Look Who's Cooking: The Rhetoric of American Home Cooking Traditions in the Twenty-First Century

by Jennifer Rachel Dutch

Overview

Home cooking is a multibillion-dollar industry that includes cookbooks, kitchen gadgets, high-end appliances, specialty ingredients, and more. Cooking-themed programming flourishes on television, inspiring a wide array of celebrity chef-branded goods even as self-described "foodies" seek authenticity by pickling, preserving, and canning foods in their own home kitchens. Despite this, claims that "no one has time to cook anymore" are common, lamenting the slow extinction of traditional American home cooking in the twenty-first century.

In Look Who's Cooking: The Rhetoric of American Home Cooking Traditions in the Twenty-First Century, author Jennifer Rachel Dutch explores the death of home cooking, revealing how modern changes transformed cooking at home from an odious chore into a concept imbued with deep meanings associated with home, family, and community.

Drawing on a wide array of texts--cookbooks, advertising, YouTube videos, and more--Dutch analyzes the many manifestations of traditional cooking in America today. She argues that what is missing from the discourse around home cooking is an understanding of skills and recipes as a form of folklore. Dutch's research reveals that home cooking is a powerful vessel that Americans fill with meaning because it represents both the continuity of the past and adaptability to the present. Home cooking is about much more than what is for dinner; it's about forging a connection to the past, displaying the self in the present, and leaving a lasting legacy for the future.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781496821126
Publisher:	University Press of Mississippi
Publication date:	08/03/2018
Series:	Folklore Studies in a Multicultural World Series
Pages:	194
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Jennifer Rachel Dutch is assistant professor of English and chair of the English Department at York College. Her work has appeared in Digest: A Journal of Foodways and Culture.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Chapter 1 In the Kitchen with Grandma 3

Chapter 2 From Great Grandma's Hearth to Mom's Microwave: The Transformation of American Home Cooking 37

Chapter 3 Just Like Grandma Never Made: Lamenting the Loss of Home Cooking in America 61

Chapter 4 From Grandma's Recipe Box: How Cookbooks Sell Comfort and Help Create America's Consumer Cooks 99

Chapter 5 Brand Name "Grandma": Selling Tradition to American Home Cooks 115

Chapter 6 Grandma's Gone Global: Home-Cooking Traditions Move from the Kitchenette to the Internet 139

Chapter 7 In the Kitchen with…Dad? Continuity and Change in Twenty-First-Century Home Cooking 161

Works Cited 167

Index 181