Recipe for narrative: Representations of culture in culinary literature (Josefina Howard, Austin Clarke, Barbados, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Laura Esquivel, Mexico)

I coin the term "culinary literature" to discuss literary genres which use food and recipes, and to argue for the consideration of cookbooks as a literary genre. Recipes tell stories in themselves; they imply plots of gender, economic status, and position in a social network, which together form a community identity. Culinary literature, and particularly its constructions of culture, gives agency to writers, characters, and readers, in order to change their place in a postcolonial world. I first focus on culinary autobiography, a genre arising from the work of women autobiographers that roots the self in the cultural apparatus of food. Josefina Howard's culinary autobiography, Rosa Mexicano, redefines culture as a nexus of historical forces. Using the culinary autobiography Pig Tails 'n Breadfruit, by Barbadian/Canadian Austin Clarke, I map a lineage of the self in food essays, and identify a new turn toward defining self in a cultural context. The novel Mistress of Spices, by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, is a magical realist romance that resists totalizing ethnographic readings by giving voice to spices as agents of culture, and by depicting food and cooking without providing recipes. The recently established genre of the culinary mystery novel turns the crime novel's mediation of order and chaos specifically to a binary of nourishment and death. Women, in culinary mysteries, use the connections forged through food in communities to build culture. The effectiveness of Laura Esquivel's Like Water for Chocolate outside of Mexico, I argue, is due largely to its structural and thematic similarities to culinary mysteries, in particular, and culinary mysteries, specifically. In my work on recipes and culinary literature, I expand the definition of literature in order to explain more completely how literature informs culture. American culture has been shaped by the cookbook, which has a uniquely American history as a folk literary genre. The community cookbook shaped corporate cookbooks, and both have passed down their structures to culinary literature. Culinary literature's discussion of global, transnational, gendered, and American identities is made visible by my study.