Foreign Kitchens, Foreign Lands: Middle Eastern Foodsheds for American Consumers

Abstract

ABSTRACTHow have cookbooks shaped popular understandings of place, especially when they describe culinary traditions rooted in foreign landscapes? This paper examines depictions of Middle Eastern landscapes and cultures that appeared in widely marketed cookbooks by Middle Eastern women sold to mainstream American readers between the 1960s and 1970s. I analyze these cookbook representations of imaginary foodsheds, rooted in the mid-twentieth century context of modern industrial food production and Pax Americana geopolitics. I demonstrate that these foodsheds served as discursive tools for cookbook authors to perform a kind of gastro-environmental identity for readers interested in these unfamiliar cuisines. Authors contextualized their recipes in landscapes, histories, and communities to build cultural bridges between themselves and their American readers. They depicted Middle Eastern foodsheds as nested both in contemporary geographies and in long-term historical timeframes. These cookbooks can serve as remarkably revealing sources for exploring how Middle Eastern identities came to be understood in mid-twentieth century mainstream American households.