Recipe

by Lynn Z. Bloom, Ian Bogost (Editor), Christopher Schaberg (Editor)

Overview

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

Recipe reveals the surprising lessons that recipes teach, in addition to the obvious instructions on how to prepare a dish or perform a process. These include lessons in hospitality, friendship, community, family and ethnic heritage, tradition, nutrition, precision and order, invention and improvisation, feasting and famine, survival and seduction and love. A recipe is a signature, as individual as the cook's fingerprint; a passport to travel the world without leaving the kitchen; a lifeline for people in hunger and in want; and always a means to expand one's worldview, if not waistline.

Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501367106
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	06/30/2022
Series:	Object Lessons
Pages:	160
Product dimensions:	7.75(w) x 6.45(h) x 0.48(d)

About the Author

Ian Bogost is an author and an award-winning game designer. He is Barbara and David Thomas Distinguished Professor in Arts & Sciences, Director of Film & Media Studies, and Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. Bogost is also Founding Partner at Persuasive Games LLC, an independent game studio, and a Contributing Editor at The Atlantic. Bogost is author or co-author of ten books, including Alien Phenomenology (2012)and Play Anything (2016).

Christopher Schaberg is Director of the Program in Public Scholarship at Washington University in St. Louis, USA, and the author of The Textual Life of Airports (2012), The End of Airports (2015), Airportness (2017), The Work of Literature in an Age of Post-Truth (2018), Searching for the Anthropocene (2019), Pedagogy of the Depressed (2021), and Adventure: An Argument for Limits (2023), all published by Bloomsbury. He is also the founding co-editor (with Ian Bogost) of Bloomsbury's Object Lessons book series.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Secret Life of Recipes

1. “First, Turn and Face the Stove.” The Recipe as an Instruction Guide
2. “You say toma¯to, I say tomahto”: The Recipe as Conversation
3. A Taste of Home: The Recipe for Comfort Cooking in Tough Times
4. Joys of Cooking-and Eating: The Great American Thanksgiving Celebration Recipe
5. “Please, sir, I want some more.” The Recipe as a Manifestation of Power, Politics Poverty, and Punishment
6. Play With Your Food, the Recipe as Jazz

Lagniappe: The Best Blueberry Pie

Index

Editorial Reviews

Fascinating. . . . [Bloom] explains how recipes unite us, contain lessons about hospitality, and can be a signature as individual as fingerprints.” —Globe and Mail

“Lynn Bloom's Recipe celebrates the complications and contradictions, the serious and play, the bounty and scarcity, represented by the simple instructions that put food on the table. This book, like the object itself, 'exists as much in the imagination' as on the plate, a satisfying examination of the marvelous 'process and promise' of the humble recipe.” —Karen Babine, author of All the Wild Hungers: A Season of Cooking and Cancer and Water and What We Know: Following the Roots of a Northern Life

“A really great read.” —Randomly Yours, Alex

From the Publisher