The Lady's Rhetoric Cookbook

The Lady’s Rhetoric Cookbook Hannah Hannah McKeating McKeating

Letter from the Editor:

Since women have been writing, they’ve been writing about what they know. While admittedly they’ve been writing for a much shorter period of time than men, they nonetheless came on the scene with something important to say; and, by god, are we going to listen.

When we look back through history we can see what women spoke life into. Grounded in their own lives, caring for others--especially by way of feeding others-- was and still is an act of building ethos. In creating this cookbook, I’ve in turn had many meaningful conversations with my grandmother, who reflects a similar point of view. She said, “My Mom was an amazing cook and other women would give my Mom respect when it came to women’s groups because she was considered accomplished as a wife and mother. I know that sounds sad, but that was that time of life. Women weren’t typically educated and cooking was a conversation tool.” Personally, I don’t find it sad at all, I see that as evidence of women’s intellectual and social power. Those recipes that changed hands between women in my great-grandmother’s life affected everyone around them, whether they knew it or not.

While many of the women included in this cookbook were advocating for a woman’s right to be educated, be heard, and be considered an equal, many of them found food and other things deemed as Women’s Work to be a place for them to start. Because they were excluded from the educated community, they nevertheless found ways to educate each other from what they experienced in their daily lives. Above all, I think that’s really, really cool.

While this project started out as a fun little hobby for me to do during the shelter-in-place of the Coronavirus pandemic, it has become something much bigger. While I’ll be speaking about it in more depth later, this cookbook has connected me to a much larger community of women in my own personal past and women writers that endured hardships so I could sit on a couch that I own, husbandless, and write a cookbook for a grad school class that is taught by a woman and is attended in majority by women. This cookbook now has become more of a love letter to these women.

In this book, you’ll find a bit of theory about what food means to Margery Kempe, Sor Juana de la Cruz, Virginia Woolf, and myself interspersed with recipes from my own family and friend’s families. I include these recipes so they can do what they’ve always done: share knowledge with other women.

Please enjoy and share at will. I hope, if nothing else, you find something delicious buried in these pages.

As a famous woman once said, “Let them eat cake!”

With Love, Hannah McKeating

Table of Contents: Hospitality: An Introduction

pg. 1

Margery Kempe: Food as Radical Love

pg. 3

Luise’s Duisberger Köpi-Kuchen

pg. 7

Sor Juana: the Philosophy of Food

pg. 9

Ale’s Chile Rellenos pg. 13 Virginia Woolf: Food We Deserve

pg. 15

Alfreda’s Shrimp and Grits

pg. 19

Hospitality Rhetorics Today

pg. 21

Hannah: Food as Kinship

pg. 23

Flora’s Okra and Tomatoes

pg. 26

Theory of Hospitality

Something that has both historically and presently sets women’s rhetoric apart from men’s is hospitality. While men may engage in hospitality rhetorics, women have had to find alternative routes for building their ethos for their audience than men do. What we’ve seen in the canon of women’s rhetoric is that women speak from a place of liminality. Their exclusion from education, the academy, and writing spaces at large means that women walk a trepidatious tightrope of performativity, persuasion, and self-representation that has heavier consequences and more severe risks than men do when speaking.

But women are smart. Throughout time, they’ve found innovative ways to walk the tightrope of liminality and be successful. These women created a new ethos by providing a different means of persuasion through contexts that were unique to women. This includes the places that made up their daily lives which were different than that of a man’s, i.e. the kitchen, parlor, nursery, garden, and their own bodies. Women also found ways to be persuasive without words that made sense with their unique ethos: hospitality.

As Sean Barnette describes in his essay “Dorothy Day’s Voluntary Poverty,” hospitality rhetoric means “An ecology of objects and practices involved in offering guests space, shelter, food, and other materials. These objects and practices allow hospitality to do rhetorical work” (112). Women’s hospitality, then, affects people physically as well as intellectually. Through the lens of Kenneth Burke’s definition of Identification, or constructing similarities in a group of participants to build ethos, we can see how women’s hospitality rhetoric is unique to them. By using materials and spaces to create a

sense of similarity between speaker and audience, women are able to give their audience a sense of togetherness and understanding, allowing them to persuade others by changing the identity of the speaker to someone that belongs not on the outside of the conversation but inside a community of people with a similar ethos.

In this cookbook, I’ll be focusing on food as an act of hospitality rhetoric.

Women unsurprisingly talk about food a lot-- our hands and bodies being the source of food and the creator of food that perpetuates life-- and commonly find it as a source of inspiration. Women feeding others and doing it well fits with their ethos; we’re commonly measured as mothers, wives, and daughters by our ability to cook. I have yet to encounter someone who doesn’t have memories of their mother cooking that they consider significant: what your mom makes on a rainy day, what she makes on your birthday, when and if she fails at cooking-- it’s all meaningful.

I’ll be focusing on Margery Kempe, Sor Juana de la Cruz, and Virginia Woolf because they all speak about food in a variety of ways. Margery Kempe talks about food as an act of radical love. Sor Juana talks about food philosophically. Virginia Woolf talks about food to demonstrate the disproportional privilege between men and women. Food in all of their circumstances reflects on their ethos as women and shows us exactly what food can mean.

