Helana Brigman

Louisiana State University, English, Alumna

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I am the creator of the award-winning blog Clearly Delicious, a food writer, photographer, cook, and doctoral candidate whose work has appeared in Louisiana Cookin’ Magazine, and column “Fresh Ideas” prints every other Thursday in Louisiana’s official state newspaper, The Advocate.

My research interests include the British periodical press, nineteenth-century literatures, women's writings, food studies, and the works of John Ruskin. I am especially drawn to un-studied samples of women's food writings in the Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine, Bow Bells, and the Illustrated London News.

As a doctoral candidate in English, I attend LSU - Baton Rouge where I divide my time between researching British culinary traditions as well as the nineteenth-century periodical press and writing, photographing, and eating southern cooking. My first book, The Fresh Table: Cooking in Louisiana All Year Round, is out now (spring, 2013) by LSU Press.
Supervisors: Sharon Weltman

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Anna Johnston

The University of Queensland, Australia

Modhumita Roy

Tufts University

Blake Singley

Australian War Memorial

Annie Gray

University of York

Coldnoon: International Journal of Travel Writing & Travelling Cultures

Mairtin Mac Con Iomaire

Anne Murcott

School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London

Michael Symons

Frank Jacob

Nord University

Kelly Lin

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Books by Helana Brigman

The Fresh Table: Cooking in Louisiana All Year Round

Papers by Helana Brigman

A Domesticated Idea: British Women Writers and the Victorian Recipe, 1845-1910

xiv for middle-class women regularly flatter readers' aspirational ideals, providing cooking inst... more xiv for middle-class women regularly flatter readers' aspirational ideals, providing cooking instructions and ingredients the average Victorian housewife might never see or use. Truffles, champagne, foies gras, or green sea turtle, for example, were hardly affordable, but they makeup some of the most famous recipes published in Isabella Beeton's 1861 cookbook, Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management. Likewise, recipes with detailed explanations for preparing broths, stocks, and breads from limited ingredients appear more appropriate for a working-class reader. This meant that many Victorian women's cookbooks and recipes were read jointly, in which "the mistress would read it [the recipe or cookbook] to decide on the day's meals, and then pass it to her cook to follow the detailed instructions for individual dishes" (Humble "Intro." to HM xxvi). This collaboration between housewife and servant made the recipe an especially practical Victorian text, one which permitted middle-class women the ability to draw firm lines between themselves-the recipe's targeted audience-and their household's staff-typically, cooks who were expected to use the recipe's instructions and do the actual work. By shifting my focus from representations of Victorian women's recipes in the periodical press to Victorian women's cookbooks, I aim to contribute to Janet Floyd and Laurel Forster's request that scholars document the "range and multiplicity of the [recipe's] form" (2). In the pages that follow, I hope to provide a more complete picture of this form as well as its functions by raising important questions about the study of Victorian female authorship as it intersected with domesticity and food. In discussing the "myths and realities of female authorship" in nineteenth-century Britain, Linda H. Peterson observes that "[t]he phrase 'woman of letters' is, tellingly, a Victorian invention," and one that allowed professional women writers to develop and present their own public personae (4). But what about the Victorian woman who preferred to write about food? At the periphery of Victorian literature, history, and culture sits one of the xv many facets of the period's woman of letters, a woman who dedicated herself to writing artfully crafted recipes that rethought how she-and many women like her-conceived eating, reading, and writing. Notes 1 In A Magazine of Her Own?: Domesticity and Desire in the Woman's Magazine, Margaret Beetham notes that the "ephemeral form" of the Victorian periodical greatly affected its availability for future scholars of print media (9). Because magazines and newspapers were intended for short-term use, they were manufactured with cheaper materials and lacked stiff covers, making it difficult to access Victorian periodicals in their original form. Fortunately, as Beetham notes, "Nineteenth-century readers who could afford…[to have] their periodicals bound in volume form" helped to preserve more fragile mediums like the women's magazine (9). See LSU's Special Collections in Hill Memorial Library for a well-preserved example of The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine: Volumes 1-8 (1860-1864), call number "RARE-052 EN36." 2 Andrea Broomfield broadly defines the eighteenth-and nineteenth-century's "middleclass" as "those who practiced a profession such as law or medicine, who served as military officers, or as clergy in the Church of England" (5). Historically, this definition would have included anyone earning between £50-1000 per annum. According to the 1851 census, 270,000 professional workers lived in Britain; by 1871, this number had tripled (data qtd. in Humble "Little Swans" 323). 3 I emphasize the word domestic here to bring attention to the ways readers of women's magazines connected with each other outside of racial and class boundaries. See Chapter Three for more information on how magazines like the EDM imagined readers as a "domestic ideal," thus creating a large imagined community of domestic Englishwomen. Additionally, see Kay Boardman's article "Ideology of Domesticity in Victorian Women's Magazines" (Victorian Periodicals Review 33.2 (Summer 2000: 150-64). 