Chapter 11 - Plath and Food

Summary

Gerard Woodward explores Plath’s complex relationship with the culture of food and cookery on both sides of the Atlantic and helps us to understand the ways in which food works in her poetry and fiction. Plath was a compulsive observer and cataloguer of what she ate and what she cooked. Yet the times she lived in were ones of great contrasts and upheavals in the social and cultural attitudes towards food in Britain and the United States. In Plath’s birth country food remained central to the American ideal of wholesomeness, represented most emphatically by Rombauer and Becker’s The Joy of Cooking, which Plath treasured. In Britain the national cuisine had been devastated by the Second World War and years of rationing. At the same time, in both countries, food was slowly acquiring new powers as a marker of status and aspiration, particularly for women.