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.

Recipes are filled with sensory directions related to taste, appearance, texture, and smell, but less often to the sounds of food cooking. While cooking and eating, whether at home or in a restaurant, are recognized as sonic experiences, we are rarely specifically instructed to “listen in.” Some scholars argue that such skills cannot be written into recipes, but rather must be passed on in practice. While I largely agree with this claim, I was challenged to find exceptions in cookbooks. In this essay, I discuss some of the few but delightful examples of sonic instruction in recipes. I conclude that while sounds are rare in cookbooks, as these examples show, listening is a skill that provides valuable information in the kitchen.

This chapter interweaves the author's personal journey, which begins in the deserts of Arabia, with a reconstruction of the beginnings of the Semitic peoples and the etymologic origins of the words for aromatics and spices . It also describes the properties and uses of frankincense. The book from which this chapter is taken—the author's Cumin, Camels, and Caravans: A Spice Odyssey (University of California Press, 2014)—is the first to relate the spice trade to culinary and ecological imperialism and to demonstrate the indelible mark that Semitic peoples had in managing the spice trade not only in Eurasia, Africa, and Arabia but in the Americas and Caribbean as well. It demonstrates that globalization did not begin in 1492, as recently argued by several scholars, but grew out of intercontinental spice trading practices, principles, and ethics over 3,500 years. Sephardic Jews and Muslim Arabs, Berbers and Persians, all played a disproportionately large role in setting the ground rules for globalization. Phoenicians, Nabateans, Arabized Jews, Sogdians, and Minaeans prehistorically played similar roles in its earliest development. A unique aspect of the book is the linguistic tracking of recipes and terms for spices to reveal routes of cultural diffusion worldwide. The text is accompanied by recipes the author has gathered during his travels, as well as a “cabinet” of profiles describing the history and characteristics of many of the world's most popular and sought-after spices.

The article compares recipes to make food with recipes to make color, specifically recipes to make natural dyes and paints before the era of synthetic industrial color. After reviewing conceptual definitions of recipes from food writers and scholars, the article discusses common ingredients for natural color-making, as well as “cooks” or creators of color, the preparations, and the desired results of these preparations. Ingredients include the cochineal beetle to make red, lapis lazuli for ultramarine blue, murex snails to make purple, as well as lesser-known ingredients and preparations. The article also reprises key historical texts in the history of making color. Unlike the present day, natural color-making was an often costly, difficult, uncertain exercise, much like food preparation on a nonindustrial scale. The author argues the results of recipes, whether food or color, may be more deeply appreciated according to that heightened difficulty.