Elegy and Remembrance in the Cookbooks of Alice B. Toklas and Edna Lewis

Cookbooks should be thought of as more than collections of instructions for preparing individual dishes and meals. We should read cookbooks as a literary genre in and of themselves, whether as romances, memoirs, histories, or, as I will argue, elegies mourning a lost loved one or memorializing a vanished place. Alice B. Toklas's The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book (1954) and Edna Lewis's The Taste of Country Cooking (1976) explicitly acknowledge the role that cookbooks play in recapturing an individual or a place. The authors” respective sets of culinary instructions and gastronomic memories demonstrate how cookbooks participate in multiple genres and in fact engage with the elegiac, if not the elegy itself.