“ If it were your will, Lord, I would for your love, and for the magnifying of your name, be chopped up as small as meat for the pot.�

Food as Radical Love

For women writers/speakers, food is a connection to life, an act of service and devotion, and a source of inspiration. In Margery Kempe’s Book there is no exception. As exemplified in her autobiography, Margery ’s domestic life and spiritual life are inseparable; she uses food as a bridge between the two lives to sum up this experience on a plate. Margery Kempe’s life--from what we can gather-- teeters between a thin line of insanity and radicalism resulting in her being written off as a medieval, bible-thumping loon that probably wasn’t much fun to be around. From the text, it seems as though this modern perspective isn’t too far off from how she was perceived by those around her at the time, either. I believe it’s possible to argue, though, that Margery deserves a break. Extreme? Certainly. However, she found an exigence to speak at a time when uneducated women were all but silent.

Margery used food to show her radical love for God, her body, and her community.

Religions have long understood the symbolism in the acts of feeding, cooking, and eating. Specifically in Christianity, food itself is steeped in ritualism, whether it be food as Jesus’ body, food that has been prayed over, or fasting. The Bible also tells many stories about food that demonstrate holiness, like manna falling from heaven in a time of desperation, 12 loaves of bread and 2 fishes feeding 4,000, and turning water into wine. From the Christian perspective, food is a lifesource, and not just any lifesource, but one given to us as a gesture of benevolence from On High. Food is meaningful.

In Margery ’s Book, food has not lost it’s symbolic meaning, however it is incorporated in with the material aspects of Margery ’s life that commonly illustrate her daily life as a mother and wife. Food is used by Margery to demonstrate both a sense of normalcy and divinity, a multi-layered sign that conveys her devotion to Christ, her humanity, and her service to comfort others.

Margery shows her devotion to Christ through her not-eating. Aside from multiple accounts of her fasting, in her autobiography, God commands her to abstain from meat and only partake in the eucharist, saying, “Thou must forsake that thou loves best in this world, and that is eating of flesh.

And instead of that flesh thou shalt eat my flesh and blood, that is

the very body of Christ in the Sacrament of the Altar. This is my will, daughter, that thou receive my body every Sunday, and I shall flow so much grace in thee that the world shall marvel in thereof. Thou shalt eat and gnaw of the sacred fig of the world as any rat gnaweth the stockfish.” Margery ’s adherence to this decree from God would’ve been more than noticeable in medieval times. As Mellisa Raine describes in her essay, ‘Fals Flesch’: Food and Embodied Piety in Margery Kempe, Margery ’s refusal to eat meat was particularly performative. Raine says, “Margery ’s refusal to eat meat would have been easily perceived at the medieval table where most dishes were communal, and where meat was a highly prized component of a meal. While her eucharist consumption was visible at the altar, her abstinence from meat was demonstrated at the many tables at which we are told Margery dined” (17). In this way, Margery used food to serve and obey God, certainly, but also to symbolically demonstrate her devotion to those around her, who would’ve perceived such an act as radicalism.

Margery also used food for more simple reasons: sometimes she was hungry. Margery mentions food in passing throughout her autobiography. An occasional mention of a cake or bottle of beer is scattered amongst the details of daily life, however it’s usually in tandem with a vision or other display of her devotion to God. One of the most prominent examples is a moment she describes after one of her first visions/conversations with God. Margery said, “And at noon the creature was stabled in her wits and in her reason as well as her psyche was before, and prayed her husband that she might have the keys of the pantry to take her meat and drink as she had done before… And she took her meat and drink as her bodily strength would serve her and knew her friends and her household and all others that came to her to see how our Lord Jesus Christ had wrought his grace in her.” Margery eating the meal was significant because it was evidence for Margery, both in terms of her sanity and of God’s grace. Margery showing signs of having her “wits stabled” and eating food as she had eaten before was important-- it made those around her believe that it wasn’t simply mental instability that had overcome her, but rather led them to believe the conversation with God was real because of her return to her previous state. Margery committing an act of service to herself--eating and drinking as a way to show her own body radical love-was perceived as the proof that she had been in conversation with Christ.

Her desire to eat wasn’t exactly taken as business as usual by those around her, however. In the same passage, she describes the people’s reaction, say-

ing, “Her maidens and her keepers counseled him that he should deliver her no keys, for they said she would but have away such food as there was, for she was not what she said as they imagine. Nevertheless, her husband, ever having tenderness and compassion of her, commanded they should deliver to her the keys.” Her husband and maidens were concerned that Margery would give the food away because it was a habit of hers. There were many accounts in her autobiography of Margery serving the poor, donating food and drink to them as a Christian duty and act of service. These acts didn’t just take place in real life, they also happened in her Holy Encounters. For instance, in one of Margery ’s visions, she’s at Jesus’s interment speaking to Mother Mary. She says, “The creature thought, when Our Lady was come home and was laid down on a bed, that she made for Our Lady a caudle [a warm, medicinal beverage], and brought it her to comfort her, and then Our Lady said unto her:-- ‘Take it away, daughter. Give me no food, but mine own Child.’

