The language of food: ingestion, expulsion and registers of repair in Alibhai-Brown’s The Settler’s Cookbook

Abstract

Food preparation, eating practices and various expressions of conviviality associated with food are not only shaped by social contexts, ideas of community and gendered divisions of labor; they are also generative of new ways of connecting people and foodstuffs in the crucible of migration. I explore the complex role of recipes and food in Yasmin Alibhai-Brown’s (2008) memoir The Settler’s Cookbook. A Memoir of Love, Migration and Food which intersperses recipes with an account of her childhood in Kampala, her family’s dispersion before Idi Amin’s expulsion orders and her migration to the UK. This paper argues that food as both material reality and as metaphor functions in this text to map the possibilities and limitations of individual and communal agency. It suggests that engaging with food, cooking and the composition of recipes needs to take into account not only representations which emphasize gendered realities of constraint but also attend to idiosyncratic expressions of the interior life of emotions and desires that testify to feminist explorations of agency, creativity and registers of pleasure and repair.