RESEARCH

As a scholar of nineteenth century domesticity and domestic texts, my research focuses on how hierarchies within the nineteenth-century home, determined by class, gender, and racial difference, defined and structured the kinds of relationships people had with books. While the cookbook might have served a literary purpose in the hands of the white mistress or on the bookcase of the parlor room, when cookbooks enter into actual kitchens their meanings transform from symbolic use to practical use—paper torn out to be repurposed for pie tin linings or sealing jars and books splattered with food stains and evidence of use as a tool. Where the mistress’s interactions with the cookbook are primarily confined to the written word, marginal notes and additional recipes pasted into a book from newspaper clippings, the interactions between a cook and a cookbook are material in nature, with food staining the page or a burner charring the paper and permanently altering the book. My dissertation, “Marginal Spaces: The Cookbook in the American Political Imagination,” explores these very different interactions with cookbooks and why taking an expansive approach to bookish interactions might broaden the horizons of evidence which literary scholars consider. 

Because cookbooks are multidimensional, multimedia objects—stained with food, marked up with pencil and pen, pasted over with newspaper clippings—my approach to studying cookbooks is also multidimensional in order to best understand the book at hand. “Marginal Spaces” uses interdisciplinary methods in order to both focus on individual recipes and their significance in particularity as well as attend to recipes at scale and their contexts in circulation. Across these different theoretical lenses and frameworks, the core of my research is always driven by a desire to surface the voices and experiences of nineteenth-century laboring women for whom the written word was not always the primary tool through which knowledge was conveyed. My scholarship draws upon bell hook’s notion that “the oppressed struggle in language to recover ourselves, to reconcile, to reunite, to renew,” and that for these reasons “language is also a place of struggle.” With orality, cultural memory, and folktales, and alternative materialities largely absent from archival records of the nineteenth century in deference to books, this project turns to alternative markings and interactions in books such as food stains, and recipes which bear the traces of orality and African or Indigenous folktale traditions and cooking styles in order to restore the multiplicity of voices and the complex textual layers always present in cookbooks.



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