The Creature answered:-- ‘Ah, Blessed Lady, ye must needs comfort yourself and cease of your sorrowing.’” Here Margery explicitly shows us what her cooking is meant to do: comfort those she’s serving. Margery cooks, feeds, and serves those around her as a radical act of love for her community, both the Holy one of her visions and the needy one surrounding her daily life.

Margery ’s acts of radical love through food left impressions on everyone around her. They were commonly seen as a sign of extremism because food is so meaningful. Women and food have a special connection, especially as the first givers of food as mothers and as historically the cooks in the kitchen. Recipes, passed down orally to other women much like the rest of our history, reflect on women’s character, duty, and competence because they so commonly are received as a woman’s radical love.

Luise’s German Beer-Cake, or Duisburger Köpi-Kuchen The ancient and holy rule of healthy living goes: Seven beers equal one meal. And a balanced diet includes three meals a day. But what to do, when your stomach after 14 beers is crying for a solid base that balances the liquid out?

Stop consuming beer? Hah! Not an option! And, thanks to this great recipe, also not a necessity anymore.

Ingredients: 4 Eggs 2 ½ Cups Flour 1 ¾ Cups Sugar 2 tablespoons Baking Powder ½ teaspoon Vanilla Extract Powdered Sugar Fat and Flour for the Form

6 oz Beer (Beer means: König Pilsner; lesser but acceptable alternatives include: Pabst Blue Ribbon; Lone Star; Tecate. Beer does not mean: IPAs; Kölsch; Hefeweizen; anything in a colorful can that smells like flowers)

The complexity of the different steps to achieve the best results here are reflective of the anticipated state of rightful drunkenness on the side of the baker.

Follow carefully: Find ingredients in your/their/someone’s kitchen.

Open the beer. You only need 6oz. Drink the superfluous ounces from bottle or can.

Open another beer. You accidentally drank the whole one before.

This time measure the 6 ounces beforehand in a different receptacle, then drink the rest from bottle or can.

Put ALL ingredients in a huge bowl. You are right, the bowl looks a little like the one your mother used to wash you in as tiny, precious baby. She really loves you. But that is not a reason to cry. Not now.

That is what the oven time is for.

Get the broken egg shells out of the bowl.

Stir! Stir with the anger of thousand gods! Stir all the ingredients into one mass. That is a metaphor, surely. But you should not mind that. You are hungry.

After coating the chosen form for the cake in fat and flour, fill the dough in there.

This is the moment to realize you should have preheated the oven, and you did not. Funny! Put the oven on 350 Degree Fahrenheit and wait. Sit down! You deserve that.

Drink a quick snack beer so time passes quicker.

Wake up! Put filled form in the oven for 40 Minutes.

Do not clean kitchen up! Drink more beers.

After testing the consistency of the cake with a stick-test or knife, you decide when it is done or not. You are a mighty decider. Get the cake out!

Eat and enjoy!

Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz

Philosophy of Food Unlike Margery Kempe, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz had quite the reputation for being fun-- nay, a blast-- to be around. She was notorious for being smart, funny, friendly, and pretty much good at everything she did. Sor Juana also really, really wanted to learn and surrounded herself with books, instruments for science and music, and experiments. Beloved by many, it’s no wonder that Sor Juana had the reputation she did. This reputation meant that she gained notoriety in spaces where women typically went unheard. When she stuck to genres of writing where women had at least previously been published, although seldom in number-- like plays, poems, music, and stories-- people would come from the palace to the convent to listen to her read and perform her work. That being said, Sor Juana didn’t stop there; as prolific as was in those genres, she was just as prolific of a writer in philosophy, theology, and most other academic genres. And so, it’s also no wonder that when the Archbishop published her theological writing against her will and then posed as a fellow nun to condemn her for it, she had something to say about it.

Sor Juana’s theological work upset so many people because they believed women had no place in the academic side of the church. This didn’t make sense to Sor Juana. In her letter, La Repuesta, she outlines how she’d had a lifelong hunger to learn. This letter is infamous for a number of reasons: 1) she definitely knows that ‘Sister Filotea’ is actually the Archbishop and is ruthlessly sarcastic about it, 2) she demonstrates her incredible academic ability, and 3) she directly advocates for Women’s Work to be taken seriously. In Sor Juana’s argument, if God gave women the natural desire to learn, then how could the Catholic Church be against it?

One of the ways Sor Juana does this is with none other than food. As she shows us with stories from her own life, women find ways to learn from their material world around them. As I’ve said before, women construct their ethos with places and objects that are unique to them. In Sor Juana’s life, one of those places was the kitchen. She was sent to the kitchen because she had been ruffling feathers for some time (outspoken + witty did not = nun in 17th C. Mexico, go figure) and her assignment to the kitchen was an attempt by her mother superior to keep Sor Juana from further rocking the boat. Sor Juana was criticized for not knowing her place because she publicly ventured into masculine disciplines.

It’s fairly poetic, then, that she would find an impetus for studying and writing on philosophy, science, and logic in one of the most feminine of spaces: the kitchen.

Sor Juana’s letter was a meticulously constructed forensic argument, something most women wouldn’t know how to do due to their lack of education, but she also used inherently feminine rhetorical strategies, like her highly narrative and ‘story-telling’ -esque way of using herself as evidence. She uses these stories to demonstrate 1) her natural desire to learn, and 2) that women learn philosophy, science, math, and logic, too, and that this knowledge is just as valid in their spaces.

