When you open a cookbook, what exactly are you searching for?
The obvious answer might be the perfect recipe, but let’s try to dig a little deeper than that. Cookbooks can be a means for communicating with another person, or for understanding a different lifestyle. Learning how to cook Ethiopian, Georgian or Italian recipes might allow you to learn something about those cultures that you may not have known in the first place. Perhaps you buy a cookbook to impress your friends and family with surprising new flavours. In any case, it is unlikely that you are reading a cookbook in order to learn how to survive.
 |
| Catherine Parr Trail, 1802-1899 (Source) |
The text is not a cookbook by any modern standards, but it does contain a series of quasi-recipes, written mostly in prose. In the book’s preface, Parr-Trail admits that she “aimed at no beauty of style”, reflecting a common sense approach to cooking and preparing food. As with most other pieces of writing from this era, it does contain many of the problematic (read: racist) tropes found in early Canadian literature. Nevertheless, the book is not meant – as many others were – to be particularly antagonistic. Rather, the author chose to write a text “for all classes, and more particularly for the wives and daughters of the small farmers.”
Cooking texts have transformed drastically since Parr Traill was writing, becoming both more empirical – with each ingredient listed along with its desired quantity – and more complex. Around the beginning of the twentieth century, figures like César Ritz and Georges-Auguste Escoffier popularized French haute-cuisine, a style of cooking characterized by meticulous preparation and extensive training.
Today, a new group of cooks are also writing survivalist cookbooks, although the kind of surviving that they refer to is not only physical; it is also psychological. Joe Beef: Surviving the Apocalypse, written by Frédéric Morin, David McMillan and Meredith Erickson, and published in 2018, is an encyclopedia of anecdotes and recipes, all based around the theme of surviving in the modern world. Recipes run from “Insta-Risotto” to a soap made of beef fat (“remember, it’s the end of the world now, so carefully choose your fragrance and that of your intended partner.”).
 |
| Photograph courtesy of Jordan Fee. |
Aside from recipes, the book is I think meant to offer to its readers a sense of companionship, much like Catherine Parr Traill’s instructional texts did. However, instead of simply providing instructions on general sustenance, the book by Morin, McMillan and Erickson is meant to provide a sense of comfort and respite from the socio-political maladies that seem to characterize the modern world. In chapter one, Erickson laments the wide variety of things that plague our thoughts today: climate change, lack of jobs, constant noise, Facebook ads. “The glorification of the superficial.” Although I can’t necessarily agree with every claim that they make (“the apocalypse is on Instagram”), the authors do provide a unique take on the concept of survival in our current world, which can often be quite startling and unexpected.
 |
| Photograph courtesy of Jordan Fee. |
Ultimately, I suppose that you could say that all cookbooks are about survival. Eating is a biological imperative for survival, and so books that instruct us on how to do so could only fit within that category. However, books like Surviving the Apocalypse do provide a different idea of survival, or at least a different set of criteria by which to define it. In conclusion, I would like to leave you all with another of my favourite quotes from Erickson’s essay:
Perhaps Catherine Parr Traill would agree.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.