Mapping Appetite Mapping Appetite Essays on Food, Fiction and Culture Edited by Jopi Nyman and Pere Gallardo CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARS PUBLISHING Mapping Appetite: Essays on Food, Fiction and Culture, edited by Jopi Nyman and Pere Gallardo This book first published 2007 by Cambridge Scholars Publishing 15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2007 by Jopi Nyman and Pere Gallardo and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN 1-84718-304-2; ISBN 13: 9781847183040 TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments.....................................................................................vii Chapter One.................................................................................................1 Introduction: Setting the Table Jopi Nyman and Pere Gallardo Part I: Food, Fantasy and Fiction Chapter Two................................................................................................8 “An Aroma of Spices […] Magnified the Sense of What It Meant to Live in England”: Travel, “Real” Food and “Misshapen” Identity Inga Bryden Chapter Three............................................................................................28 Sweet Taste of India: Food Metaphors in Contemporary Indian Fiction in English Daniela Rogobete Chapter Four..............................................................................................52 Culinary Cartographies of Multicultural London: Constructions of the Urban through Foods and “Foodways” Lia Blaj-Ward Part II: Food, Power and the Popular Chapter Five..............................................................................................68 Writing the Recipe for Subversion: The Creation of Patriarchy-Defying Communities by Means of Cookery Miriam López-Rodríguez Chapter Six................................................................................................85 Dr. Frankenstein’s Technophobic Diet: “The Iron Chancellor,” by Robert Silverberg Pere Gallardo vi Table of Contents Part III: Food, Identity and History Chapter Seven............................................................................................98 “We Call It English ‘Prosciutto’”: Food, Travel and Nation in Paul Richardson’s Cornucopia Jopi Nyman Chapter Eight...........................................................................................114 Representations of Time in Cookery Articles Eleonora Chiavetta Chapter Nine............................................................................................132 Writing Women, Writing Food: African-American Women’s Cookbooks in Historical Perspective Hélène Le Dantec-Lowry Contributors.............................................................................................150 Index........................................................................................................153 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Jopi Nyman’s research has been supported by the Academy of Finland (project 205780). Pere Gallardo’s contribution to this volume is part of the research carried out under the auspices of the T-CLAA Research Group at the Universitat Rovira i Virgili in Tarragona, Spain. CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION: SETTING THE TABLE JOPI NYMAN AND PERE GALLARDO While the field of food studies was for a long time mainly occupied by anthropologists and ethnologists interested in the study of everyday practices, recent years have witnessed a strong interest in various cultural representations of the culinary, ranging from analyses of food representation in film and literature to cultural readings of recipes, menus, national cuisines and celebrity chefs.1 Such explorations of the diverse roles of the culinary testify to the increasingly important role that food is gaining in today’s Western consumer culture, where global food trends follow each other, transforming people’s diets and reconstructing their identities. Thus food, while often considered to be too mundane to be studied, is worth studying because of its crucial role in everyday life and consumption in modes that range from televised cookery shows to mass- produced hamburgers. As Warren Belasco writes in a recent collection of essays on food, If we are what we eat, we also are what we don’t eat. People moralize constantly about what they will and will not eat. To eat is to distinguish and discriminate, include and exclude. Food choices establish boundaries and borders. In the modern era this process of culinary differentiation may entail major modification of traditional foods; few people today eat exactly 1 See, e.g., Bob Ashley, Joanne Hollows, Steve Jones and Ben Taylor, Food and Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 2004); Eating Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Food, ed. Tobias Döring, Markus Heide and Susanne Mühlheisen (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 2003); Kitchen Culture in America: Popular Representations of Food, Gender, and Race, ed. Sherrie A. Inness (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001); Reel Food: Essays on Food and Film, ed. Anne L. Bower (New York: Routledge, 2004).