In one of these stories, Sor Juana talks about how she learned from everything around her: by putting flour on the floor when a top was spinning to see the mathematical patterns it made, how those shapes resembled the ring of Solomon, and how the shape of the ring of Solomon is the shape of harps. She also speaks about food and how what she learned in the kitchen, considered then a non-academic space, still furthered her knowledge about the world around her, saying, “And what shall I tell you, lady, of the natural secrets I have discovered while cooking? I see that an egg holds together and fries in butter or in oil, but, on the contrary, in syrup shrivels into shreds; observe that to keep sugar in a liquid state one need only add a drop or two of water in which a quince or other bitter fruit has been soaked; observe that the yolk and the white of one egg are so dissimilar that each with sugar produces a result not obtainable with both together” (77). Sor juana walks us through how something that would usually be considered insignificant by an audience of men in the church and court, like an egg, still has something to teach. It also shows us Sor Juana’s desire to learn, not just from books, but what’s in her material world. Surely someone that finds “natural secrets” in frying eggs must have a god-given curiosity and will to learn!

However, Sor Juana doesn’t seem to think of the natural secrets of eggs as insignificant. She says, “But, lady, as women, what wisdom may be ours if not the philosophies of the kitchen? Lupercio Leonardo spoke well when he said: how well one may philosophize when preparing dinner. And I often say, when observing these trivial details: had Aristotle prepared victuals, he would have written more… this process is so continuous in me that I have no need for books” (77). Sor Juana directly advocates for the validity of Women’s Work. By referring to philosophers, she’s able to demonstrate her own academic ability by appealing to the ethos of the others in order to support her

own. Who could question such an authority as Lupercio Leonardo? Sor Juana didn’t just flex on the Archbishop here, though. She shows her strength and then goes on to say she didn’t need to play by their rules. She can learn from Women’s Work just as well as she could from the books she no longer could read and the schools she wasn’t allowed to participate in.

Sor Juana’s letter pushes the boundaries. To her, the desire to learn was a spiritual gift that God gave without discrimination. She advocates for a woman’s right to learn, read, and write by using everything at her disposal to elevate the ethos of women, all while walking the tightrope of liminality. Unfortunately, this was the last thing Sor Juana wrote; it seems as though she stepped on one too many Holy Toes. The Archbishop confiscated all of her writing material and instruments after the publication of La Repuesta and she shortly died after from the plague as she attended to the sick. One thing that I believe is important to remember about my favorite nun is that she was said to be a great cook. She took pride in her food and willingly, passionately served her sisters in the convent.

She was learning philosophy and science, yes, but she was also showing the people around her that she loved them.

Ale’s Chile Rellenos Ale’s mother sent this recipe to her over Facebook messenger, as she does most recipes. These recipes are important to her-- this one specifically was sent as an attempt to get a piece of her home and culture when she was living in east Texas. Mom’s exact recipe is: “Quema los chiles para que se inflen y les quitas el cuernito, luego los abres de un lado y le sacas las senillas y los rellenas de lo que quieras si los vas a meter al horno asi los dejas y si los vas a lamprear los revuelcas en harina, ya rellenos los chiles en una vasija onda pones las claras de huevo y las bates hasta que quede firme las claras, luego le pones poquito harina espolvoreada y las yemas y lo bates otra ves. pasa los chiles por el huevo y lo cubres bien, en un sarten con aceite caliente los lampreys y ya que se haga bien cocido el huevo los sacas y escurres.”

Ingredients:

For Chile Rellenos:

6 Fresh Pasilla Chiles 3 eggs, seperated ¼ cup of all-purpose flour 1 8 oz. package of Oaxaca cheese or other filling ¼ tsp. Of salt ½ cup of canola oil (or other oil of your choice) for frying

For Salsa:

4 tomatoes Half a white onion A jalapeno or serrano pepper A clove of garlic ½ tsp. Of salt ¼ tsp Cumin 2 tbsp. Of olive oil Juice of ½ a lime

For Optional Filling: ½ lb. of ground beef or tofu ½ yellow onion, diced 1 clove of garlic, minced 1 jalapeno, diced ½ bell pepper, diced 1 beefsteak tomato, diced ½ potato, diced ½ tsp. Salt ½ tsp. Pepper ¼ tsp. Cumin 1 tbsp. Olive oil

Instructions: For Optional Filling:

Heat olive oil in a frying pan to medium high heat. Add all diced vegetables to oil and cook until tender, about 5-7 minutes, 10-15 minutes if you include potatoes. Add ground meat or meat substitute and sprinkle in seasonings. Saute until meat is fully cooked and set aside.

For Chile Rellenos:

Wash the chiles and dry them. Preferably over an open flame (although broiling them in the oven or holding them over the coil of an electric stove can work) hold the chiles and turn them until they are charred but not burnt on the outside and the skin begins to inflate evenly on all sides. Allow them to cool, about 5 min., and, using a spoon, gently scrape the outside skin to remove the blackened, flaky spots on the chile. The chile will be fragile, so take care not to rip or further tear holes in the chile.

Fold the skin back over to create the original shape of the chile as much as possible and lightly roll the chile in flour. Set them aside on a plate or dish.

