What’s Cooking? Mobilizing Women’s Life Narratives in Diasporic Cookbooks

Abstract

Over recent years there has been a proliferation of cookbooks by diasporic women authors containing a wealth of traditional family recipes. Today’s cookbooks focus on experiencing transnational traditions and transculturalism through women’s voices and intergenerational stories. This paper elucidates how cookbooks, as a form of life writing, materialise ‘mobile lives’ (Elliot and Urry, 2009) through a focus on women’s histories, narratives and activism. In shaping intergenerational women’s life storying, these cookbooks represent identity markers of the geopolitics of migration. I will examine two cookbooks that explore diasporic ancestries: Cynthia Shanmugalingam’s Rambutan: Recipes from Sri Lanka (2022) and Reem Assil’s Arrabiya: Recipes from the Life of an Arab in Diaspora (2022). The authors pay homage to their homeland through culinary expression. The cookbooks include heartfelt essays that convey the importance of documenting oral food histories in order to preserve their distinct gustatory cultures in an environment where the physical land is threatened or erased from national consciousness. The cookbook is an ideal site for mobilizing the oral to the textual while also stressing the intimacy and distinctness of these diasporic family accounts. Therefore, these cookbooks mediate the interconnected acts of diasporic writing, reading and cooking.