https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8962-5298
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ABSTRACT
In 2020, during the COVID-19 lockdowns, as home cooking grew in the US, sales of cookbooks surged and community cookbooks started showing up in the households of the country. This essay is concerned with community cookbooks in the pandemic era. Drawing on the familiar ‘COVID-19 is a war’ metaphor, it investigates the relationship between cooking during the First and Second World Wars and food preparation during the COVID-19 pandemic in the US. It argues that the cooking practised in community cookbooks is militarised to serve the needs of the nation and provides pleasure through recipes of American traditional cuisine. It proposes a theoretical framework on the relationship between militarism, pleasure, and food in contemporary war cookbooks.
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Notes
1 . Community cookbooks were first sold in the US to raise money for Union soldiers wounded during the Civil War. For a brief overview on the history of community books, see Longone (Citation2012).
2 . According to Priscilla Wald, ‘disease outbreaks’ are routinely imagined ‘as ‘foreign’ or ‘alien’ agents’ posing a threat to the nation (2008, 27).
3 . To see the poster issued by the US National Wartime Nutrition Program in 1943, go to the National Archives Museum at: https://fdr.artifacts.archives.gov/objects/16297/food-is-a-weapon-dont-waste-it?ctx=5a775bd3436d4862df579651f1de04f588929996&idx=0
4 . Nostalgia in relation to food has been studied by several scholars and is often associated with notions of home, nationalism, commensality, conviviality, and community. See Mannur (Citation2007), Owen Jones and Long (Citation2017), and Kerner, Chou, and Warmind (Citation2015).
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Nieves Pascual Soler
Nieves Pascual Soler, PhD, teaches pedagogy of modern languages at Valencian International University, Spain. Among her research interests are cultural studies, feminism, and contemporary narratives in English. Her publications include Food and Masculinity in Contemporary Autobiographies: Cast-Iron Man (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2018), and the co-edited collection Traces of Aging: Old Age and Memory in Contemporary Narrative, (Transcript Verlag, 2016). Her research has been published in journals such as: Food, Culture and Society, Latin American Research Review, Animals & Society, The European Legacy, and Prose Studies.