Beat the egg whites until stiff and separately beat the yolks until uniform in color and consistency. Sprinkle in some flour and salt into the egg whites and carefully fold the egg yolks into the mixture. Put your oil in a pot on medium high heat. Once the oil is heated, coat each chile in the egg mixture and immediately transfer to the oil. Fry the coated chiles until the egg is evenly cooked on all sides, a light golden brown color, about 10-15 min. Remove the chile from the oil and drain on a paper towel. Repeat for each chile.

For Salsa:

In a frying pan, bring oil to a medium high heat. Put tomatoes, pepper, garlic, and onion in the pan and roast the ingredients until charred and blistered. Remove the cooked ingredients from the heat and put into a blender with salt and lime juice. Blend the mixture together until they are a consistent texture.

Once outer skin is removed, carefully cut out the stem and cut the chile from the top to the bottom on one side, opening it up. Remove any other stalks, fibers, or seeds in the chile and insert a 2 in. piece of Oax- Spoon salsa over chile relleno and serve with a side of rice and beans. aca cheese pulled from the roll in the package or spoon in other filling.

“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.�

Food We Deserve

Virginia Woolf, perhaps more directly than the other writers we’ve read, understood the materiality of women’s rhetoric. She knew that what was in a woman’s world impacted how she would learn, speak, and write, and this was precisely what she intended to change. As my mother loves to say,“If you eat like crap you’re gonna feel like crap.” I think Virginia would agree with my mom; women deserve better material to influence their rhetoric. As she said in her essay A Room of One’s Own, “Intellectual freedom depends on material things. Poetry depends on material things. And women have always been poor, not for the past 200 years but from the beginning of time. That is why I have laid so much stress on money and a room of one’s own” (1346). Being a woman rhetor herself, she found a source of inspiration in one of the disparities between women’s material world and men’s material world: their food.

Viriginia Woolf is less concerned with the hospitality aspect of food. Or rather, she herself isn’t cooking to serve others, but is instead looking at what is being served to women out of necessity. In Virginia’s essay, food instead serves a few purposes: 1) to exhibit the aforementioned disparity between men’s and women’s dining halls, 2) to demonstrate the poverty women live in, and 3) to show how food affects the body.

Concerning the disparity, Virginia gives a detailed recollection of a luncheon at a men’s college and a dinner at a woman’s college. When describing both meals, she was careful to remark on the difference in what it felt like to be in the dining halls. The men had the epitome of luxury: servants carrying trays on their heads, comfortable sofas and rooms, warm fires. They were so comfortable they even sang songs together. In contrast, the women’s dining hall sounds more like something that would be on an episode of Hell’s Kitchen in which Gordon Ramsay holds two pieces of bread on either side of a cook’s face and says “What are you?!” to which they reply, “An idiot sandwich.” (look up the clip on youtube, it’s very good). Everyone is crammed together on a long wooden table with uncomfortable wooden chairs. They pass bowls of food down and what’s left is scraped into a larger bowl to be served as breakfast the next morning. No one is singing. Without re-writing the pages of detail Virginia gave, I’ll instead give you a glance at the menu.

At the men’s luncheon between classes, they were served soup, salmon, ducklings, sole in a perfect white cream, partridges with a retinue of sauces and

salads ranging from sharp to sweet in flavor, potatoes thin as coins, succulent sprouts, confections of all waves of sugar, and bottomless wine (1090). In regard to this lunch, Virginia remarked, “We are all going to heaven and Vandyck is of the company-- In other words, how good life seemed, how sweet its rewards, how trivial this grudge or that grievance, how admirable friendship and the society of one’s kind, as, lighting a good cigarette, one sinks among the cushions in the window-seat” (1090). Who needs dinner after a lunch like that?

At the women’s college, they were served thin, plain gravy soup, beef, wilting bargain greens and potatoes, stringy, mealy prunes and custard, hard, dry biscuits and cheese, and water (1094). According to Virginia, there was no complaining about this meal. People were fed and others had less on their table that night. However, anyone would be lying if they said that meal sounds good. As Virginia put it, “The lamp in the spine does not light on beef and prunes.

We are all probably going to heaven, and Vandyck is, we hope, to meet us around the corner-- that is the dubious and qualifying state of mind that beef and prunes at the end of the day’s work breed between them” (1094).

The issue with the difference in meals wasn’t because the cook at the women’s college was bad at their job, it was that they had no way to ever serve them the meal that the men ate. According to the head mistress, “And it was only after a long struggle and with the utmost difficulty that [the women’s university] got 30,000 pounds together. So obviously we cannot have wine and partridges and servants carrying tin dishes on their heads, she said… we cannot have sofas and separate rooms. ‘The amenities,’ she said, ‘will have to wait’’’ (1095). The women’s college never had a chance; the women being kept in poverty was evidenced by what was on their plate.

Virginia was concerned with how a woman’s material world affected them, particularly in regard to their bodies. The food they ate as a result of the economic disadvantage they were stuck in kept them at an intellectual disadvantage as well. The mind is fed by the body, and when you feed the body beef and prunes?

Well, she says, “The human frame being what it is, heart, body, and brain all mixed together... a good dinner is of great importance to good talk. One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well” (1094).

