Through the Kitchen Window: Women Explore the Intimate Meanings of Food and Cooking

(Paperback)

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Description

These days any woman knows that the sensual pleasures of food and cooking are all too often obscured by the increasing demands of careers, families, battles over body image, and the desire for a life outside the 'traditional' domain of the kitchen. With contributions by Dorothy Allison, Maya Angelou, Letty Cottin Pogrebin and Marge Piercy among others, Through the Kitchen Window offers a fresh look at food and cooking as more than the makings of a meal. For the writers in this provocative collection, food is a cultural declaration, an expression of hidden hungers, a symbol of our intimate connections to one another.Including memories of Latina, Geechee, Chinese and Indian kitchens, Through the Kitchen Window reveals everything from the painful struggles to overcome an eating disorder to the tantalizing delights of cornbread and barbecue eaten from a lover's hands, and challenges assumptions about women, food, and the true satisfaction of cooking.

Reviews

'A fascinating anthology of ground-roots cuisine from unknown kitchen heroines!' John Whiting, News Editor of Fine Food Digest 2005 'Through the Kitchen Window is a pathbreaking book. What Avakian's collection does so well is to integrate many kinds of experiences and social locations - class, race, immigration, nationalism, age, sexuality - in a variety of formats.' Alice Julier, Professor of Sociology, Smith College, USA; President of the Association for the Study of Food and Society 'Such a re-visioning of domestic labour is most useful to feminine readers in the complexity of its nostalgia'. The Women's Review of Books, October 1997 'A yummy anthology of female culinary writing, which has the good taste to order up a whole range of experiences.' Entertainment Weekly, May 1997. 'Avakian lays out a feast of musings.' The Orlando Sentinel, May 1997. 'The personal essays are especially compelling. The collection as a whole provides both an engrossing read and a wealth of shared knowledge.' Publishers Weekly, April 1997 'A buoyant anthology of food writing by women from around the world.' Booklist Chicago, July 1999 'Refreshingly unpretentious.' Forks, Fingers and Chopsticks, Autumn 1998 'The joy in this book is in the number of voices and stories.' Charlotte Observer, July 1998 'I triply recommend this anthology as an academic text, a good read and a tempting cookbook.' Anthropological Notebooks XII/I 2006

Author Bio

Arlene Voski Avakian is Professor of Women's Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.