Food and Masculinity in Contemporary Autobiographies: Cast-Iron Man by Nieves Pascual Soler

Abstract

Reviewed by: Food and Masculinity in Contemporary Autobiographies: Cast-Iron Man by Nieves Pascual Soler Alice L. McLean (bio) Food and Masculinity in Contemporary Autobiographies: Cast-Iron Man Nieves Pascual Soler Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, ix + 126 pp. ISBN 978-3319709222, $54.99 hardcover. Food and Masculinity in Contemporary Autobiographies explores men's life writing, focusing on works penned by celebrity chefs. The book begins with a cursory overview of the secondary role food plays in nineteenth-century canonical "narratives of masculinity" by Henry Adams, Henry James, and Benjamin Franklin before diving into contemporary life writing by seven men—namely, Michael Ruhlman, Bill Buford, Grant Achatz, Marco Pierre White, Randy King, Steven Rinella, and Hank Shaw. According to Nieves Pascual Soler, the type of autobiography crafted by these chefs enables them to script a performance that works to mask—yet ultimately belies—a deep anxiety about cooking as an ideologically effeminate task. To aid in his performance, each chef-author draws on various forms of hyper-masculine life writing, casting himself as a hero, a criminal, or a hunter. As Pascual Soler acknowledges, the role of cooking has long been split along gender lines, with men serving as professional chefs and women as home cooks. Although not explicitly articulated in Food and Masculinity, this split likewise manifests within the cookbook genre—Isabella Beeton's Book of Household Management (1861) trained generations of middle-class white women how to rule the home kitchen, while Auguste Escoffier's Le Guide Culinaire (1903) served as the canonical text for twentieth-century professional chefs. Not surprisingly, the trajectory of men's and women's food writing has been significantly impacted by the rigidly gendered nature of cooking, a rigidity that becomes especially manifest in the culinary autobiographies explored in Chapter 3. Pascual Soler argues that chefs are driven to depict themselves as heroes or anti-heroes in order to compensate for the "feminizing power of cooking" (49). The drive to jettison femininity from the professional kitchen, as Pascual Soler shows, finds its most powerful exemplar in the work of Marco Pierre White, whose Devil in the Kitchen (first published as White Slave in England but renamed when reprinted for an American audience) showcases the "badass" celebrity chef who initiated a wave of "criminal confessionals," a genre that includes Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential, Gordon Ramsay's Roasting in Hell's Kitchen, and Jason Sheehan's Cooking Dirty. This genre of food writing, according to Pascual Soler, presents a persona that draws inspiration from detective fiction and criminal autobiography. As it does in Chapter 3, the book situates men's culinary autobiographies within various genres of fiction and autobiography. It does not, however, seriously ponder how life writing blends into food writing or examine in detail the gender ideologies that bifurcate men's and women's culinary autobiographies. It reviews only cursorily Traci Marie Kelly's "'If I Were a Voodoo Priestess': Women's Culinary Autobiographies," Denise Gigante's Gusto: Essential Writings in Nineteenth-Century [End Page 924] Gastronomy, and my own Aesthetic Pleasure in Twentieth-Century American Women's Food Writing. The book would benefit from a more sustained engagement with the historical context laid out by these three works of literary food studies, a context that clearly establishes a history of gendered autobiographical food writing dating back to the early 1800s, and underscores that genre and gender within culinary literature have long been mutually constitutive. In particular, the autobiographies explored in Food and Masculinity are directly descended from the two most masculine forms of culinary literature—professional cookbooks and gastronomic essays, the latter of which "worked in many ways against the feminized aesthetic of the novel, founded on ideals of bourgeois domesticity" (Gigante xxxv). Rather than contextualizing the chefs' narratives within the tradition of food writing, Pascual Soler places them into the historical context of the heroic journey, criminal writing, and the hunting autobiography in Chapters 2, 3, and 4, respectively. Using Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces as the foundation for her second chapter, Pascual Soler argues that the autobiographies by Michael Ruhlman, Bill Buford, and Grant Achatz construct narratives in which the author transforms...