Digging into the lesbian cookbook archives
The lesbian cookbook archives, the connection between cooking and cults, the fight for fresh fruit in NYC, politics and pies, cocktail recipes for all and more!
Hello readers!
I hope you’re all going well as the end of the year quickly approaches, we’re really in the final stretch now. Mariah Carey, it’s time to start defrosting…
This week:
Queering the map
The Lesbian Cookbook Archives
Cooking and Cults
Lose Yourself in Mom’s Spaghetti
The moment you’ve been waiting for
The fight for fresh fruit
Politics and pies
Cocktails Are Cocktails, Some Don’t Have Alcohol
Queering the map:
Back in the Pride Month edition of this newsletter, I wrote about the website Queering the Map. “A community-generated counter-mapping platform for digitally archiving LGBTQ2IA+ experience in relation to physical space.”
I recently checked in on the map and found some heart-breaking pins in Gaza which I thought I’d share, especially at the moment when Palestinian history, voices, and suffering are being erased. “As in other genocides, a central intent of this erasure is to eliminate not only lives but a collective memory as well. The loss is incalculable. For queer and trans people in Gaza, already existing on the margins of society, the erasure is tenfold.”
I thought writer and activist Sarah O’Neal’s words on this were particularly poignant: “In a way, the anonymous Gazans’ whose stories are pinned on Queering the Map, are asking us to do more than bear witness. They are asking us to love their loves with them. To hear our own stories in their stories. To love them. Adore them. And thus, be haunted by what we have allowed them to become.”
The Lesbian Cookbook Archives:
Taste published this article looking back at the 80s and 90s wave of unapologetically queer cookbooks. Naturally, this immediately sent me on a hunt to track some down (god bless public libraries).
One of the cookbooks I was able to track down was Cookin’ With Honey: What Literary Lesbians Eat. It is part essays, part recipe book. It humorously chronicles anecdotes from the lives of contributors like Eileen Myles, Harry Dodge, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Dorothy Alison, and Cheryl Clarke with the recipes that shape them. Here are some little snapshots:
Other notable lesbian cookbooks include:
The Whoever Said Dykes Can’t Cook Cookbook
The Alice B Tolkas Cookbook (there’s also the one I’m currently reading Murder in the Kitchen by Alice B Toklas) published in 1954!
The Lesbiliscious Cookbook
Lesbians Have to Eat, Too!
The Queer Cookbook
The Lesbian Erotic Cookbook
Cooking with Pride
The Butch Cook Book
This list is just some of the more popular queer cookbooks dating back to the 50s, it doesn’t even scratch the surface of community cookbooks and zines out there! These books represent survival, identity, community, and reclaiming a domain traditionally held by the cisgender, heterosexual housewife.
Alex Ketchum, a queer historian who cofounded The Historical Cooking Project in 2013 created an exhibition in 2021 titled “A Recipe for a Queer Cookbook” at McGill University in Montreal. The exhibit asks the essential question: What makes a cookbook queer?
If you’d like to see more about the cookbooks featured in this exhibition or perhaps have a giggle at this wonderful sub-genre read more here.
Cooking and Cults:
A duo you’d put up there with strawberries & cream, Sonny & Cher, and Scooby & Shaggy right?
If it isn’t, perhaps you should read Holy Food: How Cults, Communes, and Religious Movements Influenced What We Eat by Christina Ward. It turns out religion, communes, and cults have long shaped America’s food culture.
You might not know Kellogg’s Corn Flakes were created by Seventh-day Adventists Dr. John Harvey Kellogg and his brother, W.K. Kellogg who promoted a vegetarian diet which led them to explore grains. Similarly, the Shakers (a 19th-century group of dissenting Quakers) became infamous for their lemon pie, the Source Family (a 1970s Californian hippie cult) started the celebrity-favorite vegetarian restaurant The Source on Sunset Boulevard. Yogi Tea was made by 70s guru and accused cult leader Yogi Bhajan, the list goes on. Particularly in the industry of health food, America’s cults and communes have a lot to answer for.
Last newsletter I spoke about rituals, religion, and food and how strawberry fanta has become a popular offering in Thailand.
Ward’s book explores how food is intertwined with rituals, symbolism, and trust and how this can be manipulated to control people (often seen in cults). Further, she explores how this has shaped many of America’s food practices today. She also addresses the important question of ‘When does a religion become a cult?’ and ‘Why is America so susceptible to them?’ The book weaves academic studies, interviews, cookbooks, and religious texts to make its considered remarks and reflections simultaneously celebrating the depth of America’s food history.
