Consumption and the Literary Cookbook

Roxanne Harde, Janet Wesselius, Roxanne Harde, Janet Wesselius

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000245875
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría de la crítica literaria

Consumption and the Literary Cookbook offers readers the first book-length study of literary cookbooks. Imagining the genre more broadly to include narratives laden with recipes, cookbooks based on cultural productions including films, plays, and television series, and cookbooks that reflected and/or shaped cultural and historical narratives, the contributors draw on the tools of literary and cultural studies to closely read a diverse corpus of cookbooks. By focusing on themes of consumption—gastronomical and rhetorical—the sixteen chapters utilize the recipes and the narratives surrounding them as lenses to study identity, society, history, and culture. The chapters in this book reflect the current popularity of foodie culture as they offer entertaining analyses of cookbooks, the stories they tell, and the stories told about them.

Part I

Textual Consumption

1Curiosity and Consumption in Alice Eats: A Wonderland Cookbook and The Anne of Green Gables Cookbook

Janet Wesselius

Two recently published cookbooks feature two juvenile girls: The Anne of Green Gables Cookbook: Charming Recipes from Anne and Her Friends at Avonlea by Kate Macdonald was re-issued in 2017, while Alice Eats: A Wonderland Cookbook by Julie Rosendaal and illustrated by Pierre Lamielle was published in 2013 and includes the full text of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The publication of two cookbooks inspired by these novels is not surprising given that both novels—Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll respectively—include multiple passages about food, cooking, recipes, and eating. These are literary cookbooks for, primarily, children (although adults can and no doubt do enjoy them). In order to understand these two cookbooks, we need to look more closely at all the cooking and eating that happens in the novels themselves. I shall argue that the gastronomical concern in the novels are not only about physical hunger but also about intellectual (emotional, epistemic, aesthetic) hunger; correlatively, the cookbooks are successful—that is, attractive to children—because they have the potential to satisfy the physical as well as the intellectual hunger of child readers. The prevalence of food—both consuming and cooking—in both novels seems to indicate that the relationship with food is not only about physical hunger but also about a hunger for social and intellectual nourishment, a desire to belong and an epistemic desire to explore, know, and understand the world. In this chapter, I propose to focus on the somewhat overlooked area of the intellectual appetites of children. Like bodily appetites, the intellectual appetites of Alice and Anne involve hunger but it is a longing for more than physical sustenance; just as we hunger for and consume food, so do we hunger for and consume that which feeds our minds. I shall argue that the concept that straddles or bridges the bodily appetites manifested in Alice and Anne’s eating and cooking and in their intellectual hunger is curiosity. In the first part, I examine the connection between Alice’s eating and drinking and her curiosity by looking at her intellectual journey. In the second part, I analyze the relationship between Anne’s embodiment in her eating and cooking and her troublesome imaginative curiosity. In the third part, I turn to the cookbooks themselves.

Alice’s Appetites in Wonderland

Already in the third paragraph of Alice in Wonderland, we are told that when Alice sees a rabbit with a waistcoat and pocket watch, she jumps to her feet, “burning with curiosity” and follows it down a rabbit-hole (24). Clearly, it is curiosity that sets Alice off on her adventure. As she falls down the rabbit-hole, she notices that it is lined with both cupboards of food and bookshelves with maps and pictures. She grabs a jar of orange marmalade on her way past but “to her great disappointment it was empty” (25). Evidently, her adventure so far does nothing to satisfy her physical appetite. This scene is just the first of many in which we see Alice’s interest in food and eating. Later on, at the Mad Tea-Party, Alice interrupts the Dormouse’s story of three little girls who lived at the bottom of a well: “‘What did they live on?’ said Alice, who always took a great interest in questions of eating and drinking” (99). As she continues to fall down the rabbit-hole, to pass the time, Alice begins to recite her lessons and “though this was not a very good opportunity for showing off her knowledge, as there was no one there to listen to her, still it was good practice to say it over” (25). This scene too is just the first of many times in the story that we see Alice’s interest in knowing things and in having her knowing acknowledged. For example, during her first meeting with the Duchess Alice is both insulted by being told she knows nothing and eager for a chance to show that she knows some things. Alice asks the Duchess why her cat is grinning: “‘I don’t know of any that do,’ Alice said very politely, feeling quite pleased to have got into a conversation (82). ‘You don’t know much,’ said the Duchess; ‘and that’s a fact.’ Alice did not at all like the tone of this remark” (83). Not only does the Duchess’s remark dispel Alice’s pleasure in having a conversation with a grown up, she is also told that she is ignorant. When she has a chance to point out a few sentences later that the Duchess is wrong to think that it would be better if the world would go around faster, we are told that Alice “felt very glad to get an opportunity of showing off a little of her knowledge” (83). A picture begins to emerge of a curious girl who interested in both eating and knowing.

