ep. 132: How to Write Cookbooks

Cookbook author Julia Turshen thinks of her recipe collections as Trojan horses to talk about far more than food, and she's right. We mix it up with Julia about her childhood cookbook obsession, recipe writing and why cookbooks deserve more respect.

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More from Julia

Follow: Instagram // Site

Listen: Keep Calm and Cook On

Discover: Equity at the Table

Read and cook:

• Simply Julia: 110 Easy Recipes for Healthy Comfort Food

• Now and Again: Go-To Recipes, Inspired Menus and Endless Ideas for Reinventing Leftovers

• Feed the Resistance: Recipes and Ideas for Getting Involved

• Small Victories: Recipes, Advice and Hundreds of Ideas for Home-Cooking Triumphs

Sources

• Avakian, Arlene Voski and Barbara Haber. “Feminist Food Studies: A Brief History.” In From Betty Crocker to Feminist Food Studies: Critical Perspectives on Women and Food. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005.

• Fleitz, Elizabeth. Cooking Codes: Cookbook Discourses as Women’s Rhetorical Practices. Present Tense. Vol. 1, Iss. 1. July 10, 2010.

• Gibson, Allison. A new cookbook is donating proceeds to Planned Parenthood, another to the ACLU. Los Angeles Times. Nov. 2, 2017.

• Kennedy, Mark. Julia Turshen’s new cookbook gets very wonderfully personal. Sentinel. March 2, 2021.

• Ketchum, Alex. Special Series on Cookbook Literature/Historiography #3: Postwar Sexism and Feminist Responses in Cookbooks. The Historical Cooking Project. May 28, 2019.

• Le Dantec-Lowry, Hélène. Reading Women's Lives in Cookbooks and Other Culinary Writings: A Critical Essay. Revue Française D’études Américaines. Vol. 116, No. 2. 2008.

• Martyris, Nina. How Suffragists Used Cookbooks As a Recipe for Subversion. The Salt. Nov. 5, 2015.

• Mejia, Paula. Celebrating Abby Fisher, One of the First African-American Cookbook Authors. Atlas Obscura. Dec. 8, 2017.

• Notaker, Henry. A 600-Year History of Cookbooks as Status Symbols. The Atlantic. October 2017.

• Notaker, Henry. A History of Cookbooks: From Kitchen to Page over Seven Centuries. Oakland: University of California Press, 2017.

• Scicluna, Rachel M. “‘Turning the Tables’ as a Political Metaphor Towards Heteronormative Domesticity in the 1980s.” From Home and Sexuality: The ‘Other’ Side of the Kitchen. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.

• Sheridan, Harvey. American Women: Resources from the General Collections. Library of Congress.

• Snell, Rachel A. Recipes as Sources for Women’s Lives: Student Reflections on Food, Feminism, and Femininity. The Recipes Project. May 7, 2017.

• Stephen O. Murray and Keelung Hong Special Collections. Cookery and Food Collection. Michigan State University.

• Turshen, Julia. How Writing a Cookbook Helped Me Break Free From Diet Culture. Healthyish. March 2, 2021.

• Turshen, Julia. To Change Racial Disparity in Food, Let’s Start With Cookbooks. Eater. April 5, 2018.

• Vester, Katharina. “Recipes for Lesbian Living.” From A Taste of Power: Food and American Identities. Oakland: University of California Press, 2005.

• Vester, Katharina. “Queer Appetites, Butch Cooking: Recipes for Lesbian Subjectivities.” From Queers in American Popular Culture, Vol. 1. Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2010.

• Wessell, Adele. Cookbooks for Making History: As Sources for Historians and as Records of the Past. Media Culture Journal. Vol. 16, No. 3. 2013.

• Williams, Stacy J. A Feminist Guide to Cooking. American Sociological Association. Vol. 13, Iss. 3. 2014.