Read on Twitter
I ardently want the "memoir-with-recipes" form to vanish, especially for women food writers where recipes trivialize by transforming narratives of experience into service journalism. Meanwhile, @cettedrucks adds good points about diversity and privilege. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/voraciously/wp/2020/08/10/a-spate-of-new-food-memoirs-promised-something-different-but-the-lack-of-diversity-is-the-same-old-story/
I could be wrong, but I don't recall any recipes in Kitchen Confidential (2012). But Comfort Me With Apples (2001), arguably one of the earliest food memoirs, did have recipes so I wonder to what extent that established for form and associated it closely with female voice.
I just read @dashandbella's new memoir, and the publisher mercifully put the recipes (all 50 pages of them) at the end so you could easily skip. But the net result is like two books stitched together: a memoir that's spare and searching, and a cookbook that's just — a cookbook.
My friend Teresa Lust has written two memoirs-with-recipe; her new one's A Blissful Feast. Her recipes and essays are tightly woven together, but even in this more successful form, I don't feel they add narrative dimension. Instead, they take the reader *out* of the narrative.
