Eat My Words: Reading Women's Lives Through the Cookbooks They Wrote

I thoroughly enjoyed this book and reading the author comments. Good reading and great insight into the daily lives of it's heroins!

Eat My Words isn't just a recipe collection; nor is it a survey of cookbook history: it reads between the lines of recipes through the ages to consider the women who developed them, from 17th century English estate housekeeping books to primers which encouraged women to educate themselves. Eat My Words is very highly recommended as an excellent blend of culinary history and biography.

I picked up this book off the shelf because I am very interested in cooking and collect cookbooks. It wasn't light reading, but was very interesting. Like the women the author discusses I too collect recipes from family, friends and other sources to make a cookbook of my own. Mine is in 3 separate binders, a modern equivelant to those that women have been making for hundreds of years. The discussions of women, food and the preparation of it were interesting. I was motivated to weed out my own cookbooks and reorganize my own recipes to better represent who I am and how my family eats. It is a legacy of my own to hand down to my own children. A scrapbook of our eating habits.