Tasting Celebrity

Abstract

This essay examines the experience of intimacy with celebrity afforded to fans by an early paradigm of the celebrity cookbook, Celebrated Actor-Folks’ Cookeries: A Collection of the Favorite Foods of Famous Players (1916). It describes how the affective aspects of consumption, theatrical celebrity and gustatory taste converge in this cookbook’s dramaturgy to excite fans’ emotional connection to and sense of an authentic experience with beloved theatrical stars. It provides a performative analysis of these operations through engagement in the culinary and reading praxes scripted by the cookbook, as well as a theorization of early-twentieth century home cooks’ / theatre fans’ engagement in historical context. It suggests that gustatory taste’s claim to authentic knowledge, or the conflation of palate with ‘real’ person, may risk celebrity as much as celebrity is dependent upon letting with the public taste the ‘favorite’ foods of its famous players.

Notes

1 There are seven cookbooks titled The Bride’s Cook Book, published ca. 1909–20, catalogued in the Cookery & Food Collection at Michigan State University Library.

2 Regardless of how readers were addressed by Rowland, the book’s relatively high cost of $5 (US) with postage paid, the performers it featured, placement of advertising for it in women’s magazines and socio-cultural race and gender norms all indicate that white middle-class women were the intended audience.

3 Through a critical lens, a pattern of four types of recipe emerges. These aim toward humanizing the star or evoking the luxury of celebrity life and include: cosmopolitan recipes, nostalgic recipes from a star’s childhood or homeland, a star’s spin on ordinary American food and recipes that play on a star’s theatrical type or reputation.

4 Many women contributors offer similar expressions of encouragement that exemplify the gendered social pressures on working women, particularly performers. A few examples suffice: Lucile Lawrence declares, ‘I think cooking is a great art.’ Alice Washburn states, ‘I love to cook, but have to keep one eye on the cook book all the time.’ Mary Fuller writes, ‘Although I am not a wonderful cook, my friends always enjoy what I prepare for them.’ And Ina Clair suggests to the reader who chooses her recipe how very much it would mean to her: ‘I hope some kind soul will try my salad and approve of it. I am not much of a cook but very fond of good things to eat’ (Rowland 1916: 202, 228, 242, 154). These stars’ expressed anxiety about their performances of femininity and domesticity suggests how acutely they may have felt this issue when faced with contributing to a cookbook. While their insecurity humanizes these stars as women, who are just like the homecook, it also demonstrates that, as a superior cook, a homecook-fan has something to offer women who appear to have everything.

5 Carolyn Korsmeyer’s use of acquired taste as evidence that taste is not entirely subjective because ‘we can train the acuity of our senses – a necessity for discerning taste and connoisseurship’ pointed me to the taste training that a devoted fan might undertake (2015: 6).

6 ‘Weeping’ is the term for when liquid seeps from the meringue, often forming tear-shaped beads (‘Meringue: Guaranteeing Success’).