Uncategorized – Page 4 – R. Scharnhorst

I find most food blogs at best unoriginal, and at worst insulting. For those who aren’t perusing the foodie Internet regularly, these blogs are typically run by an individual who has left their (insert career here) to pursue cooking and (being a mom/making candles/running a farm) full-time. In many cases, these blogs read more like a catalogue of one family’s dinner than anything that comes close to resembling a more traditional recipe book intended for an audience to use. And perhaps for a cultural historian that information would prove useful and interesting. But, the stated function of these blogs is usually to provide instructions for creating a meal, and in many cases they aren’t adding anything new to the conversation.

For the most part, receipes are not protected under U.S. copyright. No one can, say, copyright a particular list of ingredients. What can be protected, though, must be a “substantial literary expression” according to the U.S. Copyright Office. Thus, if I take a list of ingredients from another blog without alterations, it’s not in violation as long as I write up the steps differently, take photos of the food, or explain my process. In a nutshell this is remix culture, where the arrangement of information creates a new piece.

But to distinguish a good remix from a bad one requires an examination of intention and addition. If the intention of the recipe is only to document one particular individual’s experience recreating a dish, that’s not a clearly delineated inventive process. The majority of the work is just mimicry. However, if the individual is taking a recipe and creating it within their own particular set of limitations—whether that’s altering, adding, or subtracting something—then the argument should stand that the remixed product and the documentation of that process is a form of invention. To further analyze this process, I aim to trace this development in the form of one particular recipe from one particular food blog I enjoy, Deb Perelman’s smitten kitchen. Continue reading “Recipe Blogs as Remix”

Recipe books may not immediately seem particularly inventive. Indeed, their very form— a list of steps to recreate a particular meal—automatically seems more straightforward and scientific in its approach. However, by examining the way receipe books are actually used, I intend to argue that they are repositories of inventive thought. My argument centers on examining two early modern English recipe books in particular—that of Anne Goodenough as well as a collection authored by multiple women. By examining the marginalia in these books, the modern day reader gleans not only how these women were utilizing these books in the kitchen, but in some ways how these books destabilized the domestic spaces they occupied.

Wendy Wall, a prominent scholar in domesticity in early modern England, has written a number of articles and two books that deal directly with cookbooks. Her argument in “Literacy and the Domestic Arts” provides a particular reading of cookbooks as practice spaces for the growing population of literate women. Not only were women compiling information about household chores, they were also using these spaces to practice their handwriting. By tying the act of writing to the act of cooking, these women were practicing what Wall dubs “artisanal literary,” which ties knowledge to experience and labor within these domestic spaces. She further argues that this artisanal literacy is fostered by a “kitchen literacy,” where the idea of “making” ties together writing and cooking (386).

By thinking about cookbooks in this way, it isn’t difficult to extend the concept of making to the actual books themselves. As Wall argues: “Writing recipes and undertaking particular types of manual work trained women in alphabetic literacy and the conventions of book use, but handicrafts in the home also signified in their own right as forms of ‘writing’ within a functional thoery of making” (387). If this idea of the physical act of making can be extended into the theoretical dimension of thought, then the marginalia in addition to the compiled recipe books function as further evidence of the inventive process. Continue reading “Invention twice-over: The use of marginalia in recipe books”