Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Culinary literature'

Thesis (MA)--Stellenbosch University, 2012.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Francoise Vergés comments in her essay Let’s Cook! that “one could write the history of a people, of a country, of a continent by writing the history of its culinary habits” (250 ). Vergés here refers to the extent to which food can be seen to document and record certain events or subjectivities. Exploring a wide range of texts spanning the late 1800s up to the post-apartheid present, this thesis focuses in particular on the ways in which “spice” as commodity, ingredient or symbol is employed to articulate and/or embed creole and diasporic identities within the South African national context. The first chapter maps the depiction of the “Malay” figure within cookery books, focussing on the extent to which it is caught up in the trappings of the picturesque. This visibility is often mediated by the figure’s proximity to food. These depictions are then placed in conversation with the conceptual artist Berni Searle’s photographic and video installations. Searle visually interrogates the stagnant modes of representation that accrue around the figure of the “Malay” and moves toward understandings of how food and food narratives structure cultural identity as complex and mutable. Chapter two shifts focus from the Cape to the ways in which “Indian Cuisine” became significant within the South African context. Here the Indian housewife plays a role in perpetuating a distinctive cultural identity. The three primary texts discussed in this chapter are the popular Indian Delights cookery book authored by the Women’s Cultural Group, Shamim Sarif’s The World Unseen and Imraan Coovadia’s The Wedding. Indian Delights. All illustrate the extent to which the realm of the kitchen, traditionally a female domain, becomes a space from which alternative subjectivities can be made. The kitchen as a place for cultural retention is explored further and to differing degrees in both The Wedding and The World Unseen. Ultimately, indentifying cultural heritage through food enables tracing alternative and intersecting cultural identities that elsewhere, are often left out for neat and new ethnic, cultural or national identities. The thesis will in particular explore the extent to which spices used within creole and/or diasporic culinary practices encode complex affiliations and connections. Tracing the intimacies and the disjunctures becomes productive within the postapartheid present where the vestiges of apartheid’s taxonomical impetus alongside a new multicultural model threaten to erase further the complexities and nuances of everyday life.
AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: In haar artikel Let’s Cook! wys Francoise Vergés daarop dat die geskiedenis van ‘n mens, ‘n land of selfs ‘n kontinent saamgestel sou kon word deur te skryf oor die geskiedenis van hulle kos en eetgewoontes (250).Vergés skep hier ‘n besef van individuele en sosiale identiteit wat deur kos geleenthede vasgevang kan word. Deur bronne vanaf die laat 1800’s tot die postapartheid periode te bestudeer, fokus hierdie navorsing spesifiek op die wyse waarop speserye as kommoditeit, inhoud of simbool gebruik word om die kreoolse en diasporiese identiteite in Suid Afrika te bevestig of te bevraagteken. Die eerste hoofstuk lewer ‘n uiteensetting en beskrywing, soos verkry uit kookboeke, van die stereotypes wat vorm om die Maleise figuur. Daar word konsekwent gefokus op die mate waarin die sigbaarheid van die Maleise identiteit verstrengel word in ‘n bestaande raamwerk van diskoerse. Die Maleise figure word dikwels meer sigbaar in die konteks van kos en eetgewoontes. Berni Searl se fotografiese en video installasies word gebruik om hierdie stereotiepiese visuele kodes te bevraagteken. Searle ontgin die passiewe wyse waarop die Maleise persoon visueel verbeeld word en beklemtoon dan hoe kos en gesprekke oor kos die kulturele identiteit kompleks en dinamies maak. Hoofstuk twee verskuif die klem vanaf die Kaap na die wyse waarop die Indiese kookkuns identiteit kry in die Suid Afrikaanse konteks. Die fokus val hier op die rol van die Indiese huisvrou en haar kombuis in die bevestiging en uitbou van ‘n onderskeibare kulturele identiteit. Die drie kern tekste wat in hierdie hoofstuk bespreek word is die wel bekende en populere Indian Delights kookboek wat saamgestel is deur die Women’s Cultural Group, Shamim Sarif se The World Unseen en Imraan Coovadia se The Wedding. Indian Delights toon verder die mate waarin die kombuis as primere domein van die vrou, ‘n ruimte bied vir die formulering van alternatiewe subjek posisies. Die kombuis bied ook geleentheid vir inherente subversie wat verder en op alternatiewe wyse ontgin word in die bronne The Wedding en The World Unseen. Deur kos te gebruik om kulturele identiteit te verstaan bied ook die geleentheid om kulturele oorvleueling te verstaan al mag sommige groepe beskou word as onafhanklik in hul oorsprong en identiteit. Hierdie navorsing gee spesifiek aandag aan die mate waarin speserye en die gebruik daarvan in kreoolse en diasporiese kookkuns die kompleksiteite, soortgelykhede, verskille en misverstande reflekteer. Dit is veral waardevol om te let op soortgelykhede en verskille gegee dat die apartheidstaksonomie van die verlede en die huidige multikulturele model die rykheid en subtiele nuanseerings van die daaglikse bestaan verder kan erodeer.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Spanish and Portuguese, 2005.
Title from PDF t.p. (viewed Dec. 3, 2008). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 66-03, Section: A, page: 0828. Chair: Catherine Larson.

