The Desk Dispatch: Page, Stage, Plate?

Siobhan Phillips on Madhur Jaffrey, Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor, and the recipe form.

May 20, 2024

Siobhan Phillips is an English professor and the author of Benefit, a novel about money, sugar, and higher education that I had the privilege to discuss with her when it came out in 2021. She’s also a brilliant writer on food: I’ve sent PDFs of her pieces, like 2015’s “Food Work,” to fellow writers, as if to say, Look at this! Look what can be done! Her LARB piece on Rebecca May Johnson’s Small Fires is a brilliant piece of criticism, the kind we need more of, and the kind I’m happy to publish in today’s Dispatch—on the ways in which performance can manifest in cookbooks and kitchens, using two of our greatest writers as examples.

Page, Stage, Plate?

By Siobhan Phillips

“When I Buy Pictures,” Marianne Moore’s sneakily definitive poem about personal taste, begins, “or what is closer to the truth, / when I look at that of which I may regard myself as the imaginary possessor, / I fix upon. . ..” The lines return as I consider my weirder habits of appreciation. Cookbooks, for one. “When I read cookbooks, or when I look at that of which I may regard myself as the imaginary creator. . .” What am I fixing upon? Moore at the galleries wanted to find “spiritual forces.” Me, lately, turning pages of recipes, I’m looking for ambivalence.

Because cooking is full of it—ambivalence, and I find it reassuring to hear echoes, among cooks so much better than me, of my own jumbled resistance. Never the dominant flavor, but present nonetheless in the tone and vibe of cookbook writers from Elizabeth David to Rufus Estes to Brooks Headley. Ambivalence takes many forms, of course. A sense that while food is the most important thing in life, it’s also faintly ridiculous to spend one’s life thinking about food; a frustration with, but also celebration of, the transience of a dish; a suspicion that satisfactory nourishment is at once the most private, selfish of endeavors and the most communal, collective of aims. A protest against the drudgery of kitchen experience, as well as all the inequities and oppressions it sustains, along with an insistence on the value of kitchen experience, with all of the creativity and ingenuity it fosters. Hesitations about the ethics of eating. Unsteady alternation among the priorities of health and cost and preference. A scorn for the false truism that food brings people together along with acknowledgement of the vast potential in combining flavors.

For help on all these issues, I can of course turn to many texts of philosophers and historians and scientists and theorists of culture. There I can find the explicit analysis I need. But I welcome, too, the more implicit suggestions among the words of people doing culinary work. I think cookbooks can be an essential place in which to explore mixed feelings about the very activity that justifies their existence. I’m not talking here about those volumes that proclaim their dislike of food preparation (or those that betray a disapproval of food pleasure). I mean to recognize, in many books of sincere dedication to cooking as a skill, a craft, and a life-enhancing practice, some acknowledgement of its unfixable complications. “Ambivalence,” Adam Phillips writes, “is the way we recognize that someone or something has become significant to us.” Cookbooks offer a place for the recognition. For many, recurrent recognitions.

I mean to recognize, in many books of sincere dedication to cooking as a skill, a craft, and a life-enhancing practice, some acknowledgement of its unfixable complications.

And interlocutors for all of them. Like much other working-through, cooking depends on relationship as well as repetition. Ambivalence often finds purchase, then, in how cookbooks set up a connection between writer and reader. The most interesting examples are the least set. At what is arguably the peak of U.S. cookbook history, let’s say the three or so decades from Chao Yang Buwei’s How to Cook and Eat in Chinese (1945) to Edna Lewis’s The Taste of Country Cooking (1976), a number of key texts make the writer-reader connection new, individual, and unsure. Changes to economic conditions, immigration patterns and policies, anti-racist and feminist struggles—all of this, in those decades, put into question some ideological assumptions regarding who was making food in the U.S., and for whom, and why. It was in such ambivalence-riddled conditions that cookbooks found their glory, rather than in times of more settled consensus (are there ever?) regarding food prep. (The “servantless American cooks”—Julia Child’s famous phrase—paging through cookery instruction: What did these uncertain personages want to learn about French cuisine, or African American foodways, or vegetarian nutrition? Did anyone, even the cooks themselves, know?)

