What would Susan Leonardi, who wrote 1989’s “Recipes for Reading,” make of Vibration Cooking? It’s silly, really, that she didn’t take it into account in her important piece arguing for the significance of the “embedded discourse” in recipes that immerse the reader in a world rather than merely dole out instruction. This type of seemingly extraneous writing has long been important in cookbooks, considered a women’s mode of writing. It’s what makes them literary texts. (In my “Food Essay” course, the final lecture and discussion is on writing the recipe into a narrative essay form—we’ll read “Recipes for Reading” closely, and I’ve added a PDF below.)

Leonardi writes of “the usefulness and importance of this discourse” and Vibration Cooking offers so much of it, from explaining why she takes the train up to Harlem for her greens to which kinds of people spend more on food and who feeds their family on cans of tuna. “White folks act like they would starve for sure if they couldn’t have a hunk of meat,” she writes. “Eating neck bones don’t bother me.”