4 See Janet Lloyd and Laurel Forster, "The Recipe in Its Cultural Contexts" (6) as well as OED entry "recipe, n." for more on the waning usage of the term "receipt" and its etymology. 5 I discuss the history and style of the British recipe in length in Chapter Two. For the poultry recipe I mention here, see "Method of Preserving and Stuffing of Birds" from Walker's Hibernian Magazine (423-24). 6 See Lucy Brown's chapter "The British Press, 1800-1860" (24-5). 7 See Laurel and Forster (6-7) and Luce Giard (149-22) on the recipe writer's "multiplications of borrowing" and what historian William Eamon calls the implied "contract between the reader and the text" (qtd. in Theophano 89-90). 8 Andrea Broomfield and Janet Theophano have provided scholars with indispensible archival research on the origins of the women's recipe books and cookery manuscripts. See Chapter 1 of Food and Cooking in Victorian England (Broomfield 2-3) and Chapters 1 and 2 of Eat My Words (Theophano 11-49). xvi 9 See Dena Attar's A Bibliography of Household Books Published in Britain 1800-1914 for receipts and recipe books that pre-dated the nineteenth century (11). 10 See Beetham's "Introduction" to A Magazine of Her Own? (7-9 and 28) and Jennifer Phegley's Educating the Proper Woman Reader (9-12). Also, see Kate Flint's chapter "Reading in the Periodical Press" in The Woman Reader, 1837-1914 (137-83). Notes 11 In A Magazine of Her Own?: Domesticity and Desire in the Woman's Magazine, Margaret Beetham notes that the "ephemeral form" of the Victorian periodical greatly affected its availability for future scholars of print media (9). Because magazines and newspapers were intended for short-term use, they were manufactured with cheaper materials and lacked stiff covers, making it difficult to access Victorian periodicals in their original form. Fortunately, as Beetham notes, "Nineteenth-century readers who could afford…[to have] their periodicals bound in volume form" helped to preserve more fragile mediums like the women's magazine (9). See LSU's Special Collections in Hill Memorial Library for a well-preserved example of The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine: Volumes 1-8 (1860-1864), call number "RARE-052 EN36." 11 Andrea Broomfield broadly defines the eighteenth-and nineteenth-century's "middleclass" as "those who practiced a profession such as law or medicine, who served as military officers, or as clergy in the Church of England" (5). Historically, this definition would have included anyone earning between £50-1000 per annum. According to the 1851 census, 270,000 professional workers lived in Britain; by 1871, this number had tripled (data qtd. in Humble "Little Swans" 323). 11 I emphasize the word domestic here to bring attention to the ways readers of women's magazines connected with each other outside of racial and class boundaries. See Chapter Three for more information on how magazines like the EDM imagined readers as a "domestic ideal," thus creating a large imagined community of domestic Englishwomen. Additionally, see Kay Boardman's article "Ideology of Domesticity in Victorian Women's Magazines" (Victorian Periodicals Review 33.2 (Summer 2000: 150-64). 11 See Janet Lloyd and Laurel Forster, "The Recipe in Its Cultural Contexts" (6) as well as OED entry "recipe, n." for more on the waning usage of the term "receipt" and its etymology. 11 I discuss the history and style of the British recipe in length in Chapter Two. For the poultry recipe I mention here, see "Method of Preserving and Stuffing of Birds" from Walker's Hibernian Magazine (423-24). 11 See Lucy Brown's chapter "The British Press, 1800-1860" (24-5). 11 See Laurel and Forster (6-7) and Luce Giard (149-22) on the recipe writer's "multiplications of borrowing" and what historian William Eamon calls the implied "contract between the reader and the text" (qtd. in Theophano 89-90). 11 Andrea Broomfield and Janet Theophano have provided scholars with indispensible archival research on the origins of the women's recipe books and cookery manuscripts. See Chapter 1 of Food and Cooking in Victorian England (Broomfield 2-3) and Chapters 1 and 2 of Eat My Words (Theophano 11-49). 11 See Dena Attar's A Bibliography of Household Books Published in Britain 1800-1914 for receipts and recipe books that pre-dated the nineteenth century (11). 11 Debates of recipe ownership persist today, especially amongst writers publishing online. In 2012, Elise Bauer, owner of one of the internet's most successful food blogs, Simply xvii Recipes, took legal action against Amazon when Sarun Srirunpetch of Bangkok, Thailand, copied and pasted her recipes and photos into an eBook for Amazon's Kindle store. Since then, an online group called "PIPO"-Protect Intellectual Property Online-has taken further action, creating a watchdog network on Google+. See "Recipes," Factsheet FL-122, U.S. Copyright Office (http://www.copyright.gov). 12 See Signe Rousseau's chapter "Food Not for Sharing" in Food and Social Media for recent discussions of "the fine line between flattery and theft" that recipe writers face on the Internet (17-33). Also, it is worth noting that as of 2015, copyright laws do not cover the listing of a recipe's ingredients, but may, under certain and rare circumstances, cover a recipe's literary merit ("Recipes," Factsheet FL-122, U.S.). 13 I discuss the extent to which Acton developed "novel features" in Chapter Two. For Acton's discussion of these additions to the recipe book, see her "Preface" to the first and second editions of Modern Cookery (xix-xxii). 14 See Alexis Easley's First-Person Anonymous: Women Writers and Victorian Print Media, 1830-70 (1-34) for her overview of the ways Victorian women entered cultural, ideological, and literary debates as "first-person anonymous" contributors to the periodical press. 15 For...

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