This thesis addresses the literary representation of food in the period from 1900 through 1945 in the work of Ford Madox Ford, Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf. Taking up nineteenth-century fascinations with sensual and aesthetic taste, these authors explore the implications of food preparation and consumption in Britain, America and France. They use representations of everyday culinary practices as a way to examine articulations of anxiety about the state of civilization, a fear that is amplified and altered by both World Wars. The thesis approaches the question of the significance of food to literary modernism in two ways. The first is a theoretical analysis of modernist ways of thinking about the dialectic between the concepts of civilization and barbarism. The second is grounded in material history, establishing the contexts and conditions of food culture in the first half of the twentieth century. Drawing on sociological thinking from Norbert Elias's conception of the civilizing process and Pierre Bourdieu's theory of distinction, and using a combined methodology of close reading, biographical and historical analysis, I show that food acts as a lens for these authors' ideas about civil society and modernity. My original contribution to knowledge is threefold. The first is my interpretation of 'culinary Impressionism' as an extension and repositioning of current scholarly thinking about Ford's literary Impressionism. The second is my reading of Stein's and Toklas's jointly-authored cookbook draft as evidence of their collaboration. This forms the crux of my argument about Stein adapting domestic culinary techniques into her other writing. The third is in my chapter on Virginia Woolf. My original archival research shows that in A Room of One's Own Woolf's representation of the financial and culinary difference between men's and women's dining in colleges at the University of Cambridge is justified and the material inequality was in fact worse than previously understood. I argue that the disparity in institutional food intensifies Woolf's later reimagining of the term 'civilization' in Three Guineas. While drawing on the work of modernist studies scholars on modernism and the everyday, civilization, and food, my project is unique in demonstrating that food reflects modernist conceptions of civilization and barbarism. My thesis contributes to the understanding of transatlantic aesthetics and gendered productions of modernism by illuminating the centrality of agriculture, cookery, domestic work and institutional dining to modernist authors.