It is no wonder, then, that women were seen as inferior. The roots of women’s subjugation grow deep. They didn’t write as much as men, and that is true. How could they when everything in their lives, down to what they ate for dinner, kept the dependent upon and servile to men?

Men seemed fairly dependent upon their meals, as she said, “How is he going to go on giving judgement, civilising natives, making laws, writing books, dressing up and speechifying at banquets, unless he can see himself at breakfast and at dinner at least twice the size he really is” (1105)? Men’s material world gave them a subject position of master, which makes sense when you’re being fed like a master. In contrast, women are expected to be the ones being civilized, judged. They’re expected to be the ones cooking these elaborate meals.

Women and their relationship to food, their own bodies, pales in comparison.

Virginia said, “I have seen a dairy company measure the effect of ordinary milk and Grade A milk upon the body of the rat. They set two rats in cages side by side, and of the two one was furtive, tumid and small, and the other was glossy, bold and big. Now what food do we feed women as artists upon? I asked, remembering, I suppose, that dinner of prunes and custard” (1114). It’s not only that they stand in a marginalized space outside of academia. It’s not only that they’re expected to serve the house and family. They do not have the space, the money, or yes, even the food, physically needed to break into such spheres.

Had Virginia Woolf been born in 2000, I believe she could’ve had an excellent career as a food critic. By the way she so eloquently condemned a dinner of beef and prunes-- and continued to do so throughout as many pages as she did-- I have no doubt that her poetry/fiction/food Instagram would’ve been a homerun.

At the end of her essay, she urges young women to write as much as possible and take advantage of the privileges available to them in their professional and academic careers. I think one of the ways we can do that is by writing about our material world like our food, and, of course, eating well. So don’t be afraid to post that picture of your delicious dinner on social media! You deserve it.

Alfreda’s Shrimp and Grits

This shrimp and grits recipe is a crowd favorite from my grandma. After reading about the thin gravy soup at the women’s college in Virginia Woolf ’s essay, it only makes sense to follow up with a thick and hearty improvement from the south. It’s quick and simple but still filling and delicious. Don’t worry, Virginia, there are no prunes in this dinner!

Ingredients: 3 cups of chicken broth

1 cup of uncooked quick grits ½ tsp. Salt ¼ tsp. black pepper 2 tbsp. butter 2 cups of shredded cheddar cheese ½ cup of creme fraiche 8 slices of bacon, chopped

2 lbs. medium shrimp, peeled and deveined 1 tbsp. lemon juice 2 tbsp. Worcestershire sauce 2 tbsp. Parsely, chopped 6 green onions, chopped 2 garlic cloves, chopped ¼ tsp. Red pepper flakes

Instructions: Bring chicken broth to a boil over medium-high heat. Stir in grits and let cook for 5-7 minutes. Add salt, pepper, butter, cheese, and creme fraiche, mixing well. Set aside and keep warm.

Cook bacon in a large nonstick skillet over medium-high heat until crisp. Remove from the pan and set aside.

Cook shrimp in the same pan for about 3 minutes, until almost pink. Stirring occasionally, add lemon juice, Worcestershire sauce, parsely, green onions, garlic, and red pepper flakes. Cook for another 3-4 minutes.

Serve grits in a bowl with shrimp sauce ladled over. Add a dash of tabasco sauce if desired. Eat as much as you want, your brain needs the food!

Hospitality Rhetorics Today

Hospitality rhetorics today look a little different than they did at the time of Margery, Sor Juana, or even Virginia. Much of it has to do with women being more included and widely read in academic and writing circles, therefore changing the shape and scope of the material influencing women’s rhetoric. Because of this, many academic institutions are now actively searching for and recognizing voices that were previously unheard-- in the field of rhetoric, we want to read non-hetero, non-white, non-male writing because we believe these folks have something important to say and add a more dynamic understanding of the world around us. This is not to assume that everything is hunkydory and that these groups are now not marginalized, rather that there has been a shift in academia that is beginning to consider these voices as valid.

Because women construct their ethos out of places and materials that are unique to them and their daily lives, the academy has become a part of such places and materials for many. The nursery, kitchen, garden, courthouse, classroom, laboratory, and office now make up the threads in the tapestry of our ethos. Where women in previous generations had to defy their womanhood to participate in the masculine discourse groups like that of the university, women today are now beginning to be able to see their academic and intellectual careers as part of their womanhood.

Kenneth Burke’s Identification theory is still largely at work in our rhetoric as well. As I’ve said before, by using materials and spaces to create a sense of similarity between speaker and audience, women are able to give their audience a sense of togetherness and understanding, allowing them to persuade others by changing the identity of the speaker to someone that belongs not on the outside of the conversation but inside a community of people with a similar ethos. In today’s academic world, the new voices that are changing the landscape have come with a deconstruction of high culture and low culture. This means our material world-- our personal anecdotes, our opinions, our conversations, our pop-culture, our jokes-- is now some-

what acceptable to a certain degree. Whereas the things that are a part of our material world would’ve been seen as unacceptable in academic spaces before, they now can be a way for women to open up the conversation to ourselves and others that don’t necessarily fit the academic mold so we’re not outside of the conversation but inside a community.

