Reimagining the culinary representations remembrances and resistances in select works of recipe fiction

Abstract

Recipe Fiction as a literary genre is shaped by its hybrid format that conjoins elements of a novel and of a cookbook. This thesis examines four novels that adhere to this structural hybridity- Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel, The Kitchen Daughter: A Novel by Jael McHenry, Pomegranate Soup by Marsha Mehran, and The Cuttlefish: A Novel by Maryline Desbiolles. The novels, marked by the presence of food recipes in them, emerge to be multidimensional texts which call for a performative engagement from the reader. The study seeks the possibilities of reading Recipe Fiction as women’s life scripts, and reclaiming their muted voices from the kitchen. It proposes to address the research gap that persists in the domain of Food Studies, around domestic kitchen spaces and cooking practices. The study foregrounds the creative, the transformative and the subversive aspects of domestic culinary practices as they interact with the complex dynamics of memory, agency and selfhood. Ingenious representations of the domestic kitchen spaces, formative remembrances of the sensorial, gastronomic encounters, and resistances that impel the cook towards empowerment and actualisation, shape the way the culinary is reimagined. The texts are studied for their capacity to challenge constrictive cultural norms, intimidating personal constraints, and discriminatory historical erasures. Theoretical postulates are borrowed from feminist geography, gustemology, infrapolitics, and power feminism to construct a framework for the textual analyses. The research seeks to reimagine domestic cooking as an empowering act, by evaluating its dynamic, reinventive and transformative prospects.