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Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Cient?fico e Tecnol?gico
Using literature to discuss the topic of food, proper bourgeois cuisine, was the purpose of this work. As a corpus, we use one of the works of E?a de Queiroz, The City and the Mountains. Served as theoretical references the Claude Levi-Strauss s concept of universal culinary and the Jean Claude Fischler s concept of specific culinary who understands food as a cultural system which includes representations, beliefs and practices of a specific group. After the initial reading of the novel and construction of a file containing general information of the work, categories designed for elaboration of a material for analysis were these: work, characters, food, intellectuals and geographies. We realized the culinary as an epicenter for understanding the culture of a specific group: in this case, the bourgeois. We proposed a quaternary model for systematizing it: this bourgeois cuisine highlights the technique, has affection for what is rare and/or expensive but still consume it with temperance, establishing a new relationship with the use of time and, finally, it is the one that opens the ritual that involves frequent restaurants and cafes. The exercise of thinking the bourgeois cuisine through the literature suggests that the art may work on increase the comprehensive capabilities of nutritionists, professionals who deal with a complex object in your practice: the food
Utilizar a literatura para problematizar o tema da alimenta??o, propriamente a cozinha burguesa, foi o prop?sito deste trabalho. Como corpus, utilizamos uma das obras de E?a de Queiroz, A cidade e as Serras. Serviram como referenciais te?ricos o conceito de cozinha universal de Claude L?vi-Strauss, al?m daquele apresentado pelo soci?logo Jean Claude Fischler que a compreende como um sistema cultural alimentar que comporta representa??es, cren?as e pr?ticas de um grupo espec?fico. Ap?s a leitura inicial do romance e constru??o de um arquivo com informa??es gerais sobre a obra, espacialidades para elabora??o de um material de an?lise foram assim pensadas a priori: a obra, personagens, comidas, intelectuais e geografias. Percebemos a cozinha como um epicentro para a compreens?o da cultura de um grupo espec?fico: neste caso, o burgu?s. Propusemos um modelo quatern?rio para sistematiz?-la: a cozinha burguesa ? aquela que p?e em relevo a t?cnica, que tem afei??o por aquilo que ? raro e/ou caro apesar de consumi-lo com temperan?a, que estabelece uma nova rela??o com o uso do tempo e que, por fim, inaugura o ritual que envolve frequentar restaurantes e caf?s. O exerc?cio de pensar a cozinha burguesa por meio da literatura sugere que esta possa produzir na forma??o de nutricionistas a amplia??o de suas capacidades de compreens?o do objeto complexo com o qual lidam em sua profiss?o: a alimenta??o

In European travel literature, interiors and domestic spaces have received little critical attention. This practice-led study explores the nature of writing about domestic encounters and domestic spaces used by two female travel writers, Freya Stark (1893-1993) and Ella Maillart (1903-1997). Their works suggest the possibility of an alternative relationship between author and subject, with a point of view permitting the observation of rich ethnographic details and attention to everyday life and everyday women. The study includes a work of creative non-fiction based on travels in kitchens in Iran and far west China.

Abstract Close to the Source is comprised of a series of nonfiction vignettes about the artisan, agricultural, and culinary methods of Italy. In Close to the Source the human relationship with nature, food, and art is reexamined while a series of rich characters help bring the material to life. Through interviews, research, and first-hand experiences, the author attempts to archive fading artisan and food-related techniques and rituals. In the process, a cultural critique about the importance of the practical arts in contemporary times emerges. The thesis contains four sections: Terra/Land; Art and Artisans; Pane/Bread; and Compagnia/Company.

Les mémoires culinaires, qui empruntent des traits sémantiques aux mythes familiaux et au discours féminin, invitent à s'interroger sur leur pertinence littéraire en tant que genre contemporain. Cette étude considère leurs ambitions narratives, leur qualité poétique, le(s) genre(s) dont ils procèdent, mais aussi celui qu’ils constituent. L'examen d'un vaste corpus de mémoires permet d'en observer la diversité et l’intertextualité, et de dessiner une continuité historique avec les textes précurseurs dont l’approche est renouvelée.Empruntant à l'autobiographie, à l'écriture culinaire, ainsi qu’à la littérature de voyage, les mémoires culinaires sont un genre hybride qui explore l’identité, dont la quête est souvent motivée par la perte diasporique d’une patrie ou par un traumatisme familial. Nous analysons les liens, dans le récit et le genre tout entier, entre la nourriture, l’écriture de soi et le voyage. Outre le tissage de traditions culinaires avec des recettes, les mémoires révèlent une dimension spirituelle, synonyme de voyage intérieur. Lire les mémoires culinaires dans la double perspective des habitudes alimentaires culturellement bien définies et de la littérature de voyage permet d’élucider les questions centrales de l'identité dans le contexte des déplacements intérieurs et extérieurs.Les multiples paradoxes du genre sont symptomatiques de son ingéniosité, associant divers éléments pour créer une narration culinaire globale, en un corpus de recettes qui incarnent une vérité universelle, et proposent ainsi une nourriture à la fois physique et symbolique
Bearing semantic elements of family myths and feminine discourse, culinary memoirs invite questions about their literary pertinence as a contemporary genre. This study considers their narrational ambitions, their poetic quality, the genre(s) from which they emerge, and also that which they define. We hypothesise that they have a literary relevance at the intersection of several genres. The examination of an extensive corpus allows us to observe its diversity and intertextuality, as well as the historical perspective of precursory texts, offering a new reading of earlier works.Rooted in autobiography and food writing, with traits of travel literature, culinary memoirs are a hybrid genre that explores identity, the quest for which is often motivated by the diasporic loss of homelands, or family trauma. We analyse the narrative and the emerging genre to understand how it represents self-writing and food within the travel narrative genre. As well as weaving culinary traditions with recipes, memoirs reveal a spiritual dimension, synonymous with an inward journey. Appraising culinary memoirs from the perspective of foodways, as culturally-defined consumption, and travel literature, elucidates the central questions of identity and origins within the context of inner and outward displacement.The genre’s multiple paradoxes are symptomatic of its resourcefulness, drawing from diverse elements to create an overarching food narrative, as a corpus of recipes that embodies a universal truth, to which nourishment, both physical and symbolic, holds the key

