Publication Details
The book was published by Routledge Press in 2012 as part of their Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature series.
The book begins with a journey through nineteenth-century food writing, tracing the rise and development of three distinct genres—the domestic cookbook, the professional cookbook, and gastronomic literature. During the 1800s, these forms of writing were rigidly gendered. Women penned recipes for the home cook and men wrote recipes for restaurant chefs and crafted essays about the art of eating, or gastronomy. In the 1890s, the American art critic Elizabeth Robins Pennell moved to London, where she wrote for the Pall Mall Gazette. Charged with writing a "cookery column," Pennell chose instead to write about the art of eating, embracing the sensually grounded languages of aestheticism and gastronomy. By depicting her column as an artistic medium and showcasing the link between an educated palate and creative expression, Pennell shifted her own position from art critic to literary artist of the appetites, a move that initiated the figuration of female pleasure in English-language food writing. Aesthetic Pleasure charts the development of women's gastronomic literature over the course of the twentieth century, dwelling on the works of Pennell, M. F. K. Fisher, Alice B. Toklas, Elizabeth David, Vertamae Smart Grovesnor, Patience Gray, and Monique Truong.