Hierarchies and hegemonies of race and class, also gender, lard the answers various cookbook authors tested across these years (and before, and since). Sara B. Franklin’s new biography of Judith Jones, the editor at Knopf who did so much to make cookbooks a serious part of U.S. publishing, describes how Jones operated through an “assumed whiteness of cookbooks’ readership” that sometimes “exoticized authors of color and their food.” Franklin’s book is deft at recognizing how such assumptions affected Jones’s revolutionary attention to a feminized genre—her meticulous care for cookbook writers’ words, her relentless promotion of their work.

It might prompt further, more specific recognition of how those writers themselves navigated the asymmetries of mid- to late-century publishing to dramatize a variously cogent, sometimes empowering ambivalence about authorship and audience. Madhur Jaffrey, who worked with Jones at Knopf on her breakthrough An Invitation to Indian Cooking, addresses a non-Indian reader from her very title, for example. But as Jaffrey’s writing weaves among its “we,” “I,” and “you,” the “invitation” permits neither a necessary estrangement nor an easy familiarity—nor any kind of condescension to the complexity of the cooking and food it describes. Shameem Black points out how Jaffrey’s later cookbooks, which range far beyond India for their dishes, refuse a simple “identitarian logic” of who makes what; that complexity, I would suggest, is there from the start.

Because Jaffrey’s voice in her Invitation is never one-note. She urges readers against putting butter on ears of corn, “for heaven’s sake”; but she also cautions readers against “los[ing] heart” if they can’t master recipes for roti —“many Indians…have not mastered them either!” She is sanguine about failures: “Since I do not expect you to have the conical containers, you could use empty cans of frozen fruit juice…” But she is also exacting about standards: “the odd member of the family who just loves wings”—chicken wings, that is, rather than breasts and thighs—“. . .will need to be placated some other way at some other time.” She refuses to be defensive: “As with most of our vegetables, we tend to overcook cabbage, but the end result tastes very good, so who cares!” Nor does she apologize for her personal preferences: “Indians never use olive oil, but I like its taste and use it frequently.”

One recipe begins with Jaffrey remembering the cooking fires of her childhood, onions roasting among the ashes, before finishing: “Lacking ashes in my apartment kitchen, I roast the eggplant right on top of the stove over an open flame. This is a bit messy, so I would advise you to insert an aluminum burner liner before you start.” The smooth movement from recollection to advice registers the difference between past and present, Delhi and New York, childhood trust and mature compromise; it remains, through this, clear-eyed about what kind of cooking has been lost and what kind is still possible—as well as a difference in possibility for the writer and reader who connect through this passage.

The result renders itself dependable by what it withholds, what it will not pretend, as well as what it grants, what it will try to make viable. The mixture—that ambivalence—has some clear sources. Jaffrey did not, initially, want to write this massively influential cookbook, as she informs us at the start of her “introduction.” An Invitation was “self-defense.” (Compare the first sentence of Chao’s “Author’s Note”: “I am ashamed to have written this book.”) In the ’60s, in New York, “enthusiastic Americans” kept asking Jaffrey about Indian food, so she kept asking them over to eat hers (restaurants were unsatisfactory)—until finally she wrote some recipes down and began handing them out, instead.

When she subsequently saw her own dishes show up on others’ tables, she could smile in relief that “it wasn’t I who was doing the shopping, paying the bills, cooking, and washing up.” The finished book, then, which could seem a deferential service provided by a woman of color to white readers, intends rather to preclude Jaffrey’s hospitable labor for the same. Her Invitation means she doesn’t have to “invite people. . .home for dinner.” Both gift and refusal, this text about cooking says with every careful instruction, every precise note of what could or should be done, every unapologetic departure or return to a point of potential authenticity, that the author is a thoughtful, generous cook who will not cook for you.

