Constructing the culinary consumer: transformative and reflective processes in Italian cookbooks

This paper explores how culinary texts operate in both performative and transformative senses in relation to wider societal norms of gender and cultural capital. As such, the paper explores changes to the way in which the culinary consumer is presented in British Italian cookbooks from 1954 to 2005. Across the period, we see a shift in the gendered representation of the culinary subject, from a housewife in the period 1954–1974, to a working mother from 1975 to 1986, and most recently as male or female cook from 1987 to 2005. We also see shifts in representation of cultural capital in these same periods from learning new cooking skills, to adapting existing cooking skills to displaying skills in shopping and product selection. In charting these changing discourses, we find that whilst reflecting wider culinary culture, these cookbooks also act in a transformative sense to promote (and indeed require) specific enactments of gender and cultural capital.