Feminist Studies 40, no. 2. © 2014 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 277

Arlene AvAkiAn

Cooking Up Lives: Feminist Food Memoirs

Two decades ago, other than addressing food disorders, feminists were reluctant to explore cooking and eating, linking these activities only with women’s oppression. I was a faculty member in women’s stud-ies at the time, and some of my colleagues’ eyes glazed over when I told them I was working on a collection of feminist writing about food and was including some recipes because I considered them important docu-ments of women’s lives.1 They continually asked how my cookbook was coming along, as confused as the bookstore owners would be when the book came out. Over the last two decades, however, a veritable flood of feminist analyses of all of the various aspects of food has been published, the articles appearing in both feminist and food-studies journals.

While the term “food memoir” has only recently become part of the lexicon of food and autobiographical writing, the genre of gastronomic writing began in 1825 with the publication of The Physiology of Taste: Or Meditations on Transcendent Gastronomy by Jean Anthelme Brillat-Sava-rin, a French lawyer, politician, and epicure.2 Approaching cooking and eating as arts, Brillat-Savarin’s twenty-eight meditations cover a wide

1. Arlene Avakian, Through the Kitchen Window: Women Explore the Intimate Meaning of Food and Cooking (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997).

2. Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, The Physiology of Taste: Or Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy (New York: Boni and Leveright, 1926).

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range of topics and are laced with autobiographical anecdotes. Believing that knowledge of food was key to understanding the world, he famously said, “Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are.” The book has been in print continuously since its publication 189 years ago. Its most notable translation into English was in 1949 by the US food writer M. K. F. Fisher. Fisher is the author of many books about food, includ-ing a number of what might now be called food memoirs. Her five most famous books were published in one volume in 1954 with the title The Art of Eating.3 Her books can be viewed as twentieth-century versions of Brillat-Savarin’s The Physiology of Taste.

Since Brillat-Savarin and Fisher, hundreds of food memoirs have been published. A wide variety of authors, including chefs, cookbook writers, food critics, novelists, farmers, and even a few scholars have used the form that Rosalia Baena has recently termed “gastrography.” 4 Like Brillat-Savarin and Fisher’s work, contemporary food memoirs put food at the center of their narratives, but they are more systematically auto-

3. M. F. K. Fisher, The Art of Eating (New York: Macmillan, 1954).4. Rosalia Baena, “Gastro-Graphy: Food as Metaphor in Fred Wah’s Diamond

Grill and Austin Clarke’s Pig Tails ’N Breadfruit,” Canadian Ethnic Studies 38, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 105-16.

Books DiscusseD in This essAy

The Language of Baklava: A Memoir. By Diana Abu-Jaber. New York: Pantheon Books, 2005.

A Day of Honey: A Memoir of Food, Love, and War.By Annia Ciezadlo. New York: Free Press, 2011.

Bento Box in the Heartland: My Japanese Girlhood in Whitebread America: A Food Memoir.By Linda Furiya. Emeryville, CA: Seal Press, 2006.

Tasting Home: Coming of Age in the Kitchen.By Judith Newton. Berkeley, CA: She Writes Press, 2013.

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biographical, chronicling the authors’ lives through cooking and eating rather than narratives about food that include personal anecdotes.

The outpouring of food memoirs over the last decades may be due to the convergence of many factors, not the least of which is a growing interest in food, initially sparked by the publication in 1961 of Master-ing the Art of French Cooking and the enormous influence of Julia Child, one of its authors.5 Child’s groundbreaking television show The French Chef, which ran weekly for ten years between 1963 and 1973, pioneered a genre that can still be viewed twenty-four hours a day since the estab-lishment of the Food Network in 1993. By bringing classic French cuisine to the US housewife and making it accessible while adhering to its basic techniques, Child has been credited with changing the way middle-class American women cooked.

Popular interest in food is matched by the rapidly developing field of food studies. Once a subject limited to nutritionists, anthropolo-gists studying the symbolic importance of foodways and agricultural-ists researching farming, the study of food has expanded to virtually all disciplines, including the humanities, social sciences, and arts as well as interdisciplinary fields. Books on food continue to be published in ever greater numbers by both university and trade presses, and articles on food are regularly published in a diverse list of scholarly anthologies and jour-nals, including Food, Culture, and Society and Food and Foodways, both founded in the mid-1980s. Currently three institutions offer PhD pro-grams in food studies and eight offer master’s degrees.

As the field of food studies has grown, feminist food scholars have made significant inroads into a field that once ignored gender and race. When Barbara Haber and I were coediting a collection of feminist essays on food in early 2000, only twenty books focusing on gender and food had been published in the preceding decade.6 Currently, it is difficult to keep up with the new work on gender and food, and similar advance-ments have been made around issues of race and class.

5. Simone Beck, Louisette Bertholle, and Julia Child, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, vol. 1 (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1961).

6. Arlene Voski Avakian and Barbara Haber, eds., From Betty Crocker to Fem-inist Food Studies: Critical Perspectives on Women and Food (Amherst: Uni-versity of Massachusetts Press, 2005).

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This essay is an intersectional feminist reading of four feminist food memoirs: Diana Abu-Jaber’s The Language of Baklava; Annia Cieza-dlo’s A Day of Honey: A Memoir of Food, Love, and War; Linda Furiya’s Bento Box in the Heartland: My Japanese Girlhood in Whitebread Amer-ica: A Food Memoir; and Judith Newton’s Tasting Home: Coming of Age in the Kitchen. While differences of training, profession, race/ethnicity, and age exist among these authors, cooking and eating are critical to their understanding of their lives, and they all use the daily material practices around food to explore relations of domination within shifting cultures and identities. While many food memoirists are women and some may well be feminists, particularly the chefs who have succeeded in male-dominated professions, their narratives do not convey the impact of gender or any other social formations on their lives.7 These four works are among the few food memoirs written from a feminist perspective.8

Food carries culture both pre-verbally and bodily—newborns experience eating from their first hours outside of the womb. Infants begin to understand their world and develop their identities though the food they eat, the relationship they have with those who feed them, and the circumstances under which they are fed, all of which occur within particular cultures, each with their own food practices. Yet neither the food we eat and the meaning it conveys nor the identities food practices help to construct are fixed; like cultures, they change over time and space. As such, food practices provide an excellent vehicle to contextualize women’s lives in an intersectional frame.

