Book	1	Standard shelving location	Searching... Unknown

Bound With These Titles

On Order

Summary

Since the founding of the United States, culinary texts and practices have played a crucial role in the making of cultural identities and social hierarchies. A Taste of Power examines culinary writing and practices as forces for the production of social order and, at the same time, points of cultural resistance. Culinary writing has helped shape dominant ideas of nationalism, gender, and sexuality, suggesting that eating right is a gateway to becoming an American, a good citizen, an ideal man, or a perfect wife and mother.

In this brilliant interdisciplinary work, Katharina Vester examines how cookbooks became a way for women to participate in nation-building before they had access to the vote or public office, for Americans to distinguish themselves from Europeans, for middle-class authors to assert their class privileges, for men to claim superiority over women in the kitchen, and for lesbian authors to insert themselves into the heteronormative economy of culinary culture. A Taste of Power engages in close reading of a wide variety of sources and genres to uncover the intersections of food, politics, and privilege in American culture.

Author Notes

Katharina Vester is Assistant Professor of History at American University in Washington, DC, where she teaches in the American Studies program.

Reviews (1)

Choice Review

At its core, this book considers what food can reveal about identity, who shapes identity, and how cultural identifiers are transmitted. Specifically, historian Vester (American Univ.) explores how food and food knowledge has been deployed as a powerful tool by a variety of groups in US history. This unique cultural study combines a variety of sources, including art, cookbooks, and literature, to analyze larger themes of nation building, gender, and sexuality as portrayed through food. The author moves quickly through the chronology, beginning with representations of food during the early republic before transitioning to a thought-provoking discussion of masculinity, cooking, and the rise of campfire cooking tropes. The book's strongest components are in the sections about how gourmet cooking, or more nuanced tastes, became the provenance of men, although home cooking remained part of the female domain. The latter part of the book discusses the place of heteronormativity in literature and cookbooks as it relates to lesbian cooks and women's role in the kitchen more generally. The chapters seem slightly like stand-alone components brought together, but they provide a wide variety of content for more advanced students of food history. Best for advanced students, graduate students, and professionals in the field. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. --Megan Elizabeth Birk, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley