By Arismita Ghosh
If a narrative is defined as a story—simply “a sequence of events in time”—then it follows that recipes are one of the most common narrative forms familiar to the everyday reader (Abrams 234). Despite the many ways one can write a modern recipe, each one will at the very least provide a series of steps to be carried out in a certain order, to achieve a certain result. A realist literary narrative is not much different. Both forms rely largely on an organised, streamlined structure in order to produce their relevant texts. As a result, experimenting with narrative form reveals the implicit goals of such neatly constructed structures: the modern recipe and the realist mode are both products of colonial imposition on narrative style, emerging in the mid-to-late 19th century. Many credit Fannie Farmer, born into a settler-colonial society in Boston, with conventionalising the “modern recipe” form in her 1887 work The Boston Cookbook (Cotter 59). She introduced standardised units of measurement and ingredient lists at the start of each recipe to create a cohesive narrative that allowed the reader to easily follow along with the recipe. Around the same time, from 1865 to 1900, American literature shifted to the realist mode, which focused on telling stories that represent “life as it really is” (Abrams 275, 333). Realistic novels employ structured narratives to give the effect of realism. Contemporary texts, however, are shifting away from these colonial forms. This paper will analyse three such texts—Fred Wah’s Diamond Grill, Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach, and Madeleine Thien’s “Simple Recipes”—that include shorter recipes within their larger narratives. All three works use their respective forms to write against the colonial imposition of neatly constructed realist narratives and recipes, instead exploring hybrid forms that allow for the embrace of cultural openness and fluidity. At the micro level of analysis, experiments with form are seen through the recipes shared by the narrators; at the macro level, they arise within the text’s structure and narrative style.
In Fred Wah’s introductory remarks and acknowledgements to Diamond Grill, he describes his book as a “biotext” (ix). He expands on this in the appended author’s note by writing that his use of the word biotext as a descriptor is a way to prevent his writing from “being hijacked by ready-made generic expectations such as the novel, autobiography, and life writing” (Wah 184). It is immediately clear that Wah is not interested in writing within the bounds of the organised realist mode; he resists the “predictable forms of narrative such as plot and character” by instead creating his own narrative form that blends the lines between prose and poetry, using individual anecdotes to convey an overarching story (185). As a result of this unique fusion, the biotext form embodies the sense of hybridity that is so integral to Wah’s identity. The combination of different genres that appear in the colonial tradition, such as autobiography and fiction, makes the biotext a hybrid genre—like Wah, whose mixed Chinese-Canadian ethnicity becomes its own hybrid category. Joanne Saul’s book Writing the Roaming Subject: The Biotext in Canadian Literature echoes this idea, claiming that “rather than presenting finished versions of a life, [biotexts] focus on the process involved in writing a life: the ruptures, gaps, and workings of memory” (17). The same idea applies to the recipes presented by Wah in Diamond Grill. Rather than presenting a static, “finished version” of how a dish should look, Wah provides flexible instructions that his readers can easily adapt to suit their needs. His use of the biotext form and recipe mode are thus both invested in creating a dynamic text, reflecting the hybrid nature of Wah’s mixed identity, which inherently opposes rigid colonial impositions on identity.
One of the first recipes presented in Diamond Grill is for tomato beef; a Chinese dish passed down in Wah’s family, with added personal asides that indicate it is specifically a Chinese dish being cooked in Canada. He introduces the dish by contextualizing it within his childhood, describing it as being particularly good “as a leftover when you get home late from playing hockey and it’s still warm” (Wah 44). Hockey is an identifiable marker of Canadian identity. By telling the reader that this Chinese dish is best when eaten after playing hockey, Wah toes both worlds without rejecting one for the other. He again personalises the tomato beef recipe in the last line, instructing the reader to “pick out pungent chunks of ginger and hide under bowl” (44). Even though Wah has specified earlier in the book that he does not enjoy the “pungent” taste of ginger, he does not call on the reader to remove it from the recipe when cooking. Instead, he tells them to remove it when eating, after the dish is made. Doing so keeps the hybridity of this experience alive: it does not erase either side of Wah’s heritage, allowing him to once again straddle the line between Chinese and Canadian cultures. Such cultural fusion can only be achieved by following this kind of non-standardised family recipe, which relies on memory and provides personalised instructions that have likely been passed down through generations.