A perspective that feminist scholars and activists with a focus on race took up decades ago, intersectionality has recently been cri-tiqued for its alleged lack of clear definition and methodology and its

7. Memoirs by women chefs include: Donna Bijan, Maman’s Homesick Pie: A Persian Heart in an American Kitchen. (Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2011); Gillian Clark, Out of the Frying Pan: A Chef’s Memoir of Hot Kitchen, Single Motherhood, and the Family Meal (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2007); Gabriella Hamilton, Blood, Bones, and Butter: the Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef (New York: Random House, 2011).

8. For examples of other feminist food memoirs, see Arlene Avakian, Lion Woman’s Legacy: An Armenian American Memoir (New York: The Femi-nist Press,1992); Doris Friedensohn, Eating as I Go: Scenes from America and Abroad (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2006); Madhur Jaf-frey, Climbing the Mango Trees: A Memoir of a Childhood in India (New York: Knopf, 2006); Pat Mora, House of Houses (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997).

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singular focus on identity politics, particularly the victimization of Black women.9 However, I have found that an intersectional approach is particularly useful in teaching undergraduates, especially white women whose assumption is often that race does not affect their lives, but is rel-evant only for women of color. Using intersectionality to contextualize groups within their multiple social formations and examining the inter-action of these formations involves everyone in structured relations of power, both those in subordinate and dominant groups. While I agree that a focus on social formations does present the danger of essential-izing, an intersectional approach insists on attention to the interactions among these structures, thereby lessening the tendency to homogenize groups.

A focus on food practices can help to bring specificity to examina-tions of cultures as well as revealing the power dynamics within them. Close attention to who is cooking what, for whom, and under what condi-tions can break down totalizing notions of gender, race, and class. While women are responsible for daily meals in most cultures, for example, some women in stratified societies have the class privilege to escape compulsory cooking. Other women may have to cook in both paid and domestic (unpaid) labor.

In addition, looking at a culture through the lens of food practices brings materiality and specificity to analyses of the interactions between dominant and subordinate cultures. Cultures determine not only what the preferred food is, but also what is edible. One of my favorite foods when I was growing up, for example, was steamed lamb brains, eaten cold with lemon and parsley. Once I went to school and encountered the non-Armenian world, however, I intuited that brains and some of the other things my family regularly ate and relished were not typical fare either for the primarily Greek and Irish children in my classes or for the “real” Americans as they were represented in the media in the 1950s. They ate meat and potatoes, casseroles, soup from cans, and other dishes that were exotic to me and my family. I learned that I was different in many ways, but not seeing our food practices reflected in the larger cul-ture was a powerful daily reminder that I was “other.” Tellingly, my first

9. See Jennifer C. Nash, “Re-Thinking Intersectionality,” Feminist Review 89 (June 2008): 1–15.

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(unsuccessful) attempt at assimilation was to beg my mother to prepare what I had come to define as “regular” food.

Yet there are also problems working with food, not the least of which is that food memories are no more reliable than any other memory, even though because of its materiality we tend to assume that a recol-lection of a particular dish might be “true.” Carol Bardenstein argues that in diasporic communities, food memories often construct a fic-tional past.10 As a case in point she interrogates cookbook writer Clau-dia Roden’s representation of her Egyptian immigrant family’s Sunday ritual of eating ful medames (a traditional Sudanese/Egyptian breakfast of baked fava beans) in “reverent silence.” 11 Bardenstein maintains that cosmopolitan elites such as the Rodens would most probably never have eaten this peasant dish while in Egypt, as they had an “energetic and emphatic disaffiliation with anything that might be considered Egyp-tian, Arab, or even Middle Eastern in some instances.” 12 Roden may not have even spoken Arabic, as members of her class preferred French. The

“we” Roden invokes through her description of the Sunday ful medames is a nostalgic construction, not what the family actually ate when they were in Egypt. Additionally, the procurement of food and cooking in the Roden household was done by servants, not the women of the family. Bardenstein also highlights food memoirist Colette Rossant who freely admits that she obtained the recipes that she included in her Memories of a Lost Egypt: A Memoir with Recipes from Middle Eastern shopkeepers on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn.13

The books that I have chosen for this review chart the development of the authors’ identities by positioning them within social contexts that are both intersecting and fluid. While gender is central to each of the narratives and each author addresses race/ethnicity and class (and their impact on each other) to some degree, the depth of these explorations varies with each text. What is left out of three of the texts, however, is sexuality, although Abu-Jaber has a reference to it in one section. Only

10. Carol Bardenstein, “Transitions Interrupted: Reconfiguring Food, Memory, and Gender in the Cookbook-Memoirs of Middle Eastern Exiles,” Signs 28, no. 1 (Autumn 2002): 354.

11. Claudia Rodin, A Book of Middle Eastern Food (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980).

12. Ibid., emphasis in original.13. Ibid, 384.

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Newton delves into the devastating effects of heterosexism through her description of learning about and coming to accept her husband’s homo-sexuality and his death from AIDS. She does not, however, explore the ways in which that experience changes her consciousness of sexuality or gender formation either in her personal life or in her professional life as a women’s studies professor and department chair.

Food is central to each of these narratives and is an excellent vehi-cle within which to explore interactions of ethnic, gender, and class identities as well as resistance to dominant cultural and social forma-tions in the case of the ethnic memoirs. Abu-Jaber, Furiya, and Newton’s works are coming-of-age narratives, and their relationships with their mothers, or in Abu-Jaber’s case, with her father, are delineated through the giving or withholding of food. The characters’ identity development is tracked through their acceptance and/or rejection of food, and, in the case of Abu-Jaber and Furiya, coming back to the food of their fami-lies’ culture provides clarity about their ethnic identities and eventu-ally the comfort of home. In Newton’s case, as well, the food she creates becomes her solace and home. Ciezadlo’s work is less of a coming-of-age narrative and more of a memoir about the years she and her Lebanese husband spent as war correspondents in Iraq and Lebanon, in which she uses food to explore Middle Eastern history and culture. Food also signifies home for Ciezadlo, harkening back to her childhood when her mother rarely failed to prepare delicious and nutritious meals, although the family was often on welfare. In Baghdad during the early days of the US occupation of Iraq, Ciezadlo struggles to cook on a hot plate in a hotel room. The next six years are spent living in Beirut, where she chronicles the trials of cooking and eating with meager provisions and unreliable refrigeration due to the civil war.

A coming-of-age narrative infused with both humor and pathos, Abu-Jaber’s The Language of Baklava is a stellar example of the literary use of food practices to interrogate the ethnic “we” through the multi-layered connections among food, memory, and identity. Writing about ethnic autobiographers, Anne Goldman argues that they walk a tight-rope among three often conflicting expectations: they “serve as cultural ambassador[s]” for an audience eager for a peek at “exotic” rites and “for-eign” practices, they respond to pressure from inside their group to “pre-serve memories of a vanishing way of life,” and they seek to convey their

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experience of the world from their ethnic positionality.14 Abu-Jaber walks this tightrope very well. The cultural “we” her memoir invokes presents an alternative vision that subverts Orientalist assumptions about an unchanging, timeless Middle Eastern culture and submissive Arab women, while not shying away from revealing tensions within the group.

