It’s the Cake Talking Theorizing the Recipe Memoir

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Tara Brabazon

Abstract

Recipes – captured on paper and in analogue mode - are frequently marked by residues from ingredients, cooking, experience and expertise. Drips, drops, mistakes and successes leave their dregs on cookbooks and individual recipes. In this article, I deploy unobtrusive research methods (Kellehear 1993), revealing a history of these residues. When opening a recipe book, researchers can see which pages were (well) read and which were never opened. Notes, additions and corrections can be tracked. Digitization has transformed this process. Mobile phone applications provide recipes and blogs sharing successes and failures. It is – ironically – an undercooked genre but one that provides opportunities to renegotiate the relationship between family and popular culture, information literacy and food literacy.

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