The Recipe Reader: Narratives – Contexts – Traditions. Ed. Janet Floyd and Laurel Forster.

“Recipes surround us: in cookery books and magazines, in newspapers and television programmes, in films and novels, we seem continually to read about, observe and be encouraged to absorb ourselves in the preparation and serving of food,” read the first lines in The Recipe Reader: Narratives – Contexts – Tradition, a multi- and interdisciplinary essay collection edited by British literary and cultural critics Janet Floyd and Laurel Forster in November 2003. And indeed, a curious and pervasive interest in everything related to food, food preparation, food representation, recipe books, culinary culture, nourishment etc. has emerged in contemporary life within the last decades. Not only have such food representations now reached a critical mass, which warrants closer analysis, but these representations work in unique ways as sites of communal, national, feminist, ethnic, and transcultural modes of identity construction. Hence, food has been the subject of extensive scholarship in various disciplines; yet, it has only recently received increasing attention in literary and cultural studies.

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