And, while the group’s several corporate sponsorship and licensing agreements have come under some critique, they are also a reflection of the RHS’s growth and influence (Span 9). In its manual of sorts, Fun and Friendship After Fifty, RHS founder Cooper explains the reason such a group is warranted in the US, particularly for aging women: “middle-aged women have gotten used to going unnoticed, to being invisible” (9). Sandra and the other participants’ reasons for belonging to RHS resound with this claim; they joined RHS as an “antidote” to the conditions of living as retired, aging women, which include loneliness, complacency, and—above all—mundanity.
In combating complacency, these women live anything but mundane lives. Data drawn from my interviews with them reveal that literacy permeates their activities from everyday writing and reading in the kitchen to formal literacy endeavors such as taking college courses and teaching enrichment classes in community centers. The women are very proud of the latter undertakings since they value literacy greatly in its traditional forms, especially writing and reading for educational and professional purposes. At the same time, the women see little value in the everyday literacy practices they undertake. Specifically, literacies such as the processes and practices of cooking are held in lower esteem than more visible and text-based Literacy comprised of, for these women, personal and public writing projects. In taking up a variety of recipe uses in my participants’ literacy experiences both in and out of the kitchen, this article addresses a debate resulting from the “social turn” in literacy studies, which shifted traditional notions of literacy from a text-based, formally-taught set of skills learned during one’s childhood and useful in institutional settings to an extratextual set of sociocognitive practices acquired throughout a person’s life useful in a variety of contexts (see Deborah Brandt, David Barton & Mary Hamilton, and Deborah Williams Minter et al, among others). While these characteristics of literacy are generally agreed upon, a divide exists among social practice literacy theorists regarding the potential for social power that literacy affords its users. Some (Paulo Freire, Morris Young, and Jacqueline Jones Royster, for instance) ascribe literacy the power to overcome oppression, inferior status, and unjust conditions. Others (Sylvia Scribner, as well as Brandt & Katie Clinton) are highly cautious in ascribing literacy such power, given that access to literacy is usually in the hands of the powerful, whether or not users know it.
This debate frames my participants’ experiences in acquiring professional literacies, which helped them resist the conventional domestic roles and responsibilities they faced as young women in the late 1960s and early 1970s. As professionals who came of age during second-wave feminism, the participants in this study struggled to pursue and achieve their educations and professions. Sandra is a retired English and ESL teacher with a master’s degree in Education. The contexts in which she and the other women acquired their formal literacies necessitated pitting their home lives, which included homemaking and childrearing, against their personal and professional goals. An attendant result of their experiences is the women’s simultaneous undervaluing of everyday literacies and especially those useful in housework. As this article will describe further, the cooking practices of two women in particular—though rife with the type of decision-making, material, and sociopolitical effects that characterize social practice literacy—are downplayed, unrecognizable even to the women themselves. Sandra’s sound bites offer one reason why. In describing patterns surrounding the women’s uses both in and out of the kitchen of a traditionally “domestic” text, the recipe, this article demonstrates how the women both align themselves with professional, community, and personal pursuits and simultaneously denigrate the idea of intentional, motivated participation in housework.
Playing It By Ear: Donna and Edna
Rather than referring to recipes in cookbooks or on websites, Donna and Edna each compose original recipes. However, in describing their cooking practices, Donna and Edna actually have nothing—no artifacts, that is—to share. Rather than relying on websites, cookbooks, or recipe cards, they compose in situ, or work from ingredients on hand to address the demands they face in their immediate, rhetorical situations. In this way, the women’s practices are comprised of basic rhetorical principles: they must consider their audience (children? adults? how many?), purpose (to nourish? to impress?), genre (simple lunch? Sunday dinner? party?), and material conditions (various ingredients and tools, money, and time). All of these elements vary, of course, according to the woman and the situation.
Donna, a semi-retired nurse who has four adult children, says she uses “no writing, no recipe cards,” but instead engages in “instinctive cooking” of fresh foods, eschewing canned fruit, vegetables, and beans. Calling her cast iron griddle her “second hand,” she goes into detail about the preparation of potatoes: “I do them boiled and sliced and fried until they’re crispy and then added to beans—from scratch.” Donna calls this meal good for “clean energy, a perfect balance.” Partially in response to the material conditions in which she cooked while living overseas, where varieties of packaged and canned foods popular in the US were unavailable, Donna also counts among her motivations to use fresh ingredients her daughter’s sensitivities to preservatives in processed, packaged foods. Importantly, Donna describes the values that underscore her interest in fresh foods and home cooking: health and nutrition. As a nursing professional and a mother who believes in a child-centered parenting style, she says, “I think I cook with respect to the kids.”
Similarly creative, Edna’s cooking faces stricter material impositions, including a tight budget and accommodating three “big eaters,” her husband and two sons (when they were teenagers). Edna also works only with a limited number of traditional ingredients appropriate within her knowledge of Italian cooking, listing onions, garlic, and homemade breadcrumbs as the base of most recipes. She is proud of keeping these ingredients on hand all the time, storing lentils and breadcrumbs in re-purposed glass jars in the pantry. Although these material conditions are inflexible, Edna describes her everyday cooking for her family of five as very flexible, emphasizing that: “I play it by ear. I don’t worry about recipes because everything calls for garlic and onions.” She credits her mother-in-law with “giving” her lots of recipes, but when I ask if I can see them, she says that “they show you or tell you, they don’t write them down…not a recipe, something you wrote down, but a pinch of this or that…” To Edna, recipes are things one might “worry” about, adding complication to something that comes naturally to her.
Discussing Donna’s and Edna’s recipe production in rhetorical terms runs counter to the ways in which the women themselves describe and perceive these practices. Between Donna’s “instinctive” cooking and Edna’s “pinch of this or that,” the women reflect their confidence in the kitchen, though they also resist generally accepted social theories of literacy as a powerful “social practice” or “set of practices” (Barton and Hamilton 6; Minter, Gere, and Keller-Cohen 671), which is neither solely text-based nor tethered to traditional literate institutions such as school, work, or church (see also Brandt, Hogg, Royster, Rumsey, Sohn, and Young, among others). The work of Barton and Hamilton on “cooking literacies” in particular highlights the decision-making of their participant Rita to exemplify the “tangible, observable” aspects of social practice literacy, whether or not the writing or reading of texts is involved:
Rita does not always go through the same set of activities in making the pie [from a well-used