But such ambivalence register’s Jaffrey’s subtle approach to vocation as well as representation (they are linked). Jaffrey is an actor—still working: her most recent credits are from 2022—who “cooked because I thought I had to,” as she explained in a 2004 interview. “[I]t’s become a profession in spite of my best intentions.” She developed her food expertise, in fact, only when she left home for RADA and couldn’t stand the British-canteen fare that was all she could afford as a foreign drama student. She capitalized on that expertise, later, only when she couldn’t support herself as a single mother on the roles that Hollywood was willing to give an Indian woman (Jaffrey hated to be typecast; her model, as an actor, is Marlon Brando).

“I used to think,” she remembers in a 2000 article, “‘What am I masquerading as? I’m an actress, not a cooking teacher!’” So cookbook writing became a role, for Jaffrey, concealing the true self—that is, the one who would be playing roles. And cooking became a profession, for Jaffrey, belying its cookbook presentation as non-professionalized labor. The transformation worked, numerous successful titles and appearances confirm. By the time we get to At Home with Madhur Jaffrey, in 2010, it might be easy to forget the writer who wrote a book about food so she wouldn’t have to be “at home” making it. Jaffrey has not forgotten. “I’ve always thought of myself as an actress and nothing else,” she confirmed in an interview just last year. “I feel sometimes that I’m acting the part of a cook.”

It’s a surprising admission, perhaps. But not, in fact, an entirely singular one: Jaffrey’s isn’t the only cookbook career begun in that ’70s golden age that particularized an ambivalence about cooking through a preference for performance. Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor’s Vibration Cooking appeared a few years before An Invitation to Indian Cooking, and it’s a very different book: more autobiographical, more discursive. (Smart-Grosvenor’s recipes credit their varied sources in part through their varied presentations.) But Smart-Grosvenor, too, wrote into a white-dominated cookbook space with descriptions of a misunderstood and underestimated non-European cuisine—in her case, foods of the African diaspora. And Smart-Grosvenor, too, was an ambitious, confident actor who came to culinary writing as something of a replacement profession when she couldn’t consistently play the roles she wanted—among intersecting bigotries of race and gender that mottled mid-century drama.

Vibration Cooking remembers its author’s anguish at being mistaken for a “domestic” when she rode the bus to a Pennsylvania theater; why would a Black woman be commuting, went the feeling among fellow commuters, if not to cook and clean for a white family? Vibration Cooking is dedicated to Smart-Grosvenor’s female forebears who did cook and clean for white families. Throughout the volume, then, her homage to cooking traditions and her declarations of cooking independence—also her enthusiasm for her readers to recognize both, among their own culinary self-realizations—would differentiate Smart-Grosvenor’s food work from other kinds of domestic labor, on the one hand, and link her food work with other kinds of creative activity, on the other. The result is shot through with an honest, experienced uncertainty about what cooking can do or be.

Ambivalence flourishes in text—because of text. Smart-Grosvenor, like Jaffrey, takes advantage of that gap between description and enactment that attends words about food. It is writing that allows both women the not-quite-performance that not-quite-substitutes for related artistic aims. Writing grants them a somewhat-satisfactory profession in their somewhat-refusal of domestic jobs. Writing, that is—description, not provision; memory (or anticipation), not existence; absence, not presence. The deepest ambivalence in cookbooks emerges from just these distinctions between real and unreal, flesh and word. Nikhil Krishnan, a philosopher who invokes Jaffrey as he remembers his own education in cooking and thinking, recalls finding in recipes proof of “a fall from a condition of organic wholeness.” Cookbooks signal a derivative, disconnected world where no one absorbs skills naturally.

It is writing that allows both women the not-quite-performance
that not-quite-substitutes for related artistic aims.