Abu-Jaber’s descriptions of eating Arab food convey comfort and clarity about who she is, but they are not nostalgic or romantic represen-tations in which diasporic characters recreate home through “authentic” food. While the memoir is full of warm and loving scenes of her father feeding his nuclear and extended family, it also explores the conflicts diasporic people face about where they belong and who they are. Like all of his Jordanian brothers who immigrated to the United States, Diana’s father has two names, Ghassan and Bud, an Arab name and an Ameri-can name, although Abu-Jaber rarely uses Arab names when referring to her father or her uncles. Bud travels back and forth to Jordan, proclaim-ing each time he arrives that he is home, only to be disappointed when he quickly realizes that Amman does not live up to the city his memory had conjured and that he is no longer who he was when he lived there. Nor is he at home in the United States, always missing Jordan again soon after he returns. Food is the link for Bud and his brothers, who also cook Arab food for their families, but sometimes even the food does not deliver the comfort of “home.”

The narrative in the very first chapter of the memoir focuses on the extent of the change the brothers have undergone since arriving in the United States. At a family gathering at the home of one of the brothers in a rural area, the men decide to butcher a lamb. What had been a reg-ular and festive event in the context of their families in Jordan becomes a disaster when they try to reproduce it years later in the United States. The older brothers decide the youngest should be the one to cut the lamb’s throat and, due to inexperience and perhaps ambivalence about killing the lamb that the children had named and romped with that very morning, he merely wounds the animal. Another brother takes the knife but only manages to slash the lamb’s face while another, in a panic, tries to smash its skull with a rock but misses. Finally, Bud takes the knife and

14. Anne E. Goldman, Take My Word: Autobiographical Innovations of Ethnic American Working Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), xxi.

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successfully kills the lamb, but by that time the meat has been rendered inedible. They would not have the shish kebab “that always reminded the brothers who they used to be — the heat, the spices, the prepara-tion for cooking, and the ritual for eating were all the same as when they were children, eating at their parents’ big table. But trying to kill the lamb showed them: They were no longer who they thought they were” (19). Abu-Jaber is quite clear, too, that they are no longer the men they thought they were. Notions of masculinity are invoked through the character of Sami/Samir, Abu-Jaber’s cousin whose father sent him to the United States to be “cured” of his feminine ways and assumed homosexuality. The slaughter scene ends with Sami/Samir wailing and crying out that he wants to go home to Jordan, a move that indicates the brothers’ inability to perform Jordanian masculinity in the context of the United States.

Women’s issues and vivid representations of strong women perme-ate Abu-Jaber’s memoir, subverting the stereotype of Arab women as sub-servient to men. Her father’s older sister Aya, for example, is an outspo-ken feminist. The family matriarch and healer with expertise in ancient Bedouin remedies, Aya is signaled as the ultimate traditionalist, yet she flouts gender conventions. Aya never married and lives alone in the desert, the much valorized ancestral home of the Abu-Jaber family, in a house built for her by a former lover rather than in the family compound. When the adolescent Diana resists her father’s authority, he threatens to send her to Jordan to live with Aya who, he says, would teach her to be a good Arab woman. Aya arrives unexpectedly at the Abu-Jaber home in the United States, but it is to save Diana from Bud rather than to reform Diana. A wonderful cook, Aya proposes to Diana that they bake des-serts together, and Diana agrees only if they don’t cook Arab food, which Diana has rejected just as she defies her father’s authority. Aya agrees, saying she doesn’t like Arab food either, except for baklava. For days Aya teaches Diana feminist lessons while they cook, saying for exam-ple, “Never let anyone tell you what to say or feel or think. No exceptions” (188). Directly challenging the patriarchal family, she advises Diana to be suspicious of men and to marry if she wants to, but that she should not

“have babies unless it is absolutely necessary” (emphasis in original) (186). Cooking itself, Aya asserts, is dangerous for women: “Food is not sweet-ness and families and little flying hearts … . Food is aggravation and too much work and hurting your back and trapping the women inside like

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slaves” (189). The baklava they bake is, however, divine, and Diana dubs the recipe for it “Poetic Baklava.”

A figure who subverts assumptions about Arab women, Aya defies her brother by telling him she will never speak to him again if he ever thinks of sending Diana to Jordan. She also questions the authenticity of Jordanian food by suggesting that baklava’s origins may be in Anatolia. We also learn from Aya that the Arab pronunciation for this iconic pastry is baklawa rather than the Greek baklava, the latter being the spelling Abu-Jaber uses in the title of the book, a move that attests to the com-plexity of Middle Eastern cultures. A food writer, Abu-Jaber is most cer-tainly aware that ownership of cultural forms is difficult, if not impossi-ble, to determine in the wake of hundreds of years of forced migrations caused by empire and war. Some of these disputes are now being adju-dicated legally. Various schemes of geographic indications for food and agricultural products, recently introduced by the European Union and the World Trade Organization, designate particular regions, states, or nations as being the originators of a specialty food and often assign legal ownership of the name of a food product, but those judgments do not end disputes. Baklava does not have a protected geographic indication, but the use of the Greek spelling in the title of a book that focuses on Jor-danian-American identity signals these conflicts.

While Abu-Jaber’s narrative includes vivid portraits of women as well as men, she tells us little about her mother. We know she is a white American whose ethnic heritage — Irish, German, perhaps Swiss or Dutch —is of little importance to her identity. We also know she grew up without a father, sharing a room with her mother in an extended family home. She has a master’s degree and she works outside the home, but she is never represented as confronting her husband, even over the move and possible relocation to Jordan when the children are young, although Abu-Jaber hints that her mother is uncomfortable in Amman. Nor does she intervene when Bud does not allow Diana to be alone with boys when she is a teenager. About halfway through the book, Abu-Jaber describes her mother as “the voice of sanity in the family—for which I love her beyond all reckoning” (237). We also learn that her father’s constant yearning for Jordan causes her mother pain that “pulled at the seams of their marriage, the very fabric of our family life” (236). Abu-Jaber, who is excellent at conveying her father’s conflict, does not tell

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us anything beyond this sentence about how her mother might have experienced that pain.

