In the title of an essay Gilles Deleuze asks "What Can A Body Do?" He does not ask what is a body, how do we define a body, what is the ideal form of a body, what is the difference between the body and the soul? He seeks function.
Key to the question of function are relationships. A body functions in relationship to a series of other bodies, cultural and material, collective and individual. We--our bodies--are assemblages of other bodies, which afford and constrain how we function.
Along the same line of questioning, how does a cookbook function? The cookbook, a textual, visual, sensual body, produces forms of relatedness: how a reader relates to food, becomes a cook, an eater, a dish washer. A whole series of roles, spanning across time, are implicit before we even pick up a cookbook. Sometimes the cookbook makes reference to these roles verbally, as nineteenth-century hospitality manuals did; sometimes the cookbook references these roles visually, as Martha Stewart does in Great Food Fast. The cover of her book offers not only an aesthetic statement, but it also offers a plate setting. The angular view from above provides the spectator with a tablecloth, a plate, a bowl, and finally the food, all centralized around the shrimp. Food preparation becomes a highly centralized act, implied in the image not explicitly stated.
Images do not need to be graphic. The verbal image in Lafcadio Hearn's recipe for "Flounder and Mullets Fried" associates freshness with locality: "These fish are very fine when fresh from the waters of Lake Ponchartrain" (25). Hearn's image of cooking involves a specific place, which many of readers will not have access to when they cook. Why include this image of locality and freshness? Sold at the 1884 World's Fair, Hearn's book purports to provide the recipes that "have made New Orleans famous." Locality, New Orleans and more generally Louisiana, is as key an ingredient in his cookbook as okra in gumbo or red beans with rice. For Hearn, relatedness means linking cooking and eating with place. Even if that place is somewhere else. Especially if that place is somewhere else.
So what can a cookbook do? It can make cooking more than just cooking.
