The Sexual Politics of Cooking: A Feminist Analysis of Culinary Hierarchy in Western Culture

It is often assumed that culinary influence has been ‘top down’– that is, that haute cuisine and professional cooking by male chefs has influenced popular cooking, especially once literacy became commonplace, and particularly with the publication of cookery books directed at the middle–class ‘housewife’. Whilst it is certainly true that professional cooking has influenced domestic cooking as a ‘trickle–down’ effect, there is an area of serious neglect or oversight – namely, the denial or ignoring of the culinary influence in the other direction, that is, the influence of female domestic cooking on haute cuisine.