Everyone loves food.  We love talking about food, reading about food, eating food, and maybe even cooking food.  And no wonder:  we are a nation of food lovers, as demonstrated by our interest in cooking shows, cookbooks, websites, food blogs, and magazines.  We call ourselves “foodies,” or food enthusiasts, and like to learn about culinary traditions from far and near.  Our interest isn’t limited to the practical requirements of nutrition, either.  We love our “foodatainment,” as Joanne Finkelstein explains the marriage of information and entertainment in contemporary cooking programs (de Solier 468).  The new media revolution has served the industry well, as it has led to the creation of a multimedia food experience.  Now we can have our cake and eat it—and read about it on a website, talk about it on a podcast, see it made on television, blog it on our weblog . . . the list goes on. 

The act of cooking itself has become a commodity, not just the product it creates.  In fact, the product itself—the food object—is largely forgotten, replaced by the spectacle of the act.  This leads to my main point:  the effects of new media upon cookery texts have enabled these texts to demonstrate their multimodal features:  features which I will argue are inherent in the text, not produced as a result of the influx of new media.  The act of reading a recipe—whether it is a print recipe, hypertext, or television show—requires a specific kind of literacy, a literacy which up until now has lacked vocabulary to explain.  Gunther Kress, in his work Literacy in the New Media Age, calls for a new kind of literacy to be able to interpret texts produced through electronic means.  This literacy, which Kress and other scholars name as multimodal literacy, can be an effective way to explain how we read and interpret recipes.  While recipes clearly are not part of “new media,” their particular focus on rhetorical elements and on the physical act of cooking make them suitable to study in the same fashion as new media texts.

In our culture, food is now a multimedia experience, encompassing all media and all modes of communication.  However, this is not a recent development.  My argument is grounded in the belief that any cookery text—from websites and blogs to handwritten recipes and cookbooks—is inherently multimodal.  While the medium of transmission may have changed over the years, recipes (whether online, print or manuscript) utilize a variety of modes to communicate their message.  Any single recipe uses both writing and visuals to tell its story.  Even in a recipe without a picture, the printed or handwritten structure of the language is a rhetorical move, constructing both the written and visual modes into an “imagetext,” or blending of modes.  Through my argument, I plan to not only broaden the definition of multimodality by including cookbooks, but I also plan to make a case for the value of cookbooks to be studied.

Julia, Emeril, Iron Chef, Rachael Ray, Jacques Pepin, and countless other chefs and programs have transformed the business of cooking into a multimedia experience.  While the cooking culture’s origins are rooted in oral tradition, much has changed in the past decades to remediate cooking into a wide variety of new media.  What was once a handwritten recipe on an index card has now become a fully interactive website complete with images, video, blogs, podcasting, chat, and asynchronous discussions.  What was once an oral narrative is now an entertaining performance in front of a live studio audience, complete with companion book and DVD.  While this remediation has been significant, these changes have not altered the ways to read them.  Even though recipes may look different today, they are and have always been multimodal.  I ground my work in that of Gunther Kress and the New London Group to explore multimodal literacy as it applies to cookbooks.  In conjunction with new media theory, I also consider reader-response theory and feminist reader theory to explore the role of the reader in the reader/text relationship.  Finally, I argue that analyzing the material is vital to considerations of multimodality, and explore the performative as an integral element to any cookery text.  Through this study I plan to argue for the cookery text as rhetorical and valuable for further scholarship.

Since the objective of my study is to explore multimodal ways of reading which cookbooks engender, my questions are focused on the relationship the reader has with the cookery text.  My main research questions are as follows:

• What do we do when presented with a cookery text?
• How can we describe the reading/interpretive process of a recipe?
• Do these processes change when presented with a cookery text of a different medium (such as a change from printed recipe to a television cooking show)?
• How might new media theory aid in expressing the process of reading a recipe?
• How might feminist criticism aid in analyzing the reading process?
• In what ways do our recipe reading processes change and what motivates those changes?
• How do considerations of inscription or materiality affect the process?
• What does a recipe do?
• How does it do it?

As I have grounded my study in reader-response and feminist reader theory, I want to design and implement a pilot study of how we read cookery texts.  I believe in order to argue my point on the multimodal literacy of cookbooks, a reception study is logical and necessary.  In fact, both cookbook studies and new media studies need empirical scholarship.  No study thus far has explored the ways in which we read cookbooks, and there has been little empirical work (though much theorizing) on how one reads a new media text. 

My study will utilize rhetorical and historical methods, as I use them to supplement and ground my empirical study.  The goal of this study is not to focus on the empirical aspect, but to use the pilot or case study to further illustrate and prove my hypotheses.  My proposed design will include a sample size of about 15-20 individuals, ideally people who (upon self-assessment) have average to above average cooking skills.  After completion of an initial questionnaire which asks for their past experience and interest in cooking, I plan to interview them about their cooking and recipe reading habits.  One component of the empirical study will be to ask the subject to rewrite a given recipe, and explain why they chose the process they did.  This remediation may happen for two different media, such as a print recipe and a television cooking show.  This data will then give me much to work with to further explore the ways in which we read and interact with recipe texts.