Denna uppsats ämnar att undersöka den språkliga och visuella utformningen av White Guide- restaurangers menyer med avsikt att få en djupare förståelse för vissa återkommande drag som kan kopplas till restauranger med denna höga kvalitetsklassificering. Forskningsfrågorna för studien lyder: Vilka visuella skillnader och likheter, när det kommer till typografi, färgsättning, användning av ikoner samt placering av text, finns det mellan de utvalda restaurangernas menyer? Finns det några språkliga skillnader och likheter ifråga om beskrivningar av tillagningsmetod, sensoriska uttryck samt uttryck för ursprung, mellan menyerna? Materialet som analyseras har avgränsats till sex olika menyer tillhörande restauranger inom kategorin mycket god klass i White Guide 2020. Menyerna analyseras dels genom en visuell analys med hjälp av sociosemiotisk teori samt genom en språklig analys som bygger på traditionell lexikal taxonomisk semantik. I den visuella analysen undersöks typografi, färgsättning, ikoner samt textens placering i menyerna och i den språkliga analysen undersöks olika uttryck för tillagningsmetoder, sensoriska uttryck samt uttryck för ursprung i menyernas maträttsbeskrivningar. Resultatet visar att menyer inom denna kategori i White Guide skiljer sig mycket åt både språkligt och visuellt även om vissa likheter har påfunnits. Alla analyserade menyer innehåller ord som betecknar tillagningsmetoder och trots att antalet skiljer sig mycket åt mellan menyerna är tillagningsmetoderna ändå flest till antalet bland samtliga språkliga analyskategorier. Många typsnittsvarianter förekommer i de olika menyerna även om typsnittsantalet inom en meny vanligen är mellan ett till tre. Marginaljusterad eller centrerad text är det absolut vanligaste i menyerna och en stor majoritet av alla menyer har en ljus bakgrund med en mörk text, där få färger och dova färger är vanligast. Att använda ikoner som fotografier eller andra symboler förekommer även om det sker sparsamt.

“Culinary Scapes” analyzes culinary cultural production produced and consumed by South Asians in various “national” sites: India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Britain, Canada and the United States. It juxtaposes contemporary South Asian cultural production to identify the potentials as well as limitations of thinking through culinary practices to understand how South Asian subjects inhabit multiple identitarian locations made possible by particularized relationships to food and culinarity. This juxtaposition of texts reveals that food is implicated in vital ways in a number of cultural, political and economic debates that both produce and contest ideas about gendered national culinary identity. The dissertation uncouples the seamless link between “food” and “nation” in a range of South Asian contexts to argue that food and nation and gender are not naturally linked, but instead are rendered isomorphic within the popular imagination for politically motivated reasons. The first chapter offers a schematic overview of culinarity in different disciplinary locations. It ends with an exploration of the politics of food production in Ketan Mehta's Mirch Masala (Spices ). Chapter II analyzes how the rhetoric of cookbooks, including those by Kala Primlani and Madhur Jaffrey, discipline middle class “housewives” in India and the United States into performing versions of Indianness, upholding the values of middle class Hindu India. Chapter III explores how queer desire—routed through culinarity—emerges against the backdrop of the classed and sexualized domestic sphere in Romesh Gunesekera's Reef and Deepa Mehta's Fire. Chapter IV examines how food is embedded in discourses about authenticity and citizenship within diasporic contexts, comparing Shani Mootoo's “Out on Main Street” with Sara Suleri's Meatless Days . Chapter V asks what it means to think “beyond the nation” analyzing the gendered, culinary television and cookbook performances of Padma Lakshmi and Raji Jallepalli as well as the writings of Geeta Kothari. It asks how fusion cuisine can be read against U.S. racial discourses of assimilation and otherness. The final chapter reflects on the politico-economic implications of thinking about food and nation in isomorphic terms by reading Nisha Ganatra's Chutney Popcorn alongside debates over basmati rice patenting in South Asia.

