ABSTRACT
In 2014 Martha Stewart and Gwyneth Paltrow traded barbs over ownership of the lifestyle genre, igniting a feud that boiled over with a spread on pie fillings in the Nov. issue of Martha Stewart Living entitled “Conscious Coupling,” a dig a Paltrow’s self-proclaimed amicable divorce strategy, and a retaliatory recipe for “Jailbird Cake” on Paltrow’s goop website, referencing Stewart’s prison time (Bueno). At issue, however, was not pie or cake, but who gets to be an arbiter of public taste, and the ways in which value is established through the publication of recipes and the consumption of print. These debates over taste and value are not new; in 1754, Anne Cook’s Professed Cookery attempted to dethrone Hannah Glasse’s 1747 The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy , the most successful cookbook of the eighteenth century, with a cookbook incorporating verse, essay, recipes, and fictionalized autobiography, all intended to undermine Glasse’s authority as a tastemaker.
This chapter will show how early printed cookbooks negotiated the relationship between aesthetic and culinary value, and between literary and functional genres, in a form that bridged the period’s public and masculine print culture and the feminized intimisphere of secret recipes. Importantly for readers of contemporary literary cookbooks, the basis of Glasse and Cook’s rivalry was a disagreement over the relationship between taste, consumption, the public sphere, and the value of technical versus literary writing. Anne Cook and Hannah Glasse’s cookbook conflict demonstrates the extent to which cookery discourse and questions of aesthetic and culinary value were as contentious and public in the 1740s and 1750s as they are today. Using Michael Warner and Nancy Fraser’s model of counterpublics, a critical intervention into Habermas’ divisions between private and public, I will illustrate the positions of resistance both Glasse and Cook took to the dominant discourse of gender, cookery, print, and the intimate realm.
This chapter will show how Glasse takes for granted that cookery, because of its connection to embodied taste, plays a part in the formation of subjects, and that she was addressing a public readership, an approach that was so successful that Samuel Johnson could refer to her ubiquitous cookbook as “Mrs. Glasse’s Cookery” (Boswell 377). This is significant to a discussion of consumption and value because print, and its corresponding public, is where Glasse sought to cultivate taste, but a taste that originated in the body of the subject. Cook’s response to Glasse asserts that she has transgressed boundaries of gender and of sphere by bringing cooking and bodily taste into the public realm of aesthetic taste. Despite Cook’s anger, however, I suggest that by addressing these issues in print, and in a text prefaced with an extensive Juvenalian satire, perhaps modelled after Pope’s 1718–42 Dunciad, only bemoaning the decline of culinary rather than literary culture, standards, and style, Cook is demonstrating just how public cookery discourse had become, and how it establishes ideas of aesthetic taste and value.
