Aesthetic Pleasure in Twentieth-Century Women's Food Writing

Alice McLean is the author of Cooking in American History (1840-1945). She received her Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Davis, before being awarded an Honors Teaching Fellowship at Sweet Briar College (2005-2009).

• Introduction 1. The Gendering of Appetite in Nineteenth-Century Food Writing 2. Forging a Space for Female Desire: M. F. K. Fisher on the Art of Eating 3. A Queer Appetite: The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book 4. A Sensual Engagement: Elizabeth David’s Gastronomic Cookbooks 5. From "Aesthetic Choice" to a "Diaporic Aesthetic": Patience Gray, Vertamae Smart Grosvenor, and Monique Truong

"Recommended." -- C. Holt-Fortin, SUNY Oswego, Choice"McLean presses page-after-page the importance of dining, and so the literature about it...being so genuinely gastronomic makes the book a pleasure to read... McLean’s intelligent and fascinating account provides unmatched delectation for the meals-into-words tragics among us, people who might entitle a thesis something like, ‘Eating into thinking’, as I once did." – Aristologist, "Women and gastronomy," Michael Symons"Part cultural history of the sexual politics of food writing, part historical survey of female pleasure as articulated through physical appetite, and part examination of the way food can serve as metaphoric material for a feminine literary voice and sensibility, Aesthetic Pleasure in Twentieth-Century Women’s Food Writing makes a clear and persuasive case for the power of women’s gastronomic writing to make significant interventions into the social underpinnings of food culture in England and America." --Susan Derwin, University of California, Santa Barbara, Gastronomica