Machine generated contents note: pt. I DIGGING IN: TASTES OF PAST AND PRESENT -- 1. Add Food and Stir: Life in the Virtual Kitchen -- Eating Words -- Burgers and Mache -- Tales of American Culinary Transformation -- Firing Up the Stove in the Sixties -- 2. Black Cake: Life (and Death) on the Food Chain -- What We Eat and What We Are -- Cooking---and Coping -- The Funeral Baked Meats -- The Pulse of the Kitchen -- 3. All That Is Toothsome? Sacred Food, Deadly Dining -- The Powers of the Cook -- The Powers of Food -- 4. Master Belly and Our Daily Bread: A Brief History of the Literary Kitchen -- Transcendental Gastronomy? -- The Morality of Renunciation -- The Morality of Celebration -- pt. II TODAY'S TABLE TALK: RECIPES OF THE MODERN -- 5. The Kitchen Muse: The Modernist Cookbook and Its Sequels -- Changing Times and Tables -- Spaghetti and Beans? -- A Rape of the Icebox -- The Modernist Fruit Bowl -- A Sudden Slice Changes the Whole Plate -- Sculpted Meat -- 6. Tastes of Clay: The Many Courses of the Culinary Memoir -- Feeding the Foodoir -- A Portrait of the Transcendental Gastronome as a Young Woman -- Two Portraits of a Hunger Artist as a Young Woman -- 7. Bitter Herbs or the Spices of Life? The Ambiguities of the Transnational Foodoir -- How I Ate and Who I Am -- Ubi Panis, Ibi Patris? -- The Redeemed Kitchen -- 8. Hail to the Chef! The Cook, the Camera, the Critic, and the Connoisseur -- Soup Operas: Mysteries of the Kitchen Unveiled -- We Love Julia -- Viagra in the Kitchen -- Lights! Camera! Eat! -- Molly, Miriam, Brenda, Chloe, Betty, Toni, Emily -- 9. Cooking the Books: Cosiness, Disgust, Desire, Despair -- In the First Kitchen -- Mealtime Mayhem -- Just Desserts -- Nausea -- Plenitude -- Ghost Milk -- pt. III FOOD FOR THOUGHT: BLESSINGS AND CURSES -- 10. The Poetics of Ice Cream: Eating Art at the Table, in the Gallery, and in a Grownups' Garden of Verses -- Eating the Body of Art -- The Meat of the Matter -- Blessing the Ice and the Cream -- The Imperatives of Pleasure -- The Flesh Made Word -- 11. Food Chained: Food Fights, Fears, Frauds---and Fantasies -- Diets and Diatribes -- Dystopias -- Disorders and Diseases -- Postmodern Pastorals.