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“A highly original, well-theorized analysis of how over 200 years' worth of American cooking literature reveals changes in cultural identities. Framing a narrative around questions of power and hegemony, Vester breathes new life into the cliché, ‘You are what you eat.’”—Warren Belasco, author of Meals to Come: A History of the Future of Food
"Through a series of zesty readings,
A Taste of Power teaches us how to parse the politics of cooking and eating. A keen cultural analyst, Vester shows how the salt of normativity and the pepper of resistance have infused the recipes we live by and thus every bite we eat."—Kristin Hoganson, author of
Consumers’ Imperium: The Global Production of American Domesticity"Vester takes everyday acts, like cooking, and masterfully illustrates their connections to larger cultural questions, such as sexuality.
A Taste of Power proves that nothing is off the table in discussions of food and power."—Amy Bentley, author of
Inventing Baby Food: Taste, Health, and the Industrialization of the American Diet
List of contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 • “For All Grades of Life”: The Making of a Republican Cuisine
In Search of an American Cuisine: National Identity and Food
“All My Bones Were Made of Indian Corn”: Maize, Revolution, and Democracy
An American Painter’s Palate: Raphaelle Peale’s Food Still Lifes
Domestic Virtue and Citizenship in the Work of Lydia Maria Child
“Bread of Our Mothers”: Sylvester Graham and the Health of the Nation
Cooking Contest: Regional, Transnational, and Class-Based Cuisines in the Antebellum United States
A Republican Cuisine
2 • “Wolf in Chef’s Clothing”: Manly Cooking and Negotiations of Ideal Masculinity
Why the Way to the Heart Is Through the Stomach
“Men, Meet the Kitchen”: Inventing Manly Cooking
Flesh, Blood, and Hemingway: Campfire Cooking and Rugged Masculinities
Hard-Boiled Cooking, Femmes Fatales, and American Noir
Silver Spoons in Their Hands: The Rise of the Gourmet
Playboys in the Kitchen: Manly Cooking in the 1950s and 1960s
“Will Cook for Sex”: Recipes for Manly Cooking
3 • “The Difference Is Spreading”: Recipes for Lesbian Living
Serving Heteronormativity—Queering the Menu
Labor of Love: Gender Normativity and Contradictions in Nineteenth-Century Cookbooks
Tender Mutton: Gertrude Stein’s Household Advice
“La Cuisine c’est la Femme”: The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book
What Lesbians Eat: Identity, Food, and Same-Sex Desire
How to Cook with Lesbians
Digestif: Power, Resistance, and Food
Notes
Works Cited
About the author
Katharina Vester is Assistant Professor of History at American University in Washington, DC, where she teaches in the American Studies program.
Summary
Examines culinary writing and practices as forces for the production of social order and, at the same time, points of cultural resistance. This book offers a close reading of a wide variety of sources and genres to uncover the intersections of food, politics, and privilege in American culture.
Additional text
"Unique... thought-provoking... Recommended."