Although Wah provides comprehensive directives when relaying his recipe for tomato beef, he refuses to tell the reader exactly how to make it. Wah pairs each step with a choice: “small tomatoes or a forty-eight ounce can,” “stewed or whole,” “one or two cloves” (44). Wah acknowledges that taste preferences differ vastly from person to person. As a result, he allows the reader to make their own judgement—which presents the recipe as a dynamic, constantly changing object. Two people can follow the same recipe for tomato beef and end up with two dishes that look completely different, simply due to the variety of choices that Wah offers. Even the method of measuring ingredients is subjective, with the recipe calling for “about a thumb of sliced ginger” and “a little salt” (44). Both of these examples are embodied, unique ways of quantifying something; they rely on the reader feeling the ingredients with their senses. By rejecting any form of standardisation, one of the main markers of the modern recipe introduced by Fannie Farmer, Wah openly embraces the kind of subjectivity frowned upon by colonialists. To anyone expecting a consistent, uniform recipe, the ones Wah provides in Diamond Grill mark a surprising departure. Similarly, his use of one-page vignettes that go back and forth in time rather than organised chapters is jarring to any reader expecting a linear, structured narrative. Wah invites the reader to meet his family and friends in the very first pages of the novel without immediately explaining who everyone is, and instead allows the audience to pass judgements on each character before providing further context. This structure allows him to actively engage the audience and build a dynamic relationship between reader and writer, rather than one-sidedly providing the reader with information, as is common with the static nature of the novel form. The lack of upfront exposition and context provided by the biotext’s structure, as well as the lack of standardised measurements and instructions in Wah’s family recipes call on the reader to rely on their own instincts before they listen to Wah. This allows him to write against the colonial imposition of texts as prescriptive or realist—Wah is more interested in fostering a culture of openness and hybridity, and he demonstrates this through his formal choices throughout Diamond Grill.
While Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach is closer to the novel genre than Diamond Grill, it similarly departs from the realist mode and follows a non-linear narrative. The text intentionally obfuscates temporality, undulating between past and present and using Lisamarie’s perspective as an unreliable narrator to keep the reader at arm’s length. In Sarah Stunden’s article “Past as Presence and the Promise of Futurity in Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach,” she argues that “the formal levels of the novel are structured around a present haunted by the past […] by ghosts who reaffirm ‘indigenous presence’” (392). This structure creates a deliberately alienating experience for the non-Indigenous reader—Lisa invites the reader to see the Haisla world and Kitamaat community through her eyes but simultaneously distances the reader by choosing not to provide contextual information in the novel. Robinson is not interested in explicating every detail of Haisla life since she knows that the non-Haisla reader can never truly enter this world. The novel’s push-and-pull narrative structure originates from this tension, toeing the line between two worlds, almost letting the reader into the Haisla community, but not quite. For example, Robinson often leaves certain Haisla words like qoalh’m untranslated, which introduces a part of Haisla culture to the reader without stopping to explain its significance. Stunden further elaborates on this intricate structure by saying, “the novel balances both engagement with a real extant community context and the imperative to publicly tell a story that does not belong to the Kitamaat community alone” (393). When Lisa shares her grandmother’s recipe for oolichan grease with the reader, she exemplifies this sense of balance. She welcomes the reader into an intimate family setting, allowing them to observe the details of how the grease is made, but provides no information about how to obtain the ingredients or prepare them for the recipe. While this is in part because oolichan are an endangered species in Kitamaat, the withholding of information also serves to protect certain parts of Haisla heritage and keep them hidden from the eyes of “outsiders,” as Robinson explains in her book The Sasquatch at Home (30). At the formal level of both narrative structure and recipe form, Robinson crafts a delicate balance between Haisla and non-Haisla worlds as a way of writing against the settler colonial impositions on her community.
