We are currently accepting pitches for contributions to our Fall 2024 series on the theme ‘Images as/and Recipes.’
Sometimes seeing is better than telling. With a renewed interest in DIY, recipes are everywhere. Instagram and Pinterest are full of recipes for quince jam, herbal remedies, and step-by-step instructions for dyeing old clothes to update your wardrobe with an eye to being environmentally conscious. Many, if not all, of these recipes are visual. But while sharing recipes on social media is new, using images to share makers’ knowledge is not.
For hundreds of years, images have been used to craft stories around recipes, and these images tell us as much about topics like nationalism or family lore as they do about the intricacies of any given recipe. Turning the physical act of making into a visual record requires interpretation and can often serve more than one goal. Artists often chose to omit descriptive text in their visual renderings, assuming the images can speak for themselves. And as scholars like Pamela Smith, Wendy Wall, and Erin O’Conner have reminded us, recipes are not straightforward records; they are full of assumptions, omissions, and expectations. This series builds on this work by considering how images function for and as recipes.
Because recipes are so flexible, the genre has been used to share food culture, medicinal practices, and craft techniques, but it has also been put to more political or artistic means, like satirical prints from the eighteenth century that portray ‘recipes for Culloden’ or ‘a recipe to be a good wife’ or contemporary artists who have looked to recipes to share both practical recipes for making fried eggs and more conceptual ‘recipes for success.’ Recipes that utilize images can also bring ideas of race, gender, and class to the surface, both supporting and subverting cultural norms.
Images ‘work’ in ways that are both similar to and diverge from written recipes. How and why authors and artists choose to include images in their recipes or translate their recipes into images can and should be critiqued and analysed.
We are looking for original research topics as well as pieces on pedagogy and museum and archival collections. We welcome contributions from art historians, material culture scholars, anthropologists, historians, literary scholars, archivists, curators, artists, and those with a professional background in recreation and reconstruction. Please send a brief pitch (2 or 3-sentences) as well as an abbreviated CV to the series editors Alexandra Macdonald (ammacdonald@wm.edu) and Melissa Reynolds (m.reynolds1@tcu.edu) any time before 15 September 2024. The theme is purposefully broadly defined to bring an interdisciplinary group of authors together and we are particularly interested in works that take an innovative approach to the topic. If you have any questions about the theme and how your work could fit within the special issue, please get in touch by email. Accepted proposals will be invited to join the quarterly volume on ‘Images as/and Recipes.’ For full instructions and more detailed information on length and image requirements please see Open Call for Contributors [https://recipes.hypotheses.org/open-call-for-contributors]
Examples of Potential Topics (not exhaustive):
- Recipes and advertising
- Recipes and satire
- Visual storytelling and recipes
- Reconstructing recipes (hands-on practice)
- Craft recipes
- Recipes and childhood
- Recipes and social media
- Recipes and the senses
- Gender, race, and class in recipes
- Text-image relationships
Publishing in the Archives Profession 