Recipe

by Lynn Z. Bloom

Overview

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

Recipe reveals the surprising lessons that recipes teach, in addition to the obvious instructions on how to prepare a dish or perform a process. These include lessons in hospitality, friendship, community, family and ethnic heritage, tradition, nutrition, precision and order, invention and improvisation, feasting and famine, survival and seduction and love. A recipe is a signature, as individual as the cook's fingerprint; a passport to travel the world without leaving the kitchen; a lifeline for people in hunger and in want; and always a means to expand one's worldview, if not waistline.

Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501367113
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	06/30/2022
Series:	Object Lessons
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	160
File size:	270 KB

About the Author

Lynn Z. Bloom is Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor and Aetna Chair of Writing Emerita at the University of Connecticut, USA, where she taught rhetoric and composition studies research, autobiography, creative nonfiction, and women writers courses 1988-2015. She has written more than 25 books, including Writers Without Borders: Writing and Teaching Writing in Troubled Times ( 2008) and The Seven Deadly Virtues and Other Lively Essays (2008). She has served as President of the National Council of Writing Program Administrators, 1988-90 and chaired the Division of Teaching Writing and the Division of Prose Writing of the Modern Language Association.
Lynn Z. Bloom is Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor and Aetna Chair of Writing Emerita at the University of Connecticut, USA, where she taught rhetoric and composition studies research, autobiography, creative nonfiction, and women writers courses 1988-2015. She has written more than 25 books, including Doctor Spock: Biography of a Conservative Radical (1972), Writers Without Borders: Writing and Teaching Writing in Troubled Times (2008) and The Seven Deadly Virtues and Other Lively Essays (2008). She has served as President of the National Council of Writing Program Administrators, 1988-90 and chaired the Division of Teaching Writing and the Division of Prose Writing of the Modern Language Association. Among her numerous awards are two Fulbright Specialist appointments to New Zealand; research fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Council of Teachers of English, and grants from the US Department of Education and the Department of Agriculture. “(Im)Patient” was named a Notable Essay in Best American Essays, 2006. Her writings on food include “Consuming Prose: The Delectable Rhetoric of Food Writing” (2008); “Feeding Hunger: Three Things I Take for Granted About Food - and Shouldn't” (2011); “Feminist Culinary Autobiographies” (2017); and “Do I Have to Give Up Chocolate?” (2023).

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Secret Life of Recipes

1. “First, Turn and Face the Stove.” The Recipe as an Instruction Guide
2. “You say toma¯to, I say tomahto”: The Recipe as Conversation
3. A Taste of Home: The Recipe for Comfort Cooking in Tough Times
4. Joys of Cooking-and Eating: The Great American Thanksgiving Celebration Recipe
5. “Please, sir, I want some more.” The Recipe as a Manifestation of Power, Politics Poverty, and Punishment
6. Play With Your Food, the Recipe as Jazz

Lagniappe: The Best Blueberry Pie

Index

Editorial Reviews

Fascinating. . . . [Bloom] explains how recipes unite us, contain lessons about hospitality, and can be a signature as individual as fingerprints.” —Globe and Mail

“Lynn Bloom's Recipe celebrates the complications and contradictions, the serious and play, the bounty and scarcity, represented by the simple instructions that put food on the table. This book, like the object itself, 'exists as much in the imagination' as on the plate, a satisfying examination of the marvelous 'process and promise' of the humble recipe.” —Karen Babine, author of All the Wild Hungers: A Season of Cooking and Cancer and Water and What We Know: Following the Roots of a Northern Life

“A really great read.” —Randomly Yours, Alex

From the Publisher