Though often residing on the periphery of literary scholarship, the work of food studies and feminist scholars on the literatures of American domesticity and cookbooks, or collectively "domestic literacies," reveal a significant and too often ignored aspect of our nation's history--the everyday lives of ordinary citizens. While many of these scholars emphasize the intersection of labor, economics, and gender issues, culinary practice is an effective--and often overlooked--lens through which we can examine how gender roles developed in a particular historical moment, how domesticity reflected the economic and sociopolitical discursive practices of the time, and how the nation's relationship to food evolved. Clearly arranging the multitude of discursive practices and domestic literacies involved in one historical period can be difficult; however, systems theory can serve as an effective method for organizing and comprehending how these discursive practices and texts are networked, how they inform and shape each other, how they co-evolve, and how they act recursively and reflexively.Examining domestic literacies from a specific historical moment, such as the immediate post-World War II era in which gender roles experienced scrutiny and American cuisine suffered an identity crisis, proves more productive than tackling a broad scope of texts. Authors M.F.K. Fisher and Julia Child operate individually and collectively to create perturbations to the network of discursive practice systems that neighbor their texts. They work alongside and challenge texts, such as Betty Crocker's Picture Cook Book that articulate problematic discourses about gender and domesticity, to reveal the complicated and multifarious relationship among domestic literacies, culinary practice, and this network. By examining these texts, we can further comprehend how the authors reshape the network of discursive practice systems and work to initiate the Good Food Movement that overhauls American cuisine and helps to construct the mid-century American national culinary identity.The iconic Betty Crocker's Picture Cook Book serves as a representative text of the many domestic literacies in this period that functioned prescriptively and proffered conservative ideas of gender and domesticity. Though most often read simply as a cookbook, this text, when considered as part of the domestic literacies subsystem, reveals the multiple networked systems at work that shape the content of the text and how it is organized and structured. While Betty Crocker's Picture Cook Book advocates a return to the kitchen for American women to serve their families, prolific food writer M.F.K. Fisher challenges such a linear and austere approach to culinary practice and gender in her text Map of Another Town. At the same time, in the early 1960s, Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking debuted and changed the American culinary landscape; it also operated alongside Fisher's work to change and shape American culinary practice. Decades later, Child's memoir, My Life in France, centering on the time leading up to the publication of her groundbreaking text sets the stage for the fundamental components of Mastering the Art of French Cooking and the broader culinary practice-as-art. Together, these texts, as a networked representative microcosm of the domestic literacies subsystem, function interdependently with the neighboring discursive practice systems, such as gender, labor, and economics, to alter American cuisine, culinary practice, and gender roles connected with the kitchen.
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