Library Trends

Abstract:

This article engages with the topic of embodied information through the analysis of historic recipes, part of the Chatelaine magazine's annual contest "50 Favorite Family Recipes." The corporeal information embodied in culinary texts, when they are analyzed as records of information behavior, provides knowledge about their producers and users. More specifically, the information embedded in recipes fuels stories about women's tensed roles in the family at a time of change in Canadian culture, during the postwar years. This article proposes that a recipe read in its information environment, together with clues about its origins, functions, and consumption, indicate how users interact with the recipe, accepting, negotiating, or challenging it through cultural, political, and social gestures, while located in the everyday space of the private kitchen. The analysis is focused on a genre of dishes that is often associated with fifties and sixties forms of domesticity—the casserole—and discuss the incorporation of canned products in recipes at a time of rapid modernization through mass-produced foods.