The recipe in its cultural contexts

Recipes surround us: in cookery books and magazines, in newspapers and television programmes, in films and novels, we seem continually to read about, observe and be encouraged to absorb ourselves in the preparation and serving of food. Recipes, instructional or indicative, are not, of course, exclusively concerned with the more or less complicated production of routine meals or the orchestration of feasts, though, in doing just that, they evoke the elaborate scene of home, and the contentious arena of domestic politics and family values. In their different appearances, they are also persistently drawn into cultural debates around health and purity, about lifestyle and individualism, and into definitions of the national past, present and future. This volume aims to bring together some of these disparate contexts and debates, in order to demonstrate the multiple ways in which the recipe illuminates the cultural worlds in which it appears, and constitutes a textual form worthy of study in its own right. Food and cookery are crucial elements in all cultures. To say that we are what we eat has become a truism, albeit one that has generated a burgeoning field of academic enquiry into food and meals. The work of cooking and the texts that represent that work to us, situated as they are between the purchase of food and its consumption, can scarcely be less important to our sense of identity and shared values than food itself.