A taste of power : food and American identities / Katharina Vester.

Includes bibliographies and index.

"For all grades of life?" the making of a republican cuisine -- In search of an American cuisine: national identity and food -- "All my bones were made of Indian corn" : maize, revolution, and democracy -- An American painter's palate : Raphaelle Peale's food still lifes -- Domestic virtue and citizenship in Lydia Maria Child -- "Bread of our mothers" : Sylvester Graham and the health of the nation -- Cooking contest : regional, transnational, and class-based cuisines in the Antebellum U.S -- A republican cuisine -- "Wolf in chef's clothing" : manly cooking and negotiations of ideal masculinity -- Why the way to the heart is through the stomach -- "Men, meet the kitchen" : inventing manly cooking -- Flesh, blood, and Hemingway : campfire cooking and rugged masculinities -- Hardboiled cooking, femmes fatales, and American Noir -- Silver Spoons in their hands : the rise of the gourmet -- Playboys in the kitchen: manly cooking in the 1950s and 60s -- "Will cook for sex" : recipes for manly cooking -- "The difference is spreading" : recipes for lesbian living -- "Serving heteronormativity/queering the menu" -- Labor of love : gender-normativity and contradiction in 19th century cookbooks -- Tender Mutton: Gertrude Stein's household advice -- "La cuisine c'est la femme" : the Alice B. Toklas cook book -- What lesbians eat : identity, food and same-sex desire -- How to cook with lesbians -- Digestif : power, resistance and food.

"A Taste of Power is an investigation of the crucial role culinary texts and practices played in the making of cultural identities and social hierarchies since the founding of the United States. Nutritional advice and representations of food and eating, including cookbooks, literature, magazines, newspapers, still life paintings, television shows, films, and the internet, have helped throughout American history to circulate normative claims about citizenship, gender performance, sexuality, class privilege, race, and ethnicity, while promising an increase in cultural capital and social mobility to those who comply with the prescribed norms. The study examines culinary writing and practices as forces for the production of social order and, at the same time, as points of cultural resistance against hegemonic norms, especially in shaping dominant ideas of nationalism, gender, and sexuality, suggesting that eating right is a gateway to becoming an American, a good citizen, an ideal man, or a perfect mother. Cookbooks, as a low-prestige literary form, became the largely unheralded vehicles for women to participate in nation-building before they had access to the vote or public office, for middle-class authors to assert their class privileges, for men to claim superiority over women even in the kitchen, and for Lesbian authors to reinscribe themselves into the heteronormative economy of culinary culture. The book engages in close reading of a wide variety of sources and genres to uncover the intersections of food, politics, and privilege in American culture."--Provided by publisher.

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