I personally don’t mind this deconstruction and would argue that I, in fact, thrive in it. As you may have picked up on throughout this cookbook, I personally undercut the gravitas of the heavy theoretical work with humor and pop-culture references all the time. After some reflection, I realized I do it not because I feel a need to undermine myself and my intellectual ability to make my ethos easier to swallow, but instead as a way of extending the conversation to my audience and saying I’m fun AND I know what I’m talking about! We want other voices in academic spaces, and the best way to do that, in my opinion, is by making the conversation understandable and inclusive. I was once criticized because I seemed to value fast food, cheap beer, and jokes over kombucha and a debate about Derrida. To which I reply Oh, please! I can do both. And I do do both, I do both often and all at once.

The academy is part of what makes up my unique ethos, but so does eating chicken tenders, cracking open a cold can, and laughing with my friends.

These two spaces no longer need to be separate from each other in my writing, they are the spaces that make up my material world and are therefore valid. Women have fought for the right to be heard in the past and as a consequence I and other women in my generation can be as low culture or high culture as we want to be.

And so, hospitality rhetoric now is not so much servitude as expression but instead expressing ourselves to other women in a way that they can relate and respond to as a service to them. It’s diplomacy. When we talk about food, it’s because the food was just that good, or because we want to, or because we think it’s important. Food is still very meaningful and is still an act of care, the difference is we get to choose how meaningful and full of care it is without it reflecting on our character or personhood alone, as it used to.

“If I have a free 2 hours in my day I’m going to spend it eating chips and watching Law and Order: SVU, not trying to pump out a short story.”

Food as Kinship

When I first started this project, I believed that I didn’t talk about food and assumed it was because I didn’t have to like the women in the past. I planned on saying that because I only cook for myself and eat when and what I want, it didn’t hold that much value to me. As I started writing that down, however, I looked up and realized that I was slaving away over a cookbook, clearly demonstrating that I think food has great value. After thinking a little harder about it, I realized that I actually talk about food a lot.

I remembered a project I did in undergrad where I had to create a map of a neighborhood and chose to represent the map as a plate of food, which I knitted and felted to a plate. I also have written often about a particularly harrowing memory from high school: I had just moved to DC from Laredo and we had a party where we were supposed to bring food from different cultures. I made my class arroz con leche, my bff’s grandma’s recipe, and excitedly put it on the table next to the french macarons and victoria sponge cake. The class went up to the table and a girl said “what is this?” to which a boy responded, “I don’t know, something from Mexico.” Her reply, you ask? “Oh, gross.” No one touched it.

The personal rejection and rejection of the place I was from hurt deeply. I ate about a gallon of arroz con leche in the bathroom and cried for the rest of the class party. I obviously, definitely think food is meaningful.

Aside from this cookbook, I usually talk about food in the jokes I make. I don’t talk about the food I cook for others, though, I talk about the food I eat when no one is watching. This is the kind of food that’s indulgent, cheap, deep fried, and comes in a bucket; it’s typically what one would consider to be ‘bad food’ in the health sense but also kind of in the Michael Jackson sense. I make jokes about bad food because even though I know it’s not necessarily a universal experience, I believe a lot of people have occasionally indulged and may find a relatable situation somewhere in there. If I’m going to be wholly honest, these ‘jokes’ are not far from my reality, either, so of course make their way into my writing. It’s a representation of my material world, leave me alone!

These jokes typically serve a purpose, though. They’re carefully constructed as a source of relief from either heavy, dry academic writing, tension built in a story, or the contrast of high culture. The food in my writing is a direct example of the modern theory of hospitality-- it’s there to create a sense of commonality

between me and my audience, keeping the conversation open to all and casting myself as approachable. In this way, I’m demonstrating academic strength and emotional intelligence by using bad food as a tool of diplomacy.

In one of my assignments for class, I was talking about how reality (like jobs, internships, and clubs) make creative work difficult. My argument was in response to a writer saying that everyone should spend at least two hours a day writing stories if they want to be successful. This didn’t make much sense to me in my life at the time because, put simply, I was freakin’ busy. I responded in this assignment by saying, “If I have a free 2 hours in my day I’m going to spend it eating chips and watching Law and Order: SVU, not trying to pump out a short story.” This was me basically saying back to the writer, “You’re being exclusive! Not everyone has the same amount of time in their day as you to write for 2 hours.” I was hinting to my audience that I am a ‘normal’ person, essentially arguing that eating chips and watching Law and Order is what normal people do. This argument was an attempt on my end to collapse low culture and high culture by highlighting the exclusivity of the luxury the writer had demanded from the students listening to him.

In this very cookbook I’ve used the same rhetorical strategy. In the Hospitality Rhetorics Today section, I similarly commented, “The academy is part of what makes up my unique ethos, but so does eating chicken tenders, cracking open a cold can, and laughing with my friends.” This was me trying to provide relief from the academic tone of the rest of the section, which had become quite heady with rhetorical theory. Here I was directly referring to the collapse of high culture and low culture. I joke as a way of operating in both spaces because both spaces directly influence me. Chicken tenders and a cold can of beer are as much a part of my life as my academic endeavors. I also wanted my audience, again, to view me as approachable, or, for lack of a better term, normal.

