Creating Feasts for the Eyes

Ariana Gunderson, 2022 SAE-CES fellowship winner, reflects on her research with cookbook recipe developers in Germany

Take a cookbook down from your shelf, one published in the last few years, and it will likely be a strikingly aesthetic object. Hardcover with large dimensions, and with full-page color photographs for most of the recipes. As you riffle through the cookbook, images cascade until, perhaps, you stop flipping pages as a photograph catches your eye. Is it the drop of syrup hanging from the top pancake on a short stack? Is it the electric green scallion swimming in glistening tofu? After you look at the photo and read the recipe title as a caption, only then perhaps do you scan down the list of ingredients and skim the numbered instructions. Though you might think of a recipe as written directions for cooking, a photograph of the finished dish is a promise of what might reward you if you put in the work to follow the recipe, and it might outshine the black and white text printed opposite.

When I entered the field last summer, supported by the SAE-CES Pre-Dissertation Research Fellowship,  I focused on the textual: the scribbled notes, the words typed out, the sitting down to face a laptop screen after the food had been cooked and the dishes washed. I wanted to understand how the crackling, bubbling, splattering world of food in a kitchen was transformed into neat words printed on a page. How do recipe developers distill a clean narrative of instruction from the sensorial mess of cooking? When I sat down to interview recipe developers in Germany, I heard enticing tidbits from the writing strategies of recipe creation, but I was surprised by the overwhelming importance of the visual to these writers. They saw their recipes as, first and foremost, an idea, a concept embodied in the recipe title (say, Gluten-Free Rosemary Apricot Crumble). This concept takes on two forms: the written recipe and the photograph. Though the text offers readers insight to the process of cooking and perhaps even the roadmap to recreate the dish for themselves, the photograph is a finished product that readers (viewers?) can consume without delay or further work.

“What makes a good recipe?” I asked recipe developers. “A good photo,” replied the majority.  Ellie, a recipe developer in Hamburg, told me that she arrives at a photoshoot with only a draft of the recipe, and she finalizes the written instructions after the photo has been captured. She adapts the text to match the process that unfolds in the studio kitchen and to the ‘final product’ promised by the photograph. Another developer, Andra, shared that she considers the heart of a recipe to be the photo; the recipe text is just a ‘nice-to-have’ in case you feel like recreating the promise made by the image.

My interlocutors agreed that it is a wonderful feeling to know someone cooked your recipe, but they don’t begrudge readers who enjoy reading the recipe and don’t cook it. They consider Kopfkino (literally head-cinema), the movie that plays in your mind as you imagine cooking the recipe, to be a legitimate way to engage with recipes. Just reading a recipe and feeling inspired as you imagine what cooking it would feel, taste, smell, look like is getting value from it. The photograph of a finished dish printed alongside a recipe makes that Kopfkino even sweeter.

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The 2022 SAE-CES Pre-Dissertation Research Fellowship, jointly sponsored by the Society for the Anthropology of Europe and the Council for European Studies, was awarded to Ariana Gunderson (Indiana University, Bloomington) for her dissertation project, “Selling Food as Text in the German Recipe Industry”.  Applications are now welcomed for the 2023 fellowship. Deadline is March 19, 2023.