A huge shoutout to @adeladecevic for referring me to Parker’s article.
Original research question: What is the cultural and historical significant of the food items written about in The Bluest Eye, and do they contribute to the novel’s theme?
Hinman Abel, Mary. Practical Sanitary and Economic Cooking Adapted to Persons of Moderate and Small Means. American Public Health Organization, 1889, pg.iv, 106.
- Hinman Abel’s cookbook includes a guide for her idea of proper nutrition and cheap-to-make recipes designed for lower-class families in the late nineteenth century. The cookbook’s recipe for cobbler, the notable dessert Claudia and Frieda spill, is the first time the dish is properly printed with the racialized epithet, “Brown Betty.”
“Practical Sanitary and Economic Cooking.” Feeding America, The Historic American Cookbook Project, digital.lib.msu.edu/projects/cookbooks/html/books/book_42.cfm.
- The Historic American Cookbook Project’s introduces Practical Sanitary. The page documents the cookbook’s origins briefly, claiming the cookbook’s tone as straightforward and dispassionate. The page contextualizes the “brown betty,” recipe, as the cookbook is specifically inspired by European cuisine and dining habits.
Gardaphé, Fred L., and Wenying Xu. “Introduction: Food in Multi-Ethnic Literatures.” MELUS, vol. 32, no. 4, 2007, pp. 5–10. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/30029828.
- Gardaphé and Xu lay the groundwork for food’s role and significance in multi-ethnic literature. They argue that food serves as a motif that accentuates characters’ ethnicities in these narratives and contributes to subject formation, community formation, and identity.
Graves, Brian. “You Are What You Beat: Food Metaphors and Southern Black Identity in Twentieth-Century African American Literature and Goodie Mob’s ‘Soul Food.’” Studies in Popular Culture, vol. 38, no. 1, 2015, pp.125-127. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/44259588.
- Graves argues that food is central to black-southern identity: Southern cuisine can either comfort black characters or expose their rural-blackness and cause identity crises. Graves’s argument is specifically relevant to Pecola’s mother Pauline, a black woman from Alabama who chooses to make an iconic southern dish for her proper, white employers.
House, Elizabeth B. “The ‘Sweet Life’ in Toni Morrison’s Fiction.” American Literature, vol. 56, no. 2, 1984, pp. 182. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2925752.
- House argues that Morrison threads a battle between capitalist versus idyllic values in her work, the former of which is superior though costly to the trajectory of characters’ lives. She claims that Morrison employs food imagery to show these contrasting values.
Kuenz, Jane. “The Bluest Eye: Notes on History, Community, and Black Female Subjectivity.” African American Review, vol. 27, no. 3, 1993, pp. 421–431. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3041932.
- Kuenz argues that The Bluest Eye attempts to rewrite an authentic portrayal black-female subjectivity and portray how black-female subjects are invaded by mass-white culture, specifically black-female sexuality. She claims that Pecola Breedlove experiences arousal from fantasizing about inhabiting a white body, and gets sexual pleasure from eating the Mary Jane candies.
Lewis, Edna, et al. The Taste of Country Cooking. Alfred A. Knopf, 2006, pp.6-25, 184, 194, 455.
- Lewis’s cookbook, published in the same decade as The Bluest Eye, pioneered Americans’ appreciation for Southern cooking, exemplifying black pride and representing an idealized, community-oriented food culture in the black community that at times contrasts with Morrison’s more nuanced take. Lewis’s book gives insight into some of the food featured in The Bluest Eye, through recipes and her childhood memories of the foods. Similarly to Morrison’s novel, the cookbook is separated into the sections “Spring,” “Summer,” “Fall,” and “Winter.”
Parker, Emma. “‘Apple Pie’ Ideology and the Politics of Appetite in the Novels of Toni Morrison.” Contemporary Literature, vol. 39, no. 4, 1998, pp. 620–629. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1208728.
- Parker argues that sugar and hunger emphasize and cause black characters’ oppression in Morrison’s novels. She claims that fruit and sugar are associated with capitalism, freedom, and the black race’s history of oppression, contextualizing the significance of the various sweets and fruits referred to throughout The Bluest Eye that highlight the social differences and self-hatred characters associated with these foods have.