This dissertation examines how women’s food writing, from blogs to cookbooks to novels, demonstrate a desire to articulate themselves as people within communities rather than accept a dehumanized identity as a consumer or set of credit-card numbers. I argue that through an emphasis on connection with one another via a discourse of scratch cooking and locally sourced foods, women are able to push back against the hegemony of corporate food and industrial agriculture. Working from a case study model, each of my chapters examines the distinct ways in which women assert their personhood apart from the homogenizing influences of mainstream food culture. As a means of articulating this woman’s culinary culture, predicated on a foundation of scratch cooking and local ingredients and relationships, I examine the food blog Fed Up With Lunch and the author’s use of an anonymous persona to interrogate the federal school lunch program; feminist vegetarian and vegan cookbooks authored by collectives of women who rely on oppositional identities in order to push back against what they view as hegemony; how diasporic Indian women use scratch cooking as a means of self-expression within the context of migration; and the novel cookbook as an example of injecting a feminist discourse of food into a traditional fictional narrative. Read together, these discrete case studies make an argument for women’s power to effect meaningful change from within the circumscribed space of the kitchen.
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This dissertation posits that Nouvelle Cuisine brings together two of the most powerful cultural forces involved in constituting French national identity: food and revolution. As a result of this privileged position, Nouvelle Cuisine offers scholars a particularly rich object of study that can be related to larger issues at play in the formation and performance of national identity. In this work, I will argue that the revolutionary rhetoric used in the articulation of Nouvelle Cuisine serves several distinct and, at times, oppositional purposes. On the one hand, the revolutionary rhetoric is intended to create a break with a tumultuous and painful past, while asserting a new paradigm of national strength. On the other hand, however, the revolutionary rhetoric of equality and freedom also somewhat paradoxically participates in and supports the dark side of democracy, which includes but is not limited to behind-the-scenes jockeying for power and the elimination of groups that threaten or curtail either the power at the top or the legitimacy of the revolution itself.

This work will also argue that because of the very malleability of the revolutionary rhetoric and because French cuisine is considered such an important expression of the French nation, Nouvelle Cuisine and the contemporaneous culinary discourse transforms France's fine dining domain into a sort of theatre where national attitudes are not only represented to a socially diverse French public, but where the public itself is invited to participate in this performance of the nation: rehearsing, refining, and rejecting what it means to be French and, as a result, projecting both aspirations and anxieties of nationhood through this culinary landscape.

In writing this dissertation, I have drawn heavily on my training in literary studies, but have tried as much as possible to allow the subject matter to dictate an inclusive and interdisciplinary approach. I engage frequently with a wide variety of scholars such as Homi Bhabha, Roland Barthes, Michel Winock, Jean-Robert Pitte, Claude Fischler, and Stephen Mennell. Consequently, my argument places the classic literary tools of linguistic and semiotic methods alongside investigations that call on cultural studies, history, anthropology, sociology, political philosophy, and of course food studies. I use cookbooks, guidebooks, newspapers, magazines, menus, interviews, and multiple editions of the Larousse Gastronomique to provide first and foremost the context but also the evidence for this dissertation. I concentrate the bulk of my critical energies on the food and leisure magazine Le Nouveau Guide (founded by food critics Henri Gault and Christian Millau) and the cookbook series entitled "Les Recettes Originales de...", paying particular attention to Nouvelle Cuisine foundational chefs Paul Bocuse and Michel Guérard.

