‘I am a woman and I write about food’: On food writing by women

Unfazed by criticism that cooking is frivolous and writing about it is tosh, generations of women have been making literature out of cookery

July 20, 2019 04:00 pm | Updated 04:00 pm IST

On a cold winter night this January, I was on a flight to Colombo from Bengaluru, to attend the Galle Literary Festival where I was to talk about my cookbook, Five Morsels of Love . The man seated next to me struck up a conversation, and after the initial pleasantries, asked, “So, from when have cookery books become literature?” I laughed the question away but, of course, felt stung.

Some years ago, in the aftermath of my grandmother’s sudden death, I traded pantsuits for aprons, as I became the unlikely custodian of my grandmother’s recipes. After what seemed like a lifetime of running after grades and scholarships and job titles, I decided to drop out of the race to write about food. In those early days I would evade questions around how long this break was for, if I was on a sabbatical, and when I would go back to a ‘real’ career. I even sounded apologetic at times for having the courage to chase a dream. And as I looked back over the history of women in food, I realised I wasn’t alone. One of the greatest food writers of all time, M.F.K. Fisher, whose autobiographical essays created a genre, was dismissed by critics and serious writers for years. To begin with she was a woman and to add to that she was writing about food, a trifle. The poet Maya Angelou, who authored two cookbooks, once said in an interview with The Guardian that people thought it was odd — unworthy even — for her to have written cookbooks. “But I make no apologies” she retorted.

A gendered trap?

I never seem to have an answer to the question ‘Aren’t you overqualified to cook and write recipes?’ In a world where women are constantly made to feel apologetic and small for their choices and food is somehow the lesser genre in literature, I worried if I was at the losing end of a battle in both gender and genre. I think the anxiety also stemmed from having espoused a worldview — not unlike many women of my generation — that cooking is a gendered trap. Would writing about food then be falling into the same trap albeit through a different door? It did not help that I didn’t own a single cookbook till that point and the only food writing I knew was the kind classified as lifestyle journalism.

While I don’t have scientifically verified data to back this claim up, a scan through the ‘Cookbooks & Food’ genre under the

‘Books’ category on Amazon suggests this is a genre upheld, overwhelmingly so, by women. And if one were to exclude the restaurant cookbooks that seem to be written mostly by male chefs then the verdict becomes even clearer — over 90% of all food writing is done by women. Here I was at the threshold of tumbling into a ‘female’ genre in writing which the world seemed to think suited women homecooks with artistic aspirations and plenty of time on hand. I had to find out what I was getting into.

One of the first writers I discovered in that journey was M.F.K. Fisher and she led me to places in a way only language can. In my imagination I shared a warm peach pie with cool yellow cream with her, ogled at kettles of strawberry jam on juice-stained tables, had my first taste of oyster and travelled to Paris enveloped in a passionate mist. Fisher wrote like a poet. Soon I was following Claudia Roden into the markets of Cairo, getting immersed in the kitchen bustle of her Egyptian childhood, stuffing grape leaves with ground beef, passing around plates of mezze and taking in the delicate scent of rose- and orange-blossom waters. Roden wrote A Book of Middle Eastern Food in an effort to preserve the flavours, emotions and memories of a land she and her family were forced out of during the Suez crisis in the mid-50s. In reading her I encountered a woman who communicated history through taste.

Heritage in the kitchen

To read Anissa Helou’s Feast: Food of the Islamic World — an extensively researched 500-page tome — is to trace the history and food of Islam from the oasis of Medina to the Mughal dynasty in over 300 recipes. Helou, a former art consultant, tells me over a shaky phone connection from New York that it worried her that post 9/11 Muslims were vilified the world over and Islam

was presented in such a negative way. “I travelled from Zanzibar to Senegal to Indonesia to Xinjiang collecting recipes, social information and historical context. We owe this people and civilisation a great debt in terms of ingredients and culinary lore.” Helou writes with authority and scholarship and her approach to food writing has always been that of preserving culture, especially in conflict-torn regions like Syria and Lebanon where populations are displaced, entire cultures wiped out and the matrilineal transference of food knowledge is all but broken.

Zaitoun , a book on Palestinian cuisine by Yasmin Khan, captures stews and meat dishes from the West Bank, plant-based dishes from Galilee and Gazan food in danger of extinction, depicting the everyday life of Palestinians in an effort to humanise them. A former human-rights activist, Khan believes that her current role as a food writer is no different from that of her previous one as a journalist and activist to bear witness to a human-rights situation. “I am really committed to do what I can to use the power of story and cookery to shine a light on places of conflict. I strongly believe that cultural change is a precursor to political change. And food provides a neutral entry point to open up conversations, build empathy, challenge stereotypes and shift perspectives. Being a woman was an advantage as it helped take me into the kitchens and hearths of Palestinian women. It was such a responsibility and honour to translate the personal heritage that the Palestinian women shared with such generosity into recipes,” she tells me.

Redemptive power

While writers like Helou and Khan usher us into geographic and cultural worlds where we otherwise might never go, writers like Laurie Colwin are interpreters of the less-than-perfect everyday life.

“…and that life itself is full, not only of charm and warmth and comfort but of sorrow and tears. But whether we are happy or sad, we must be fed. Both happy and sad people can be cheered up by a nice meal,” Colwin writes in the introduction to her book, More Home Cooking: A Writer Returns to the Kitchen.

Colwin inspired a whole generation of food memoirists to blend in prose and recipes in an engaging first-person voice. Colwin’s

essays are like dinner conversations with an old friend, weaving together tales of triumph and disaster in her kitchen and life. Tracing that line of descent from Colwin to the present, one arrives at Ella Risbridger. Risbridger’s Midnight Chicken & Other Recipes Worth Living For is being hailed as a genre-bending cookbook as it could find itself in the memoir, self-help or food sections of any bookstore. Cooking and writing about it was Risbridger’s way of lifting herself out of depression and face the loss of her partner, the writer John Underwood, who died just as she finished the last draft of her book. It is a book that celebrates the redemptive power of cooking and offers a way to look at life with hope.

In the bones

Moving into the realm of food journalism, one encounters Ligaya Mishan, who has been writing the ‘Hungry City’ column for The New York Times for several years now where she reviews ‘smaller’ restaurants, almost always immigrant-owned, guiding one into hitherto undiscovered alleys of New York. She tells the stories of immigrants with food at the centre but questions of politics and race are never too far away. Mishan has been challenging and stretching the boundaries of food writing by always evocatively describing food (she has an MFA in creative writing and poetry) but giving just as much importance to the lives and thoughts of the people around the food. For years food writers have been given the memo to stay apolitical and Mishan detonates that by wearing her Asian-American activist hat every single time she writes about food. This is urgent and important work in a world most definitely swerving to the Right everywhere, with no tolerance for minorities and immigrants.

As this journey of discovery of women’s voices in food continues, I am more convinced than ever that some of the most significant stories of our times are related to food — from hunger, to issues of ecology and sustainability, to questions of identify and the self. Food writing isn’t about peripheral text around glossy-styled photographs, endless descriptions of how a dish or an ingredient tastes or culinary flights of fancy. As with food, the writing about it can help us understand what forms our body and bones, our thoughts and aspirations and who we are as a civilisation. Untouched by criticism that cooking is frivolous work and writing about it is sentimental tosh, generations of women have tirelessly documented life as it happens, transforming themselves into unacknowledged anthropologists, ethnographers, historians and activists. It is perhaps time we begin to take notice and recognise that contribution in the pages of world history.

The writer is the author of the cookbook , Five Morsels of Love.

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