Lisa prefaces the recipe for oolichan grease by saying “only the most experienced grease makers” should decide when to make it, but continues writing the recipe instructions in the second person imperative, directly addressing the reader (Monkey Beach 86). This once again creates an effect that is simultaneously alienating—since the reader does not have the resources or knowledge to reproduce this recipe—and welcoming—since Lisa nevertheless invites to listen in on the cultural information. The use of the second person brings us out of the rhythm of the narrative for only one paragraph before reverting to the first person in the next paragraph, again reinforcing the reader’s sense of estrangement from the rest of the novel. This kind of duality echoes the question of the hybrid identity in Diamond Grill and speaks to the inherent contradiction of living as an Indigenous person in Canada. By alienating the reader from the internal world of Monkey Beach, Robinson recreates the feeling of alienation experienced by many Indigenous people within their own homes. When recounting the recipe for oolichan grease, Lisa uses the basic form of the modern recipe by writing in the imperative and providing step-by-step instructions, a form likely familiar to non-Indigenous readers. The content of the recipe, however, draws on a tradition that is unique to her Haisla community and consequently unfamiliar to readers on the outside. Robinson thus reclaims the colonial imposition of the modern recipe form to write instructions for a food item that has historically been excluded from colonial histories.
In the oolichan recipe itself, Lisa provides no markers of time or list of ingredients. All the instructions narrated by Lisa are based on the recipient’s instincts and assume prior knowledge, likely how the recipe was recounted within her community in Kitamaat, where everyone grew up with this knowledge on hand. Lisa gives directives that rely on the recipient using all their senses, calling on them to “stir slowly until cooked” and use a “quick, spiraling motion” when adding hot rocks (Monkey Beach 86). These are not specific descriptors; each reader could have their own interpretation of what stirring slowly or using a spiralling motion looks like, similar to the ambiguous nature of Wah’s recipes in Diamond Grill. As a result, cooking becomes an embodied experience, where the cook must feel and use their instincts to tell when something is ready, rather than relying on static instructions to give completely unquestionable directives. The sense of hybridity that this recipe embraces also expresses itself through the tools and utensils used, which provide a stark contrast between traditional Haisla methodologies and modern colonial inventions. The “fire pit,” the “wooden board,” and “red-hot rocks from an open fire” are all tools used in the Haisla community for centuries, with the knowledge of their functionality passed down from generation to generation (86). At the end of the recipe, however, Lisa directs the recipient to “keep your fresh oolichan grease refrigerated” (86). The modern intrusion of the refrigerator is a sharp deviation from the previously mentioned tools, especially since Lisa highlights the incompatibility of modern technology with traditional Haisla foodways by saying “[fresh] oolichans go rancid easily and don’t last in the fridge or freezer” (86). It is only through the process of making grease out of the oolichan that these two different worlds can come together, as they store their traditional food in modern refrigerators. Lisa’s recipe, then, calls attention to the contradictions that exist between Haisla and non-Haisla ways of cooking; instead of necessarily attempting to reconcile these contradictions, she lets them remain in opposition to one another. Both at the level of the larger narrative structure in Monkey Beach and the form of the recipe as Lisa relays it, Robinson writes against colonial impositions that restrict the identities and spaces that Indigenous people can occupy. By accepting her hybridity, like Wah does in Diamond Grill, she resists colonial rigidity and presents an Indigenous identity that espouses openness and dynamism.
Outside the realm of extended narratives like novels and biotexts lies the short story, which first gained prominence within the Canadian literary landscape in the 1960s. According to Maria Löschnigg’s book The Routledge Introduction to the Canadian Short Story, the short story form remains relevant due to its ability to “reflect an almost infinite spectrum of thematic concerns” (7). Short stories are an especially popular choice among migrant authors in Canada; given the discontinuous and hybrid nature of migrant identity, it is fitting that these authors would prefer a form that is not bound by the constraints of a sustained narrative. One such well-known short story is Madeleine Thien’s “Simple Recipes,” which has “assumed an almost canonical status” in the Canadian literary sphere (Löschnigg 199). In the same vein as Diamond Grill and Monkey Beach, “Simple Recipes” follows a first-person narrator who oscillates between the past and the present, resulting in a non-linear narrative fractured into different vignettes from the narrator’s childhood. Löschnigg argues that the short story’s fragmented nature is “particularly well suited for capturing experiences of disruption, of ‘living on the hyphen’” (189). Thien’s text exemplifies the disruptive nature of migrant identity at the formal level of both short story and recipe—the “simple recipe” in the title is one for rice, which Thien presents in snippets multiple times throughout the text. “Simple Recipes” opens with the instructions of how to wash rice, and ends with the same image of “rins[ing] the rice over and over” (Thien 19). The recipe for making rice, then, frames the entire story from beginning to end. By dispersing this “simple recipe” throughout the story, Thien challenges the colonial idea that recipes—and narrative structure—must adhere to a clear and organised narrative structure.
