Description: Most of us think cookbooks are just collections of recipes to feed the body. Janet Theophano shows that cookbooks provide food for the mind and soul as well. In this innovative culinary and cultural history, she explores two centuries of cookbooks and the women who wrote them -- from 18th-century handwritten "receipt books" and the first standardized guides to "domestic science" of the 19th century to bestsellers by Alice Waters, Madeline Kamman, Julia Child, and Lynn Rossetto Kasper. She ranges widely from A Date with a Dish, the African-American classic, to a 1950s, U.S.-Chinese cookbook featuring a recipe called "Bomb Japan." Here, a cookbook is a memoir, a diary, a record of life that not only reflects ideals of family and womanhood, but also gives voice to women to express and fulfil themselves.

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