The first time Alice eats and drinks is when she finds herself in the long low hall with doors all around after losing the White Rabbit and it is in this passage that several themes first emerge. When she drinks the contents of the bottle labeled “DRINK ME,” she finds it “very nice” and soon begins to shrink: ‘What a curious feeling!’ said Alice,” and she is soon the right size to fit through the little door (30). When she realizes that she left the key on the table she can no longer reach, she begins to cry. Very soon, however, she tells herself to stop crying. We read that “she generally gave herself very good advice (though she seldom followed it) … for this curious child was very fond of pretending to be two people” (31). As we all know, she finds and consumes the cake with “EAT ME” spelled out in currants.“‘Curiouser and curiouser!’ cried Alice,” as she begins to grow (33). Not surprisingly, given that Alice already had a fondness for pretending to be two people, all this shrinking and growing causes Alice to wonder if she is still herself:

Dear, dear! How queer everything is to-day! And yesterday things went on just as usual. I wonder if I’ve been changed in the night? Let me think: was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I’m not the same, the next question is, ‘Who in the world am I?’ Ah, that’s the great puzzle! (36).

We can see several significant things here. Alice’s physical appetite—eating and drinking—is inextricably tied to her intellectual appetite—for example, pretending to be two people, wondering what identity is. In fact, her two appetites are of a piece: Alice’s adventures are pursued both through her physical eating and her intellectual curiosity (which is also connected to her hunger for her intellectual abilities—her knowledge—to be recognized and acknowledged). All the eating and drinking Alice does in this story enables her to continue on her adventure. She finds an unlabeled bottle in the White Rabbit’s house and although there was no label on this bottle, she drinks it: “‘I know something interesting is sure to happen,’ she said to herself, ‘whenever I eat or drink anything: so I’ll just see what this bottle does’” (53). She grows again and is unable to shrink again until she eats the little cakes thrown into the room. When she shrinks too small she looks around for something to eat or drink and encounters a large blue caterpillar smoking a hookah on a mushroom (64). The Caterpillar echoes Alice’s question “Who in the world am I?” (36) by asking her who she is (65). He eventually tells her that eating one side of the mushroom will make her grow and the other side will make her shrink. For the rest of the story, she alternates nibbling at one side and the other until she makes herself the height she wishes to be.

Alice exercises her curiosity by eating and drinking and the thing she most wants to know is “who am I?” Throughout her physical changes, she wants to know if she is still herself. Even before her growing and shrinking, Alice was curious about her identity and often pretended to be two people. At the mad tea party she gets nothing to eat or drink nor does she find anything to feed her intellect—significantly she pronounces it “the stupidest tea-party I ever was at in all my life” (103). After leaving it, she finds her own way in to the beautiful garden that she saw at the beginning. Just as Alice learns to harness the power of her eating by nibbling alternate sides of the mushroom until she is the size she chooses to be, Alice begins to stand up to the characters she encounters—the Red Queen who cheats at croquet and threatens everyone with beheading, her second encounter with the nasty Duchess, the Gryphon and the Mock Turtle who insist they have more education than Alice—and at the trial for the stolen tarts, she begins to grow physically strong as well until she is strong enough in her own self-knowledge to assert her agency. “‘Stuff and nonsense!’ said Alice loudly” to the Queen; “‘Who cares for you?’ said Alice (she had grown to her full size by this time). ‘You’re nothing but a pack of cards!’”(157). The little girl who wondered who she was, whose eating and drinking caused her height to fluctuate wildly, whose knowledge claims were denigrated is transformed: Alice wakes up when she knows the Red Queen for who she is and when she knows herself and her own agency.

