Recipes for Reading: Community Cookbooks, Stories, Histories
Like community cookbooks themselves, this collection of essays offers a diversity of voices and of ideas brought together around the unifying theme of food. Thirteen different writers discuss language, food, literature, and the role of women in society as illustrated by community cookbooks. The included essays take a very academic approach to community cookbooks, analyzing them as language and as literature. Some of the more entertaining of the essays, Ann Romines's "Growing Up with the Methodist Cookbooks," for example, take a more personal approach and give the reader a look into the author's own kitchen and the community cookbooks that have shaped it. Discussions of previous literature and accessible collections of community cookbooks are included in some of the essays but are not exhaustive. Recommended for academic and public libraries where there is strong interest in linguistics or women's studies.?Mary Martin, CAPCON Lib. Network, Washington, D.C.Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.