This article proposes that recipes are a form of culinary communication, suggesting that a recipe's biography is one of communicative moments, negotiations, and multiple voices. This framework is applied to The Art of Cooking, a series of culinary demonstrations organized by the Women's Committee at the Art Gallery of Toronto in the 1960s. The events, featuring chefs such as James Beard and Dione Lucas, were organized around the logics of gourmet cooking but departed from it when faced with the realities of women's daily lives. The research is based on archival documents and media coverage of these very popular events, which offer an opportunity to explore the mythologies and narratives about gourmet cooking in the 1960s. This article argues that communications about a recipe are part of the recipe's evolving biography and need to be analyzed alongside ingredients, instructions, makers, and users. In addition, the article advocates for the inclusion of women's committees’ histories to those of art museums in North America.

This article traces the evolution of food photography through the lens of its political context. The ways in which prop stylists and food stylists defined food photography trends was guided by more than their unique interpretation of assigned art direction. The political zeitgeist was also a guiding force. From the socially conservative leadership during the Reagan/Bush years to the promises of hope and change defining the Obama presidency——the tenor of each administration left its mark on food photography. During the Reagan/Bush years, legislation favored the moneyed classes; food photography reflected the tastes of a culture rife with opulent excess. Food was presented in fantastical sets propped with precious accoutrements, some having hardly anything at all to do with the eating or serving of food. The Clinton administration's pro-family domestic agenda set the cultural tone for Martha Stewart's ascendency and for her magazine's visual message to endure. Both Clinton and Stewart brought us back to the real world. Food sets became whiter and brighter as prop stylists jettisoned intricately detailed props for those with cleaner, simpler lines. The muddled disinformation fed to us during the George W. Bush years played out in the confusing, tumultuous compositions proliferating Gourmet's food photography during his presidency. Yellow, the color of hope and promise, cast its hue on the food pages of magazines at the onset of Obama's presidency; but just as he chose to address policymaking by embracing a myriad of viewpoints, so too did magazines embrace a mix of visual viewpoints to please their readers. What we were left with, on both fronts, was an all-over-the-place quality lacking clear definition. Photographs from Gourmet, Food & Wine, Bon Apetit, Weight Watcher's Magazine, Woman's Day and Fine Cooking serve as visual reference points.

Lee Miller was a Vogue cover girl in New York in the mid-to-late 1920s. In the early thirties she was Man Ray's muse, student, and lover in Paris, where she also worked as both photographer and model for Paris Vogue , as well as for numerous courtiers, including Patou and Scheperelli. The mid-thirties found her with her own successful photographic studio back in Manhattan. In WWII she served as British Vogue 's official war correspondent and was one of the first photographers to enter liberated Dachau and Buchenwald. In 1957 Miller passed the Cordon Bleu course at their Paris school. Generally overlooked, if not overtly dismissed, Lee Miller's gourmet phase in the 1950s and 1960s is discussed in this article as ““another form of her genius.”” Always ahead of her time, Miller was a mezza maven and a tapas enthusiast. The home she shared with her husband, Roland Penrose, in the English countryside was frequently filled with weekend guests drawn from the international modern art world. For many of them she created ““food pictures,”” some inspired by their own works of art. She collected and invented recipes, often based on her extensive travels and sometimes as practical jokes and rebukes.