Another, equally common objection—that cookbooks signal a conformist, standardized world in which no one decides things individually—only seems opposite, betraying as it does the same basic anxiety about primary experience and secondary representation. One doesn’t have to be an ardent Derridaen, brandishing some hyper-sensitive logocentrism detector, to identify in our worry over the cookbook genre a metaphysical fear. Food text inflames it like an allergy—with symptoms that may include a yearning for “wholeness,” a concern over distance and temporality: “The existence of recipe books, I came to think,” Krishnan writes about his early reading of Jaffrey, “was itself a melancholy fact about a world of emigration and the growing distance between generations.” This is so. Yet if Jaffrey’s experience in London provides a measure of alienation, as she pored over her mother’s written instructions so that she could recreate the dishes she had enjoyed as a girl far away, it also predicts a margin for re-creation. Reparative, as well as melancholic. She left home to become an actor; when cooking became a role she could try, writing let her try it.

Her cookbooks, in turn, offer others their own chance. Performance, after all, manages presence and absence with its is-and-is-not enactments. Recipe as script. My own favorite genre comparison for recipe collections, though, is not a script or a manual, and not the commonly invoked novel or history or memoir—though cookbooks bear affinity to all of these. I like thinking of recipes, and even whole cookbooks, as something like letters.

Like the letters that Jaffrey’s mother sent to her, with recipes, like the letters Jaffrey wrote to curious white acquaintances, with recipes, like the letters that Smart-Grosvenor exchanged with her friend Stella, and included as a whole section in Vibration Cooking, about what and where they were eating—with recipes. Letters capture that writer-reader relationship of which a cookbook, too, takes advantage. (Susan Leonardi, in an important literary analysis of recipes, emphasizes the significance of “exchange.”) A letter moves between the public performance of a role in a play, on stage, and the private service of a meal on the table, at home. It captures the uncertain shift between work and love, professional and amateur, that can make cooking so frustrating and reassuring, both.

Plus, a letter can be friendly-ish, but also distant; it can command and liberate, or inspire and comfort, sometimes at once. Letters avoid the personality-less alternatives—of pure, anonymous instruction and pure, anodyne aspiration—toward which cookbooks might track, the way newsletters can provide relief from the worst tendencies of YouTube videos or Instagram posts. (I don’t think it’s an accident, though it may seem counterintuitive, that food writing has flourished in the age of the newsletter.)

Letters, finally, in their regret over the separation that occasions them, recognize the textual as a poor, glorious substitute for the physical; cookbooks sustain the same basic doubts about the real and the virtual as they persist in the practice of putting food into words. (Okay, and maybe photos: though my thinking about photos in cookbooks, I have to confess, runs to Orson Welles’s challenge for Peter Bogdanovich—“Name a great performance in color”: wrong, certainly; there are definitely great recipe collections that rely on images, but also Welles kind of has a point.) That basic impossibility becomes ground for others, reminding us that we don’t have to solve the ambivalence to cook through it. When I read cookbooks, I fix upon the stuff that isn’t pretending otherwise.

Right now, the Desk Book Club is reading Longthroat Memoirs: Soups, Sex and Nigerian Taste Buds by Yemisi Aribisala. The first discussion thread will take place on May 31. Buy it from Archestratus for 20 percent off!

If you’re looking for cooking inspiration, remember to scroll through The Desk Cookbook.

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News

My book No Meat Required: The Cultural History and Culinary Future of Plant-Based Eating will be out in paperback on June 25. Please consider a preorder!

Reading

Continuing The World and All That It Holds by Aleksandar Hemon, which is the first novel in a while that’s gripped me to the point that I want to read it instead of work. I had an interlude with the wonderful Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other by Danielle Dutton. I highly recommend the film Do Not Expect Much From the End of the World—not only is the title a title I’m very envious of, but its sensibility and politics are highly relevant to my work of late. Watching it, it felt like how I want people to feel reading me. (Thank you to Jon Randell Smith for alerting me to it!)