Food studies

Owing to its close connections with the domestic sphere, “food” was considered a female concern in the Victorian period, and writing about food offered women rich, and potentially lucrative, authorial opportunities. Women’s food writing encompassed a wide range of fictional and nonfictional genres, including cookery books and household manuals, primers and textbooks, newspaper and magazine articles, and novels and poems. It was tonally and thematically diverse: many examples aimed to deliver practical instruction in culinary skills and techniques, and so adopted an imperative voice, but others assumed a more creative or journalistic style. Some writings were primarily concerned with domestic economy and the management of bodily appetites; others encouraged gastronomic experimentation and highlighted the pleasures of sensory indulgence. As well as shedding light on what people in the nineteenth century actually ate, women’s food writing provides an insight into the shifting...