My main goal when I make jokes like this is to persuade my audience to, if nothing else, like me. I talk about chips and chicken tenders and cheap beer because it challenges the dynamic in academic writing of “I, the writer, am the gatekeeper of this knowledge and you, the audience, must know ____ or be ____ to understand what I’m talking about” that I find to be one of the most problematic.

True to this turn in history, I find the one-way conversations of academia to be exclusive, and therefore want to flip this dynamic by using my personality and sense of humor to encourage a sense of audience participation and include others. I want food to be a way for me to connect with the audience and make them feel like they’re part of my community, not outside of my conversation listening

in.

While food doesn’t reflect on me as a mother, wife, or daughter, I still choose for it to be important. Dining tables have long been a place where community is enacted, and I purposefully want to participate in this rhetorical space. For the women of the past that I’ve talked about in this cookbook, food has taken on many different ways of meaning-making, dressed and re-dressed on a variety of plates in a variety of countries, centuries, and languages. For them, food was a reason to speak. It fed them both physically as well as intellectually and helped them advocate for a woman’s right to write. For Margery, Sor Juana, and Virginia, food gave them the means to speak their mind.

For me, food is a form of friendship. If we cannot be friends, I would still like you to feel acquainted with me. If we cannot be acquainted, I would still like you to think of me as likeable. Food mediates the binary between the lay person and the academic, essentially providing a bit of a buffer to the tightrope of liminality that all women must walk when speaking. Everyone eats, don’t they? If we can share one experience, perhaps we can convince someone to consider sharing another. Everyone has a significant memory of either serving food or being served food. It is in no way a neutral space, but it is a familiar space.

For my grandmother and great grandmother, food was who they were. For my mother and me, food is a creative endeavor. It holds the power to be an act of service and love when we want it to be or an indulgent moment alone in front of an open fridge at 3 AM. Whatever we choose food to be, it gets to be. Recipes changing hands between mothers, grandmothers, friends, bible study groups, sewing circles, websites, magazines, or TV shows still holds a lot of power in our world, too. Women giving other women the means to provide for themselves and their loved ones by arming them with a technical skill and specific knowledge has not lost its strength. The difference today is that the consequences of not being able to master such specific, technical knowledge has far less dire consequences on how you are valued in your community.

If there was one thing I learned making this cookbook, I’ve learned that food is emotional. If you can, call someone that’s cooked for you and tell them you appreciate them, it’s hard work.

I hope you eat something delicious today!

Flora’s Okra and Tomatoes Recipe This is my Oklahoman family’s recipe for okra and tomatoes.

Typically served on bad days, rainy days, I-ain’t-got-paid-yet days, or any of our other typical family gatherings. Nothing tastes more like home or is more comforting than this recipe (complete with all the fixins). Serve the stew over a bed of rice and for extra fun-- or payday-- I like to top it with fried okra, green tomatoes, and onions.

Ingredients for the stew: 3 tablespoons of canola oil 2 containers of fresh okra, chopped 2 cans of stewed tomatoes 1 cup of chicken stock 1 Yellow onion, diced 1/2 cup of chopped parsley 1 tablespoon of

(Optional) topping: 1 cup of flour ½ cup of cornmeal 1 teaspoon of salt 1 teaspoon of Slap Ya Ingredients for rice: Mama seasoning 2 cups of white 1 cup of peanut oil longgrain rice for frying 2 ½ cups of water 1 egg, beaten 2 tablespoons of About 5 pieces of butter okra, chopped 2 bay leaves About ¼ of a yellow onion, chopped 1 tomatillo, sliced tomato paste 2 tablespoons of Slap Ya Mama seasoning 2 teaspoons of salt

Instructions: Put the canola oil for the stew in a large saucepan over medium heat. Once oil is heated, put the onion in and cook until translucent. Put the chopped okra in and cook until the okra becomes slimy and soft (that sounds really gross but it’s good trust me).

Once onions and okra are cooked, put in the tomato paste and stir to incorporate with the vegetables. Quickly add the cans of stewed tomatoes and bring to a boil, about 10-15 minutes. Once the liquid in the pot reduces, add the chicken stock and parsley, reduce heat, and cover. After about 15 minutes, add the seasonings and stir. Put the lid on the pot and let simmer for 30-45 minutes.

Once the stew is simmering, put the rice and the water in a medium saucepan along with the butter and the bay leaves. Put the pot on high heat until it begins to boil. Once boiling, immediately set it to the lowest heat and cover. Let cook for about 20 minutes.

Optional topping instructions (a Hannah add-on): Once the rice starts cooking, add the oil to whatever sort of pot or pan you fry in (I typically use a wide saucepan (I’m not a professional chef, if you can’t tell)) and bring the oil up to a medium heat. Mix dry ingredients in one bowl and put the beaten egg in a separate bowl. Coat the tomatillo, onion, and okra in the egg and then dredge in the flour mixture. Once oil is hot enough, put the coated vegetables in the oil and fry until golden brown. Once finished, put the fried stuff on a paper towel to drain.

Serve the rice, okra and tomatoes, and topping in a bowl. If desired, add a dash of Tobasco.

Special Thanks To:

Luise Noe

Alejandra & Maria Alcaraz

Flora Crabtree

Alfreda Crabtree Jones