Intensifying Taste, Intensifying Identity: Collectivity through Community Cookbooks

Abstract

Community cookbooks have long served as organizational locations for women’s associations, church groups, and charity organizations in the United States. In creating communities, these textual associations implicitly rebuke a social order that devalues women’s work, authorize forms of communication and knowledge that have been ignored and suppressed, and bring into being collective forms of social, economic, and political identity. But understanding these communities as undermining norms of gender, as protesting domesticity and obeisance, or, alternatively, as liberating women from gender norms is to mistake world creation for resistance. Community cookbooks operate through the senses and the body as judgments about belonging; by creating and reprinting the socially gustative in book formats, they encourage a reading of communal political identities as more a matter of intensification of identity than defiance or domination.