Wishlist: Eat My Words

Eat My Words: Reading Women's Lives Through the Cookbooks They Wrote by Janet Theopano

Sigh. In honor of the fact that last night a dumbass waiter decided to piss me off royally by returning my debit card to my boyfriend after he rang up our dinner, I wanted to make today's wish list book about women. Appallingly, typing 'women' into Amazon's search engine in the Cooking, Food and Wine category brought up mostly books on dieting. So my real wish for today is for more female-centric quality food books, preferably not of the schmaltzy sisterhood variety. (When I worked at a video store in high school, we used to call movies that would fit this description "cook a bunch of food and then throw it at each other" movies. This includes movies like "Tortilla Soup," "Soul Food," and "Eat Drink Man Woman.")

I'm currently reading Judith Jones' new memoir The Tenth Muse, which would have fit this category fairly well, but didn't meet the qualification of being a book I don't own. Instead I've picked Janet Theopano's investigation of female cookbook authors, which appears to be a bit on the academic side. This certainly does not mean dry, but I wouldn't give a book like this to the casual cookbook enthusiast. What interested me in this book is the double whammy of cookbook criticism and the fact that it might be a good way to discover women's cookbooks. Although I have a sneaking suspicion she might use cookbooks as a means of showing how oppressive the life of a homemaker can be, which would be disappointing, Theopano is a folklorist so there's hope that the book is not feminist, cooking-is-a-tool-of-the-oppressor pap.