The narrative of Nouvelle Cuisine is equivocal, but it does not defy conclusions. My final analysis in this dissertation is that in the production and articulation of Nouvelle Cuisine, we see how food and revolution are used to reorganize the hierarchies and composition of a society. We see a reorganization that restores bourgeois, patriarchal values and clings to a hexagonal interpretation of France that prioritizes resistance over incorporation. We see a revolution that is perhaps less the French Revolution than the July Revolution. We see a revolution that is an alibi for restoration.

Dissertation

Australian community cookbooks are an under-recognised and under-utilised trove of historical information about the life of the nation. Special features of form and function make this cookery genre distinctively revealing not only of the evolution of Australian food culture, but of twentieth-century discourses of identity. Community cookbooks express the voices of "ordinary people" in everyday life, in particular the large cohort of mostly middle-class twentieth-century women who recognised the community cookbook as a way they could help themselves and their communities. In doing so, they made their social, religious, political and cultural values manifest in the fabric of the community and thereby contributed to the building of the Australian civil society. They also left an enduring record of the foodways practiced in Australian homes. This thesis undertakes a genre study of the Australian community cookbook. Investigation of the history of community cookbooks in Australia positions them in the context of a fast-changing social and political culture, within an emergent and maturing nation. Careful dissection of the community cookbook demonstrates the significance of the special features that distinguish this genre – the important principle of the volunteer community group and the role of the recipes. The thesis discusses how Australian community cookbooks relate to the three pillars of cultural history – class, gender and ethnicity. It further reflects on a trio of themes with particular resonances in Australian social history – technology, regionalism and the development of the Australian national and civic culture. Survey of a large number of texts helps to refine understanding of how the genre has been mobilised in Australia, and how it has contributed to the broad history of Australian communities and community endeavours. Closer reading of selected texts allows a deeper investigation of the themes of the community cookbook and produces a rich picture of Australian social and culinary culture at the domestic level. Sharing food is the most basic human communal activity. The sharing of recipes through community cookbooks has evolved as a multifaceted way of building social capital, making it a small but sturdy plank in the civil society. Community cookbooks are very flexible in reflecting individual communities, their foodways, their needs and their views of the broader society. This study of community cookbooks is a contribution to the field of Australian social and cultural history, particularly food history, and to the pursuit of history “from the ground up”.
Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, School of History and Politics, 2010

O presente trabalho tem como objetivo analisar o gênero textual receita culinária, perspectivando a sua evolução ao longo do tempo e a influência do suporte de circulação. Para tal, a análise incide sobre a organização global e discursiva do gênero, focando em particular a influência dos suportes e das relações verbais e não verbais existentes. O foco das análises se dá pela configuração do texto, pela organização discursiva (tipos de discurso), pelo léxico culinário e pela relação entre unidades verbais e não verbais embasada pela Semiótica sociointeracional. Veremos que o contexto e os meios de circulação do gênero textual tem grande importância e interferência neste processo de transformação e adaptação do gênero ao contexto social e veremos que, embora tenha se atualizado para se enquadrar ao contexto moderno e atual, o gênero jamais perdeu sua função social e sua importância comunicativa que persistem ainda hoje. Seja nos livros antigos, seja na internet notaremos que ao longo do tempo o gênero encaixou-se na sociedade e continua tão frequentemente utilizado quanto antes, agora em novas formas digitais e suportes de circulação, que têm um importante papel nesta evolução do gênero.
The present study aims to analyze the textual genre culinary recipe, looking at its evolution over time and the influence of the circulation support. To this end, the analysis emphasizes on aspects of the global and discursive organization of the genre, in particular the influence of the supports and the verbal and nonverbal relations. The focus of the analysis is on the text structure, discursive organization (types of discourse), culinary lexicon, and the relationship between verbal and non-verbal units based on socio-interactional semiotics. We will see that the context and circulation mediums of the textual genre has great importance and interference in this process of transformation and adaptation of the genre in the apparent social context and although it has updated itself to fit the modern and current context. Whether in old books or on the internet, we will notice that, over time, the genre has become part of society and continues to be used as often as before, now in new digital forms and circulation medium which play an important role in this evolution of the genre.