Cookbooks and Foodoirs:Narrating the Self and the Nation Through Cuisine Tanfer Emin Tunc (bio) Megan J. Elias. Food on the Page: Cookbooks and American Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017. 304 pp. $34.95. Laura Shapiro. What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food That Tells Their Stories. New York: Viking, 2017. 320 pp. $27.00. In Inventing Authenticity: How Cookbook Writers Redefine Southern Identity (2018), Carrie Helms Tippen conveys that cookbooks communicate "a system of complex social relationships, historical times and places, and rhetorical and narrative strategies." In other words, "cooking instructions [are] meaningful texts and cultural objects" (p. 20)—as are foodoirs (a portmanteau of food memoirs), or personal recollections of experiences with food—especially to historians seeking new lenses through which to examine an individual, a people, or a nation. Interest in both of these genres of culinary writing has been steadily increasing over the past two decades, and the books under review represent only two of the many recent additions to the secondary literature on these subjects. Megan J. Elias's Food on the Page: Cookbooks and American Culture (2017) is a cultural history of American cookbooks from the post-Revolutionary period (i.e., the late eighteenth century) to the present day that complements the work of food scholars and culinary historians such as Ken Albala, Arlene Avakian, Warren Belasco, Amy Bentley, Sherrie Inness, Harvey Levenstein, James Mc-Williams, Laura Shapiro, Andrew Smith and Katharina Vester. It fills a specific void in the cookbook literature: namely that so few comprehensive surveys of the history of American cookbooks exist, especially monographs that narrate the social context and cultural impact of cookbooks in the United States from the colonial era to the present. Carol Fisher's The American Cookbook: A History (2006) and Sarah Walden's Tasteful Domesticity: Women's Rhetoric and the American Cookbook, 1790–1940 (2018) are the only recent works comparable to Elias's project, though remarkably, Fisher is not cited in Food on the Page (Walden is too recent to be cited). [End Page 104] Other secondary sources on the history of American cookbooks are either too general, or too specific. For example, Henry Notaker's A History of Cookbooks (2017) and Sandra Sherman's Invention of the Modern Cookbook (2010) present historical overviews that touch upon the United States, but their predominant focus is the European tradition over the past few centuries. Works that take the United States as their geographic focus such as John T. Edge's The Potlikker Papers (2017), Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald's United Tastes (2017), Toni Tipton-Martin's The Jemima Code (2015), John Van Willigen's Kentucky's Cookbook Heritage (2014), Janet Floyd and Laurel Forster's The Recipe Reader (2010), Jessamyn Neuhaus's Manly Meals and Mom's Home Cooking (2003), Mary Drake McFeely's Can She Bake a Cherry Pie? (2000), and Anne Bower's Recipes for Reading (1997) represent significant interventions in the history of American cookbooks. However, they tend to be thematic, and not surveys, emphasizing one historical period, minority group, cookbook genre, region, or even state. Older works, such as Janice and Daniel Longone's American Cookbooks and Wine Books (1984), Eleanor Lowenstein and Waldo Lincoln's Bibliography of American Cookery Books (1971), and Margaret Cook's America's Charitable Cooks (1971), are either annotated bibliographies with minimal commentary, limited in scope and chronology, or lacking the appropriate social, cultural and historical contextualization. The premise of Food on the Page is that cookbooks are primary documents that are reflections of the eras in which they were written. In other words, cookbooks are first-hand accounts that provide insight into historical periods and their prevailing attitudes, preferences, values and beliefs. They narrate ideas about national identity and "Americanness," while also representing what Americans aspire to cook and what they aspire to be. Above all, they "express the anxieties and assumptions of an era" and "provide commentary on national norms while also helping to construct that culture" (p. 5). Food on the Page is organized around social movements, ideas, individuals and events, and therefore in many respects parallels a typical American history survey textbook. Each one of its seven chapters...