Customer Reviews

Eat My Words: Reading Women's Lives Through the Cookbooks They Wrote

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I picked up this book off the shelf because I am very interested in cooking and collect cookbooks. It wasn't light reading, but was very interesting. Like the women the author discusses I too collect recipes from family, friends and other sources to make a cookbook of my own. Mine is in 3 separate binders, a modern equivelant to those that women have been making for hundreds of years. The discussions of women, food and the preparation of it were interesting. I was motivated to weed out my own cookbooks and reorganize my own recipes to better represent who I am and how my family eats. It is a legacy of my own to hand down to my own children. A scrapbook of our eating habits.

Eat My Words isn't just a recipe collection; nor is it a survey of cookbook history: it reads between the lines of recipes through the ages to consider the women who developed them, from 17th century English estate housekeeping books to primers which encouraged women to educate themselves. Eat My Words is very highly recommended as an excellent blend of culinary history and biography.

In "Eat My Words: Reading Women's Lives Through the Cookbooks They Wrote" folklorist Janet Theophano attempts to reconstruct the lives of underrepresented women through contextual interpretation and supposition based upon the contents of their cookbooks. Though her discourse to this end becomes increasingly strained throughout the book's progression, Theophano ultimately proves that historical cookbooks' greatest value derives not from the culinary information they possess, but from the windows they open into the lives of the women who made them. Cookbooks, she shows, are records of their creators' lives and comprise miniature archival collections unto themselves. A single cookbook can document multiple generation's viewpoints, experiences and socioeconomic situations for individuals, families and society at large. However, Theophano's approach is at worst fallacious and at best quixotic. It relies highly on conjecture, supposing that the items found in these cookbooks were directly related to their creators' lives and not just items of esoteric value. Accuracy aside, "Eat My Words" still demonstrates how even the most innocuous of records can hold far more value than its obvious nature would belie.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book and reading the author comments. Good reading and great insight into the daily lives of it's heroins!

This book was a great disappointment to me. The author has fallen into the trap of reading what she needs from her sources, whether they provide the evidence she wants or not. I will admit I couldn't finish the first chapter and it may improve further along, but her rational for her conclusions escapes me. The handwritten recipe books/journals/scrapbooks she studied could have provided a fascinating look at how women's lives and priorities have changed over the centuries, but her insistence on broad societal conclusions from these very personal documents left me cold. When she directly discussed the documents and individuals she did a wonderful job, but when she tried to apply to the society at large their was a huge gap between her evidence and her conclusions.