In Praise of the Kitchen Poet : Cooking as Kinship in Ethnic Culinary Memoirs

Corinne Florence Bigot (1, 2)

1 CAS - Cultures anglo-saxonnes
2 CREA (EA 370) - Centre de Recherches Anglophones

The chapter analyzes the representation of kinship and ethnicity in ethnic culinary memoirs, focusing on the relationship between the authors and the female cooks, or “kitchen poets,” they evoke. Collectively, ethnic culinary memoirs approach ethnicity and kinship in varying ways and this chapter considers the following questions: Does the ethnic culinary memoir, as an intimate public space where family stories, photographs, and recipes are shared with the reader, only display traditional visions of family structures and of kinship as biological? As they pay homage to women’s embodied knowledge and depict cooking as a corporeal practice, can these memoirs also posit kinship as established through practice and foster kinship that transcends the biological through the culinary communities they create?

Mots clés: Culinary memoirs

Domaines: Littératures

Corinne Florence Bigot. In Praise of the Kitchen Poet : Cooking as Kinship in Ethnic Culinary Memoirs. Ethnicity and Kinship in North American and European Literatures, Routledge, pp.12, 2021, 9781003129820. ⟨10.4324/9781003129820⟩. ⟨hal-02994851⟩