While Abu-Jaber’s mother is practical, she is not depicted as being particularly nurturing, nor is she a cook. Bud is the cook for the family, and most of the recipes in the book reference him. This representation subverts the stereotypically romantic notion, so common in food writ-ing, of mothers as naturalized nurturers passing recipes and food lore down to their daughters.

Abu-Jaber’s handling of her coming to consciousness about race, on the other hand, is both vivid and complex. It is told through her brief friendship with Bennett, the son of an English diplomat when Diana was eight years old and Bud has taken the family to live in Amman because they have become “too Americanized.” Crumpets, Bennett tells her, are his favorite food, but he says, “one cannot get a proper crumpet in a land like Jordan. Father says. Not now and not ever” (43). “Native” food, Bennett says, is “dirty” and must be avoided. Realizing that he is talk-ing about the food her father lovingly cooks for the family, Diana recalls having “a sick, disloyal feeling float in my center” (49). But Bennett has the allure of a scooter, something Diana has never seen, and she begins to spend her time with him, giving up her Jordanian friends, even Hisham, who until that time had been her best friend.

Away from Amman for a few days, Diana returns to the city craving Jordanian gum, and when she goes to the store to get some she runs into her old friends. She and Hisham go to Diana’s house and encounter Ben-nett in the courtyard. Demonstrating that he has already internalized assumptions about Arab male predatory behavior and exercising his first-world male entitlement, Bennett acts as Diana’s protector. “Don’t touch her! … Do you live here? I don’t believe so! This is our courtyard—not your courtyard …. I think you’d better get out of here” (emphasis in original). When Hisham leaves, Bennett tells Diana that she “doesn’t belong with them! You know that. The sort you are belongs with the sort I am. Like belongs with like. Father says. No in-betweens. The world isn’t meant for in-betweens, it isn’t done. You know that.” When Diana asks him how he knows she belongs with him, he immediately puts his arm next to hers, saying, “Look at the color you are” (49). With her arm next to Bennett’s very light skin, she realizes that she is actually not like him, but neither is she like Hisham. She is an in-between.

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Abu-Jaber also recounts how her family was targeted by the ram-pant anti-Arab racism in the United States following the oil crisis of 1973. Images of terrorists and sheikhs abounded, and the Abu-Jabers were viewed with suspicion by neighbors in the suburbs of Syracuse in upstate New York, where the family settles after living in Jordan for a few years. A simple barbeque in the front yard scandalizes most of the neighbors and makes Diana infamous among her peers. One girl tells her that eating in the front yard is an “unholy disgrace” and that “if your family doesn’t know how to behave, my parents will have to find out about get-ting you out of this neighborhood” (82). The comment is an empty threat, but it instills in Diana profound shame that lasts for many years about being of Jordanian descent. In her characteristic humor, however, Abu-Jaber follows this story with the recipe, “‘Distract the Neighbors’ Grilled Chicken,” which she promises will “fill the neighborhood with a gor-geous scent” (79).

Like many children of immigrants, Diana tries to become as much like her non-ethnic peers as possible throughout her adolescence, and while she eventually comes to accept her Jordanian heritage, her ethnic identity and sense of home remain conflicted into adulthood. While studying in Amman for a year on a Fulbright Student Program, she simul-taneously feels alienated, infuriated, enchanted, and at home, but at the end of the year she eagerly anticipates coming back to the United States. When she does return, however, she is not at all “at home,” and her sense of her Jordanian self is undermined when she is severely criticized by some in the Arab-American community for what they consider to be a negative portrayal of Jordanians in her first novel Arabian Jazz, which had been published while she was in Amman.15 She eventually decides that one need not make a choice for one home over the other, asserting that even while living in one place she can lay claim to the other because both live in her.

The Language of Baklava is a complex representation of an immi-grant father and his first-generation daughter that incorporates gender, ethnicity, race, and their interactions presented in engaging prose that is both moving and often hilarious. The narrative subverts Orientalism and the common notion among many food memoirists that the food of

15. Diana Abu-Jaber, Arabian Jazz (New York: Harcourt, 1993).

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home is simple, unchanging, and restorative. While clarity about her ethnic identity and her home is no longer simply conveyed through a delicious meal cooked by her father, as it was when she was a child, Abu-Jaber is at home and not at home in both Jordan and the United States with the food of Jordan always at the center of her narrative and her life.

Linda Furiya takes up some of the same themes in her Bento Box in the Heartland, an equally effective memoir, albeit one in a very different style. Furiya’s narrative begins with a tale about struggle and survival. When she is six years old, her mother tells her a story about how infants’ futures could be predicted by how well they are able to expel the occa-sional bones in the fish and rice porridge their mothers feed them. Chil-dren who are able to expel the bones would live long successful lives, but those who swallow them would have dim futures. Baffled as to the moral of the tale at the time she heard it, Furiya soon learns that she will have to struggle to expel many fish bones as she navigates the difficult terrain of being the child of Japanese immigrants in the rural Indiana town of Versailles where they are the only Asian family.

A coming-of-age story with a focus on ethnic identity and gender and with race playing a more prominent role than in The Language of Bak-lava, Furiya’s book also addresses class issues, which are missing in Abu-Jaber’s memoir. There are also major differences between the two fami-lies. Abu-Jaber’s narrative is full of extended family gatherings with an excess of food and emotions, particularly from her father and his broth-ers. Most of the Furiyas’ relatives are in Japan, and contact with the few family members in the United States is rare. Moreover, the emotional tone of the memoir is primarily subdued. Furiya acknowledges that her family did not communicate through words, but through actions, telling enigmatic stories, and the sharing of food. We are, however, well aware of Linda’s emotions as she struggles with her fish bones.

Unlike the Abu-Jabers, Furiya’s parents would never have thought of having American names. They are thoroughly Japanese, and though neither have a desire to return to their native land, they have little con-nection to non-Japanese people and US society. Eating Japanese food is a crucial connection to their culture, but essential ingredients for Japa-nese cuisine are not available in rural Indiana, and the possibility of run-ning out of supplies, often sent by relatives in Japan, is a source of enor-mous anxiety. The elder Furiyas’ preoccupation with culturally appropriate food is perhaps exacerbated by both parents’ experience of extreme

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hunger, her mother after the Second World War in Japan and her father’s near starvation when he was in a Russian prison during the Manchurian war. They are ecstatic, then, when they learn about a Japanese grocery store in Chicago, a trip they periodically make despite the long distance, and then in Cincinnati, much closer to their home. It is through visits to these stores, which like many ethnic groceries are de facto community centers, that they meet other Japanese people. Furiya’s descriptions of these much anticipated and festive trips are in sharp contrast to their daily lives of isolation.