Ward recommends the walnut loaf from the House of David (a religious commune in Michigan founded in 1903) if anyone’s keen.
Lose Yourself in Mom’s Spaghetti:
Speaking of American culture and food, a headline popped up for me this week that Eminem is now selling Mom’s Spaghetti Pasta Sauce, the marinara sauce used at his downtown restaurant, Mom’s Spaghetti.
In a world of endless celebrity tequilas brands, a marinara sauce feels almost refreshing.
The Moment You’ve Been Waiting For:
I can’t even remember how I stumbled upon this, but surely it’s the moment we’ve all been waiting for; The Sopranos but just the scenes where they’re talking about food. The super cut is almost 2 hours long and has been watched over 526,000 times! Too good.
Oh, and I’ll never stop saying: “So what, no fuckin’ ziti now?”
The Fight for Fresh Fruit:
I read an article in MOLD Magazine this week titled ‘Designing for Informal Food Systems: Learning from New York’s Fresh-cut Fruit Vendors
“Walking throughout New York City — on sidewalks, outside of subway stations, and even down on train platforms— you are likely to find women, mostly from Latin America, standing behind shopping carts or wire laundry baskets, all selling fresh-cut fruit to commuters and hungry city dwellers alike…
A mainstay in contemporary New York landscapes, these women also represent a paradox at the intersection of policy, design, foodways, and livelihoods. The absurd reality is that in a city that is actively trying to increase access to healthy food, especially in low-income, Black and brown neighborhoods that have historically faced disparities in food access, through public education programs and policy interventions, immigrant women selling fresh fruit at affordable prices find themselves harassed, ticketed, and even criminalized.”
Even stepping back from the politics, we all know how important fresh fruit is. Remember what happened to Kramer when he was banned from the fruit store? And he’s not wrong about supermarket fruit!
Unfortunately, most vendors are operating without permits and don’t meet the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH) food vending regulations. The DOHMH requires fruit vendors sell out of stainless steel units, have hot and cold running water, and for the fruit to be stored in the steel unit, not on display. This makes it extremely difficult for vendors to make a profit or for their businesses to even survive.
In 2022, Ane Gonzales Lara and Ryan Devlin worked on a project, funded by the Pratt Center for Community Development that sought to create an affordable prototype for selling fruit that met basic DOHMH requirements. However, even the modest designs were still costing nearly $1,000 and would have to be stored in rented space in commissaries, something most vendors can’t afford.
Devlin writes: “If the city is concerned with social justice, access to healthy food and access to livelihoods, rules must emerge from the realities that currently exist.”
Politics and Pies:
Food is intrinsically political, it also has a long history of being used in protest. It’s not just pies, also popular are eggs, tomatoes, flour, and milkshakes apparently the Romans used to throw turnips in 63 A.D.
There are a lot of things to consider when choosing your weapon of choice. Texture, color, firmness, stickiness, smelliness, throw-ability.
One of the first famous public cream pie-ings was has-been singer and anti-gay rights campaigner Anita Bryant in 1977 by activist Thom L. Higgins. The cream-pieing and Anita Bryant went on to become a bit of a punchline.
In 1910, the British suffragette Ethel Moorhead famously threw an egg at Winston Churchill when he was home secretary. However, more recently, egg-ing was made popular again by Australian teen William Connolly in 2019. After the horrific Christchurch mosque shootings, far-right politician Fraser Anning reacted to the shooting by adding to the Muslim hate. At a televised interview the following day now infamously known “egg boy” slapped an egg onto Anning’s bald head from behind, after which the politician turned around and slapped the teenager in the face.
In 1960 then-Vice President Richard Nixon was pelted with eggs and tomatoes. In 1986 Enoch Powell even got a ham sandwich thrown at him.
At the 2019 British elections milkshakes were the food of choice. The first milkshake was thrown at right-wing activist Tommy Robinson; later that month Brexit politician Nigel Farage got a Five Guys milkshake thrown at him. Only days later, he was trapped in his campaign bus, as a crowd of milkshake drinkers waited outside. Farage’s fellow UKIP member Carl Benjamin was milkshake-ed four times that May!
More recently, and perhaps more controversially we’ve seen Climate Activists through soup on art.
Where does this leave us? What’s the future of public food protests? They’re pretty contentious, although maybe that’s the point. Some have tried to argue they’re a form of political violence however, defenders say it’s more about humiliation than violence and is a non-violent form of protest. In the age of social media, one thing is for certain they are bound to get media attention and generate public discussion.
Cocktails Are Cocktails, Some Don’t Have Alcohol