Narrating Cuisines - Food Stories and Paratexts in Regional Cookbooks

10.6641/PICCFC.13.2013.13.13

Maarit Knuuttila

narratives ； regional cuisine ； textualization ； food stories ； cookbooks

2013 中華飲食文化國際學術研討會論文集

第13屆（2013 / 10 / 20）

27 - 40

英文

What is a food narrative? How are they used in construction processes of regional cuisines? What kind of themes are intertwined, discussed and articulated to the dishes to root them to a certain area? Former questions are in focus in my ongoing study on regional cuisines. This paper is one section of it and concentrates paratexts and food stories attached to regional cookbooks. The goal of this paper is to outline the nature of paratexts and food stories in gastronomical writing as well as highlight themes for further exploration. My example area is Central Finland province and my data corpus consists of three cookbooks from 1980 to 2008. The comparison of those three books show us which kind of narratives have been considered essential for representing local cuisine and also how the nature of textualization of regional cookbooks has changed during in past 40 years.