Despite the anxiety over procuring food, Linda’s memories of eating with her parents before she entered elementary school convey a sense of plenty and well-being.

These lunches with my parents were magnificent feasts made in our tiny kitchen. The size of a hall closet, the small room became alive during lunchtime, like a living breathing creature with steam puffing from the electric rice cooker, rattling from the simmering pots, and short clipping notes of Mom chopping with her steady hand guiding her nakiri bocho (Japanese vegetable knife). (4)

This scene is contrasted with the school lunchroom, an alien place where, as she explains, her “first notion of how different we really were struck me among the pastel-colored molded trays and long bleached wood tables of the school cafeteria” (3).

She is soon bringing lunch from home like her friends, but that practice has its own hazards. Linda’s obento, a Japanese boxed meal, is filled with rice balls, an apple, and a cookie, unlike the sandwiches in her friends’ lunchboxes. Too mortified to eat the rice balls in front of her friends, she eats the apple and cookie, secretly eating the rice balls in the bathroom. While she is embarrassed by them, rice balls are Lin-da’s favorite food and convey her mother’s love — a bit of the security she feels eating lunches at home with her parents.

Huddled in the pewter-grey toilet stall with the medicinal smell of Lysol, I cradled one of the three firmly packed rice balls in my hands. … My pounding heart steadied a moment as I imagined Mom shaking salt on the palms of her clean wet hands and then pressing and rotating each ball three of four times until it was uniform. (10)

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Eating the rice balls is “empowering and primal, rather than diminish-ing… . I had the sense that if I left one grain uneaten, something inside me would shrivel up and die” (10). When her mother asks if she liked the rice balls, she answers in the affirmative, but conveys neither her embar-rassment nor her sense of invincibility, noting the limitations of their relationship and the distance between the world Linda encounters in school and her mother’s world inside the house.

Being the only Asian girl in the school, Furiya is alone in her confu-sion and conflict about her ethnic and racial identities. Furiya observes, too, that her parents did not instill ethnic pride in their children. It was only when she is eating or later as an adult cooking Japanese food that she experiences a strong and clear connection to her heritage. She also had a brief glimpse of how all of their lives might have been different had her parents not immigrated to the United States when she accompanies her mother on a trip to Japan when she is a young teenager. Seeing her mother’s ease among her family and in her own country begins for her a

“life long journey in search of a home” (173). She first finds that home in the Asian-American community when she moves to San Francisco as a young woman and is exposed for the first time to Asian-American poli-tics and ethnic pride.

While Furiya’s representation of gender is nuanced by ethnicity and racism, her parents’ traditional gender roles also result in her mother’s depression, which is reminiscent of the “problem with no name” made famous by Betty Friedan, although it is exacerbated by the isolation of immigration into an alien culture. During the winter months when she is confined to the house, her usually energetic mother often stays in bed for most of the day. While always preparing an elaborate lunch for her husband, who works at night, as well as the obento he takes to work, she sometimes merely leaves a loaf of bread and sandwich meat on the table for Linda and her brothers’ dinner. When awake she is short tempered and sometimes hits her children. Interestingly, when Furiya asks her parents about this period when she is an adult, neither of them remembers it.

Furiya’s experience of gender is highly racialized. In one of the most powerful scenes in the memoir, gender and race come together at one of the dinner gatherings of the Japanese Americans’ Citizens League at the home of the Unos, a Japanese couple who are regular members of the league. Among the guests of primarily Japanese couples and their children are two white men, Thomas and Bobby, husbands of Japanese women whom

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they met after the war when they were part of US-led reconstruction efforts in Japan. When Thomas and his wife Mochiko arrive at the Unos, he bursts into the room verbally abusing Mochiko, who, he complains, did not have the proper directions to the house, and immediately orders her to get him a beer. During the buffet dinner Linda and her mother hear Thomas and Bobby reminiscing about the Japanese prostitutes they had known, presumably including Mochiko, in vicious racist and sexist language. Linda is outraged at the behavior of the two men and perhaps even more at the women in the kitchen, who are also clearly disturbed by what they hear but do not respond. Linda wants to shake her mother “to break her unreachable silence” (269). But instead she eats a sweet bean-paste dessert, and when Thomas notices Linda’s sensual delight in what she is eating, he pulls his chair closer to her, tells her she should grow her hair out, that she is “such a pretty Japanese doll” (270). When he reaches out to squeeze her shoulder, she, too, is unable to respond and attributes her passivity to being in her parents’ milieu.

I could feel the intent behind his touch as I recoiled. My strong talk and willfulness had left me… . If I had been with my friends, I would not have hesitated to create a scene. But in my parents’ world there were hidden implications, hurt feelings, and bruised egos. I was at a loss. I glanced across the room and caught a reflection of myself in the mirror of a tall wood curio cabinet. My eyes shone with the con-trolled fear of a dog that wants to get away from a stranger. In the mirror I saw the identical mask of resignation I had seen on Mochiko and my mother and many of the other women that afternoon. As the cloying sweet beans coated my mouth like chalk dust, I realized I would do nothing, and that he knew it. (270)

Gender is clearly inextricably entwined with race and sexism interlaced with racism, with consequences transmitted intergenerationally and requiring an enormous struggle to overcome.

The racism Furiya experiences comes from both women and men. She recounts in excruciating detail the racism of Mrs. Anders, a woman from the church that sponsors a Vietnamese refugee family to settle in Versailles. Rather than easing the enormously difficult emigration from Vietnam to the United States by settling refugees in groups, US govern-ment policy required that the refugees be scattered around the country in the mistaken hope that their isolation from other Vietnamese would accelerate assimilation. Assuming that the two Asian families would

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have much in common, Mrs. Anders arranges a meeting between them and is incredulous when the Dong children have to translate from Viet-namese to English so their mother can communicate with Mrs. Furiya. With Mrs. Anders in the room, the conversation is stilted, but when she excuses herself to go to the bathroom, Linda’s mother immediately asks Mrs. Dong if she has rice. “This four-letter question somehow closed what-ever distance had existed between my mother and Mrs. Dong. Mom knew how searching for and making familiar food was a common denomina-tor to all newcomers to America” (184). Mrs. Dong goes home with the address of the Asian grocery store in Cincinnati and the leftover rice cakes.

