Eat My Words

Most of us think cookbooks are just collections of recipes to feed the body. Janet Theophano shows that cookbooks provide food for the mind and soul as well. In this innovative culinary and cultural history, she explores two centuries of cookbooks and the women who wrote them. Janet looks at eighteenth-century handwritten "receipt books" from England, a Chinese cookbook dictated to a daughter by her mother, the famous African American cookbook A Date with a Dish and bestsellers by Alice Waters and Lynn Rossetto Kasper. In Janet's classic book, the cookbook is shown to be what it really is: a memoir, a diary, a record of a life. She shows how they reflect ideals of family and womanhood, but also give women a voice to express and fulfill themselves.