Anne’s Appetites at Green Gables

The relationship between intellectual and bodily appetites is much more fraught in Anne of Green Gables. Anne, like Alice, is a curious child. At the beginning of the novel, we read that Marilla thinks to herself “what a starved, unloved life [Anne] had had—a life of drudgery and poverty and neglect” (41). Mrs. Lynde says when she first sees Anne: “She’s terrible skinny and homely” (64). In other words, Anne is not just physically malnourished but emotionally and intellectually malnourished as well when she comes to Green Gables, having never been loved and having rarely been to school. As well, Anne’s physical malnourishment is intimately related to her emotional malnourishment; as we see several times in the novel, Anne cannot eat when she is upset. For example, when she realizes that the Cuthberts wanted a boy and she will not be allowed to stay at Green Gables, we read that Anne could not eat; she says “‘I’m in the depths of despair. Can you eat when you are in the depths of despair?’” (26). The next morning, however, she has recovered her appetite, announcing that she is hungry because “‘All sorts of mornings are interesting, don’t you think? You don’t know what’s going to happen through the day, and there’s so much scope for imagination’” (32). When Anne’s curiosity comes to the fore, she regains her appetite, both for food and for life.

Anne begins to flourish at Green Gables, both physically and intellectually. For example, Anne is exhilarated to go to her first picnic—a social occasion—and she is excited to try new food like ice cream: “‘think of it, Marilla—ice cream!’” (90). The Sunday school picnic and ice cream pique Anne’s curiosity, because she’s never experienced either. She returns home in “a state of beatification impossible to describe,” having satisfied her curiosity (104). However, it is in this incident of the Sunday school picnic that we see the fraught relationship between her curiosity and food. Initially, Anne worries that she can’t go to the picnic because everyone must bring a basket of food, and Anne has never learned to cook. Marilla says she will cook a basket for Anne and give her cooking lessons soon, when she grows out of being “featherbrained”: “‘You’ve got to keep your wits about you in cooking and not stop in the middle of things to let your thoughts rove over all creation’” (91–2). So, does this opposition between Anne’s curiosity and imagination and the ability to cook mean that Anne’s intellectual appetites are opposed to food?¹

At first it does seem that Anne’s intellectual appetites are actually an impediment to cooking and as well as to consuming food. After the picnic event, comes the infamous tea party where Anne gives Diana red currant wine to drink, mistakenly thinking it is red cordial. The tea party is an important incident, partly because Diana gets drunk and her mother temporarily separates the two girls. But is it also important because the little girls are playing at being grownups; their emotional and intellectual growth is fed by their curiosity about adult life and enabled by the physical play, involving eating and drinking. There are many descriptions of the food, the table, the tea set. In fact, the beauty of the alleged red cordial plays a role in Diana drinking three tumblerfuls which makes her drunk. As Anne says “I love bright red drinks, don’t you? They taste twice as good as any other colour” (123). Once again, we see the entwinement of the physical hunger satisfied by food but also the intellectual, aesthetic hunger that can be satisfied by food. When Diana praises Marilla’s cordial, Anne acknowledges that Marilla is renowned for her cooking and laments that although she is learning to cook, “‘There is so little scope for imagination in cookery. You just have to go by rules. The last time I made a cake I forgot to put the flour in’” (124). This story is followed by Anne recounting how she also forgot to tell Marilla that a mouse had drowned in the plum sauce that Marilla intends to serve to company; unfortunately, Anne “shrieked” the news to Marilla in front of the company (125). What we see here is Anne’s inability/indifference to the quotidian chores of life where there is no scope for the curious imagination. Cooking, quotidian though it may be, is necessary to life; this is part of the reason Marilla is so determined to teach her. Anne’s curiosity is expressed most clearly in her imagination; she is constantly imagining herself and in her surroundings into other places and conditions. The younger Anne may be a poor cook but she perseveres and brings her imagination, her curiosity about alternate realities, to her cooking. And we see it first in this disastrous tea party: not only does Anne rhapsodize over the color of the wine, but she asks Marilla if she can use the rosebud spray tea set for the tea party (121). In other words, what the food is served in and on, how it is served, the kind of food served and all the social rituals around eating—pressing Diana to have another drink, for example—are all part of this basic necessity. But the relationship between curiosity and cooking is not an easy one and Anne struggles to make appropriate room for them each.

We see this even more clearly in the liniment cake incident. When Anne’s cooking improves enough, Marilla allows her to bake a cake ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Endorsement
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I Textual Consumption
• PART II Consumption and Community
• PART III Cultural Consumption
• List of contributors
• Index