For Linda, however, the Dongs’ presence in her school confronts her with her own Asian identity. Initially happy to have another Asian girl to relate to, she befriends Tam, even defending her against teasing and racial slurs. Very soon, however, Linda cuts off the friendship, fear-ing it will jeopardize her own status, particularly when some students begin to mistake her for Tam. Seeing how people respond to the Dongs, Linda gains insight into her own denial of her racial experiences. She recognizes her mother’s “immigrant vulnerability” and her own “hidden struggles as an Asian in the white bread part of America” (188). She had assumed that she could be like everyone else if only she learned to play the part well enough, but she is caught up short when she sees her reflec-tion in a store window and “wondered who that Asian girl was” (189).

All of the authors in this review essay address gender and race, and, while we know their class backgrounds, only Furiya explores class. She learns about her father’s poverty as a child, the abuse he suffered when he and his sister were sent to work for a family that treated them like slaves, and she also knows that her mother was the privileged daughter of the owner of a rice shop in Tokyo. While her father makes enough money for her mother to be a full-time homemaker, he has to work two jobs, neither of which is white collar. It is only when Linda visits her father’s upper-middle-class brother George, who does have an American name, and his family in Brooklyn Heights, however, that she becomes aware of the impact of class on her life. Her uncle introduces her to a world of expansiveness, sophistication, and privilege, one that both intimidates and entrances her. Her uncle, his Scandinavian wife, and their daugh-ters encourage her to form her own ideas and voice them, to challenge authority, even that of adults. Their way of life is in sharp contrast to her parents’ expectation that she and her brothers obey them without

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question and her parents’ reticence to express emotion, responses that intertwine culture and class. In the context of her uncle’s family, she is able, for the first time, to express her rage at the racism she experiences in Versailles and her anger at her parents for living in a place where she is so racially isolated. Her uncle and cousins not only validate her feel-ings, but her uncle suggests she apply to New York University, saying she could live with them while attending school. Linda becomes aware of both the economic and cultural limitations of her parents when her father says he can neither pay the tuition at NYU, nor would he allow her to go as far away as New York.

During lunch on a visit home while in her senior year at Indiana’s Purdue University, she reflects on the place of food in her relationship with her parents, realizing that “eating had been my family’s commu-nion. We communicated not through direct words, but through actions and food. When I left for college Mom didn’t tell me she would miss me with tears. Instead she packed a box of rice balls into my pile of belong-ings” (305). Yet it is only many years later, after she has lived in many cities in the United States, Canada, and China, that she is able to come to terms with her own inability to openly communicate with her par-ents, expressing neither her anger at them nor her love for them. Her

“inadequacies and anger ebbed though the years; rising in their place were humility and strong values that guided me … toward a place where I could finally let go and treasure and honor the uniqueness of my child-hood and having grown up in a Japanese household in America’s heart-land” (307). This ending comes abruptly. Furiya’s narrative is excellent about bringing us into her process of coming to consciousness about race, gender, and class through high school, yet we know little about how she got to her place of contentment in adulthood. But perhaps that is another book.

A decade older than the other authors in this review, Judith New-ton’s A Taste of Home is the most explicitly feminist memoir considered here. She positions herself within gendered, raced, and class-specific contexts. It is not, however, a tale of women’s solidarity but rather a chronicle of recovery from the psychological damage perpetrated by her narcissistic mother and sexually inappropriate father. When she is four years old, her mother learns that she and a boy her age had shown each other their genitals. Her mother’s reaction is to tell her daughter that she was mistaken in thinking Judith was a good girl and dissolves into

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tears. The four-year-old Judith blames herself for her mother’s distress and remains convinced for most of her life that there is something mon-strous about her.

Newton’s journey to health is abetted by religious faith and com-munity, psychoanalysis, intellectual work, and the social movements of the time, including the free speech and civil rights movements that she encounters while she is in graduate school at Berkeley, and most importantly the women’s movement. She also consistently found solace through cooking, which staved off alienation and helped her to create a sense of home. Cookbooks, she says were “agents of my recovery—from childhood misery, from profound self-loss, from my fear, even as an adult, that the world would never seem like home” (2).

The narrative proceeds chronologically, with the sections of the memoir after she leaves her family home organized around decades and the cookbooks she was using at the time: Mastering the Art of French Cooking for the sixties, Time-Life Foods of the World for the seventies, and Moosewood for the eighties and the nineties. Most chapters in each sec-tion are named after a dish or a food featured in the chapter with reci-pes included at the end of the chapter. While this organizational strat-egy works well most of the time, it sometimes seems like a straightjacket, with material not pertinent to the main ideas in the chapter included to make the recipe work.

Newton’s description of the first meal she cooks from Child’s book— an ambitious four-course feast prepared for her friends from graduate school on the occasion of her decision to study for a PhD in English —is used as an occasion to reflect on her differentiation from her mother and her own growth. As she prepares each course, she notes how her approach is different from her mother’s, and, when the meal is presented to her friends and they respond favorably, she says, “My life as an adult had officially begun” (81). Years later she observes what she had not noticed at the time: just like her mother, she was equating cooking a meal with becoming an adult.

Like Abu-Jaber, Newton subverts the notion of a romantic mother-daughter bond around food. While Newton describes her mother’s

“cooking and baking as the most reliable form of nurturing my mother did provide” (7), we have no evidence that she felt nurtured by her moth-er’s cooking. In fact, when she is at graduate school and is “exhilarated” by intellectual stimulation, she tells us she “never missed [her] mother’s

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cooking. Books fed my hunger” (53). Further, although the young Judith wants to learn to cook, her mother neither allows her daughter to cook with her, nor gives her accurate recipes when she asks for them, omit-ting or changing an ingredient, a mark of the withholding that charac-terizes her relationship to her daughter. Nor does Newton experience the dinner table as a place of nurturing. Self-absorbed, the parents rarely relate to their children, and Newton’s father’s eating habits, a harbinger of what would later become sexually inappropriate behavior, disturb her so much she begs her mother to let her and her brother eat separately. The mother complies without any discussion. Only Thanksgiving din-ners are memorable. The menu is not the usual turkey with trimmings, however, but a smorgasbord of desserts eaten while playing cards.

Like many young people in the 1960s, Newton’s political conscious-ness was shaped by the social movements around her, first by the Free Speech Movement and then by her growing awareness of racism, sparked by a 1962 New Yorker essay by James Baldwin about losing his faith and eventually finding new meaning in his life through his deep commit-ment to Black freedom. Having also lost the Christian faith that had given her some comfort when she was thirteen years old, Newton finds deep personal resonance in Baldwin’s discussion of transforming his faith in Jesus into a passion for social justice. She is also profoundly moved by his powerful writing about the effects of racism on Black people, the first time she had ever encountered such writing. She is, she says, “born again, and the agent of my transformation had been a gay black man sev-enteen years my senior. In giving me a purpose, Baldwin had made the world seem more like home” (63).

