ABSTRACT
Pat Mora’s culinary memoir, House of Houses , evinces the typical features of the genre (a mixture of materials such as personal and family stories, recipes, photographs, and family trees), while engaging in a distinctive, metatextual discourse about the link between storytelling, personal and collective memory, and recipes. The aim of this chapter is to show how recipes embody the values encoded in Mora’s writing (such as generosity, craft, and care), and how consumption is represented, through this conflation of literature and recipes, as an occasion for the collective piecing together of the memory of the Chicano community.
In House of Houses, recipes are valuable because they allow the narrator to uncover intimate stories about her relatives’ past: the culinary loosens people’s tongue, and offers an access to personal memories which, put together, paint a picture of the collective history of the Chicano community. Talk of a meal can lead to the recovery of a history that is missing from the historical archive, of stories that went untold because they were about marginalized groups.
Memory is one aspect that connects recipes and oral narrative in Mora’s work. To uncover the other dimensions that underpin this parallel, this chapter proposes to read the references to food in Mora’s text through the prism of Walter Benjamin’s “The Storyteller.” Just like the stories in Benjamin’s essay, which depend on dialogue and have to be listened to and re-told in order to endure, the meals in Mora’s text always take place in a context of conversation and exchange which enables memory to be passed on and preserved. The cook, like the storyteller, has an intimate, embodied relationship to their craft; recipes are a prompt for this performer of memory. Through exploring this connection between recipes and stories, this chapter shows that Mora’s text explores the symbolic, meaning-making aspect of food, without neglecting its embodied materiality. This dual view also informs Mora’s view of written narrative, the writing process, reading, and autobiography.
Her description of reading, in very material terms, as a sensuous process full of the pleasure of anticipation, is inspired by the specific reading experience that a recipe creates, this chapter argues. Mora recreates that experience for her reader through a kind of writing that is shock-full of synesthesia, leading to a poetic prose, both intellectual and sensual, which resonates in the reader’s body. The framework of the recipe is also closely linked to the way in which Mora contends with the autobiographical genre. Her version of autobiography is strikingly close to the genre of the community cookbook, with its democratic and inclusive nature, its conversational tone, and its avoidance of a discourse of expertise and hierarchy. House of Houses presents the same horizontal structure, as the main narrator’s relatives share their stories with her and become narrators in their own right, co-creators of this collective autobiography, where the subject/narrator is not an isolated individual but a whole tapestry of ancestors, refuting the claim that too many cooks spoil the broth.