By the late 1960s she is a young faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania, and when a well-qualified woman professor is denied tenure she joins with other untenured faculty to write a letter of protest. Soon after, all of the signatories of the letter are informed that their con-tracts will not be renewed. Newton shares the frustrations of the other young faculty members, but when she joins a women’s group she comes to realize, for the first time, “how the world I lived in limited women and put them down in regular, suddenly visible ways. Although I still felt bad about myself, the way I saw the world and thought about myself had changed. I was no longer just a victim of my own neuroses, and I was not alone. Born again — the third time around” (124).

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Like many other women whose consciousness was raised in the 1970s, she comprehends many things she previously neither understood nor could articulate: her fear of becoming a wife, despite her joy at mar-rying Dick, the man she deeply loved; her confusion when her mentor, upon learning she was married, advises her to write novels instead of seeking a faculty position; her outrage when the department chair at the University of Pennsylvania tells her they had not responded to her job application because she was married and they worried that she would have children. It is also through her involvement in the women’s move-ment and her growing awareness of patriarchy that Newton is able to begin to trust women.

Newton does not abandon her commitment to ending racism when she finds feminism. One of her first acts as director of Women and Gender Studies at the University of California, Davis, is to contact the directors of the Ethnic Studies Programs to ask them about their goals, offer her sup-port, and discuss ways their programs might collaborate. The program directors and sometimes the faculty begin to meet regularly, often over a meal. Eventually, the four ethnic studies programs (African and African American Studies, Asian American Studies, Chicana/o Studies, Native American Studies) and Women and Gender Studies are reorganized into one subdivision in the College of the Humanities. What might have been a disaster turns out to be a great success. Once housed in their own building, which Newton likens to a neighborhood, faculty collaboration across programs greatly increases. Women and Gender Studies’ involve-ment in this collaboration would not have been possible were it not for Newton’s deep commitment to antiracism and her growing awareness of her white privilege.

Newton attributes the success of these efforts partially to the meals the directors and the faculty periodically share, Newton doing the bulk of the cooking and hosting the gatherings at her home. Through the act of feeding people good food she wants to develop good feelings among the various groups, which she hopes they could “draw on in the future when the inevitable jealousies and tensions arose.” Extolling cooking further, she writes,

Cooking … [is] an emblem of domestic work that makes romance and revolution possible. Eating what is cooked and served with goodwill evokes one of our first experiences of feeling at home in the world,

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the experience of being fed by another human being. That is one reason cooking and eating with others can heal the adult self, one reason that it can so easily make us feel connected to another person, a family, a culture, a political community. (279)

And so, Newton creates a home for these programs partially through the giving of food. Perhaps because food has created a psychological home for her, and she gives these meals willingly, she does not ask the fem-inist questions of who is doing the cooking for whom and under what conditions.

Newton is the only author reviewed here to addresses LGBT issues, which she does through her relationship with her husband Dick, who admits and accepts his homosexuality after many years of trying var-ious “cures.” While her portrayal of their futile attempts to have a sex life, his struggle to come out, and his death from AIDS are heart wrench-ing, there is much missing here too. We don’t know how that experience changed her larger views on homosexuality in the way we know how her involvement in antiracism shapes her as the director of women’s studies.

But Tasting Home has much to recommend it. Using an explicit intersectional feminist approach, the memoir examines psychological damage and recovery through psychoanalysis as well as healing through consciousness of her social positionality as a result of her involvement in social movements and personal relationships. Her journey to health is charted through the cooking and the giving of food, the means through which she created home.

The only memoir among the four in this review that is not a coming-of-age narrative is Annia Ciezadlo’s A Day of Honey. Ciezadlo’s memoir focuses on her experiences during the six years she spent in the war zones of Iraq and Lebanon and uses food practices as a way to under-stand and explore the people and cultures in these countries in conflict, exploring changes wrought by war and displacement and struggles to maintain some semblance of family and community life. She exposes

the shadow conflict … the slow relentless destruction of everyday civilian life: The children can’t go to school. The pregnant woman can’t give birth at a hospital. The farmer can’t plow his fields. The musician can’t play his guitar. The professor can’t teach her class. For civilians, war becomes a relentless accumulation of can’ts (empha-sis in original). (8)

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Following the food has for Ciezadlo been a way to understand the world and, relying on the feminist mantra she learned from her mother, “the personal is political,” she explores the private sphere to understand the public one.16 Like the other authors, however, Ciezadlo also cooks to create home, even under the very difficult conditions of war.

Accompanying her husband, Mohammed Bazzi, to Baghdad in 2003 when he is named Middle Eastern bureau chief for Newsday, Ciezadlo covers the US occupation of Iraq as a freelance journalist for the Chris-tian Science Monitor. Later, when they move to Beirut and the 2006 war breaks out in Lebanon, she writes for both the Monitor and the New Republic. We learn with her about the histories and cultures of Iraq and Lebanon and the politics of the region, often through an exploration of the history of the food, all told with descriptions of sumptuous meals.

Not all the food is wonderful, however, and Ciezadlo explores that as well. When she and Mohammed are living in a hotel outside of the Green Zone in Baghdad, they eat at restaurants where the food is consis-tently bad. A running joke among their associates, the most severe crit-icism coming from other Middle Easterners, is that there is no such thing as Iraqi cuisine. As a Midwesterner who suffers the supercilious New Yorkers’ mistaken assumption that the standard American fare she was raised on and loves is all processed, unhealthy, and unappetizing, Cieza-dlo is suspicious of these assessments and sets out to learn about Iraqi cuisine. What she finds is that the very first recorded recipes were Iraqi, written on clay tablets dating from 1600 BCE, and that some of them resemble the Lebanese stews she would later learn to cook from Moham-med’s mother. She also learns that the ubiquitous hummus, kebab, and tabouli —what had come to be identified as Iraqi cuisine —were brought to Iraq only in the mid-twentieth century by Palestinian refugees and other migrants from the Levant.

Turning to contemporary cultures of food, she uses her journalistic skills to seek out Iraqi cuisine. She asks all the Iraqis she knows to name their favorite dish and to her surprise they all choose masquf, freshly caught carp-like fish grilled over a fruitwood fire until it is golden, eaten

16. See Ann Marie Awad, “Democracies of Bread: Ann Marie Awad Interviews Annia Ciezadlo,” Guernica/A Magazine of Art and Politics, August 15, 2011, http://www.guernicamag.com/interviews/eating_baghdad_annia_ciezadlo_ 8_15_11.

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with flat bread, chopped onions, parsley, and tomatoes. Everyone she asks also tells her that masquf is “the flavor of freedom” (93). Searching for the origin of masquf, she finds it cannot be definitively traced and that the lore about it is contradictory, reflecting the long and complex history of the region.

Some people said masquf was imported by the Ottomans. Others maintained it was a Babylonian tradition, thousands of years old. Muslims claimed it was a Christian dish (the Christian affinity for fish being well known). Christians whispered that it was a specialty from the old Jewish quarter (the Jewish affinity for fish being well known). Some believed it had come from the Mandeans (the Man-dean love for the rivers and its waters being well known). (93)

Deciding that she must taste the dish that held such a powerful place in the Iraqi imaginary, Ciezadlo searches for the best masquf, and her quest takes her to parts of Baghdad she might not have otherwise known. While waiting the hour it takes to prepare the dish, Ciezadlo wanders the neighborhoods, streets such as Abu Nusaw, named after a bisexual eighth-century poet, where intellectuals and artists gather, gender conventions are flaunted, and menus include dishes from villages. Emblematic of the complexity of cultures in regions where rulers and boundaries have changed and populations forced to migrate, Ciezadlo comes to understand that

the beauty of masquf lay in its intersecting lines of descent —in the very fact that I couldn’t pin it down … it was a national dish, the cui-sine of a place and a time where identities — ethnic, sectarian, ideo-logical — dissolved, at least for the golden hour of waiting for your fish to be prepared… . What mattered was that everybody thought of it as someone else’s dish and yet also entirely their own. (157)

In addition to her exploration of food, Ciezadlo’s memoir focuses on women’s stories. Like Abu-Jaber, Ciezadlo undercuts Western assump-tions about Arab women, recounting Iraq’s history as one of the most gender-liberal in the region and contrasting it with both Saddam Hus-sein’s growing gender conservatism and the occupation forces’ duplicity in using gender as a reason for the invasion. When she and her transla-tor, Roaa, travel the dangerous road to a women’s center, established by occupation forces, to interview the Iraqi women working there, she finds

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they are under siege. They are receiving death threats and are completely isolated because the roads, including the one Ciezadlo and Roaa have just traveled, have become very dangerous. Only two weeks before their visit, Fern Holland, a young American woman who had been working with women’s centers, and her assistants had been shot and killed on that road. Ciezadlo exposes the sham of the US government’s touting wom-en’s freedom, establishing the centers after they cancelled elections and not providing support or protection for them. She has great respect, on the other hand, for the bravery of Iraqi women and their creative resis-tance as their lives become more and more restricted.

She explores, too, the gender equality in her relationship with Moham-med, challenging the stereotype of Muslim men being universally patri-archal. For her trip to the women’s center, as well as in other situations, Ciezadlo chooses to wear a hijab, and finds herself “in the feministically awkward position of arguing with Mohammed.” He does not want her to wear what he considers a mark of women’s oppression, but she argues,

“I needed the damn thing for safety” (126). For political and emotional reasons, Ciezadlo and Mohammed are opposed to marriage, but they eventually have a civil ceremony in New York officiated by a Jewish les-bian judge who Ciezadlo had interviewed for a story on domestic vio-lence. Back in Beirut, Mohammed consistently rejects his parents’ pleas for a Shiite wedding, but he eventually relents, and Annia agrees, when his ailing father refuses to kiss Annia because without a marriage contract (known as katab al-kitaab), they are not kin and, although he loves her, he is forbidden to kiss a woman who is not a relative. The ritual, performed between the couple and not requiring a witness, consists of the woman saying she will marry the man and the man accepting her as his wife. It also requires naming the amount of the dowry. Ciezadlo’s description of the playful bargaining between the couple over the amount Annia is worth is presented with humor, demonstrating again that Mohammed had overcome some of the gendered conventions of his upbringing.

The recipes Ciezadlo chooses to include in her memoir are not the usual fare, but what she learns from Umm Hassane, Mohammed’s mother. The older woman is neither a gentle teacher, nor is it an easy time for anyone in Beirut. The Lebanese civil conflict is raging, relatives are scat-tered around the country, and many of their houses have been destroyed. Umm Hassane’s husband has recently died, and she has been in the hos-pital with a kidney infection. Food is difficult to obtain and electricity

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unreliable, making the storage of perishables for more than a few hours impossible. Umm Hassane focuses her distress on the inedibility of their meals, often consisting merely of hummus and cans of tuna fish pro-cured from the meager supplies available.

Umm Hassane wants to cook, but even the simplest meal is difficult to prepare, and time for cooking is scarce, as both Annia and Moham-med are reporting on the war. But one free morning Annia asks Umm Hassane to show her how to make batata wa bayd, Lebanese scrambled eggs with potatoes and onions. Ciezadlo’s description of this first cook-ing lesson debunks any notion of the warm and nurturing intergenera-tional transmission of food practices. Umm Hassane agrees to teach Annia, but she is impatient with Annia’s lack of knowledge of Lebanese cooking and her insistence on quantifying measurements and timing. Annoyed when Annia asks her how long to cook the onions and potatoes, Umm Hassane dramatically storms out of the kitchen but comes back just as they are ready for the next step, ordering Annia to taste them, the only sure way, she says, to know when they are done. The language barrier leads to countless misunderstandings, but the scene is related with humor and laced with the love between them.

I imagine that there were many other cooking lessons because most of the nineteen recipes in A Day of Honey are for dishes I have not seen in other Middle Eastern cookbooks. Ciezadlo brings her skills as a writer to the recipes as well, speaking directly to the reader offering advice, sugges-tions for variations, and sometimes background on the dish or an ingredient.

Writing in the midst of war zones in the Middle East, a region where cultural boundaries were irrevocably breached when Western powers created nations out of disparate peoples, Ciezadlo explores interactions among cultures, taking on the complexity of Middle Eastern history and politics, always putting gender at the center in a beautifully written and thoroughly engaging book.

Grounding their narratives in food, a symbolic and daily material practice, these four memoirs complicate and deepen our understanding of intersectionality. We can see into the complexities of the interaction of social locations through the authors’ detailing of the ways in which food practices illuminate and assuage fraught racial/ethnic, gender, and class identities and their interactions. In addition, they demonstrate that food can provide a reliable means to understand the world in all its com-plexity. While there are major differences among these authors’ lives and

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their memoirs, they all demonstrate the ways that cooking and eating can provide a consistent sense of home for women who have chosen to break boundaries. These feminist food memoirs cook up lives that are both delectable and intellectually provocative.