Alongside the fragmented nature of the short story itself, the first instance of the rice recipe is split into two parts: the first of which is in first-person descriptive, and then in second-person imperative. The narrator begins by describing her father’s actions as he cleans the rice. When she writes “over and over, my father rinsed the rice, drained the water, then filled the pot again,” the narrator clearly defines who is making the rice and where (Thien 3). The narrator places rice solely within the context of the father’s presence from the start of the story. Unlike most recipes, which are prescriptive by nature and tell the reader what to make in the future, Thien’s recipe for rice tells the audience what is being made in the present. It is only in the second paragraph that the narrator shifts to writing in the second person, directly addressing the reader by saying, “you measure the water this way” (3). As in the previous two texts, the narrator uses the imperative form of the recipe to invite the audience into a personal, intimate setting to which they otherwise would not have access. The sudden move into the second person takes the reader out of the text, albeit for a moment, making them aware of their role as part of the audience. By relying on the recipe form to relay information to the reader, the narrator breaks the fourth wall in an unsettling yet welcoming manner. She instructs that “the water should reach the bend of your first knuckle”: once again, similar to Diamond Grill, the narrator uses an embodied mode of measurement (3). This engages all of the recipient’s senses and bodily awareness, while also emphasising the fact that this is a family recipe that has been passed down across generations, with the narrator’s father teaching her this dish. It calls to a collective memory of rice-making, and the narrator now shares this knowledge with the reader through this recipe within a short story. Right after this, however, the narrator switches back to first person and ends by recalling her father in the lines, “[he] did not need instructions […] He closed his eyes and felt for the waterline” (4). Again, the sudden shifts between tenses displace the reader and draw attention to the fragmented nature of the recipe. There is no clear, uninterrupted way for the narrator to write about the process of making rice, which for her is inextricably intertwined with her complicated relationship with her father. She can only find clarity through displacement—this allows the narrator to write against the colonial imposition of neatly constructed narratives, and move towards a fractured narrative form that offers her more freedom.
Thien’s use of a non-linear, alternating narrative is an important pushback against realist narratives as it thematically supports the acceptance of cultural hybridity. The narrator and her brother’s diaspora identity is one of the main things with which their father contends throughout the story, and his strict enforcement of Malaysian values eventually leads his son to rebel. Löschnigg reads the act of rice-washing and sifting through impurities as symbolic of the father’s “rejection of cultural openness and hybridity,” which complicates this essay’s notion that cultural rigidity is a product of colonial ideology (Löschnigg 206). “Simple Recipes” provides an example where the barrier to openness comes from within the family itself, rather than from an external Canadian community rejecting a culture that is perceived as Other. The use of form, then, becomes a crucial way to analyse Thien’s intentions when presenting the story—instead of using a neatly constructed linear storyline, she favours more displaced narrative modes that complicate the story’s timeline. Her embrace of such a hybrid form reads as an embrace of fluid and hybrid migrant identities. Even the fragmentation of the rice recipe reads as an attempt to reclaim the symbol for rice, which for so long symbolised the abuse enacted by her father. By repeating the line “my father would rinse the rice over and over” at the end of the story, the narrator returns to this image from her childhood after reckoning with the knowledge she has in the present day (Thien 19). Her experience with her father as an adult reinforms her memory of this experience of making rice. She reflects on the process of rinsing and adds a detail to the recipe that was not present in the beginning: the impurities are only “a speck, barely visible” (19). Her personal addition to the recipe passed down to her from her father highlights how collective knowledge is shaped by every generation, demonstrating that the recipe form is dynamic and ever-changing in this context. The narrator thus challenges the colonial imposition of static recipes. By redefining the act of rinsing rice from start to end of the story, the author conveys that in the same way a recipe changes, she can end the cycle of abuse perpetuated by her father through this defiant embrace of an amalgamated and displaced form. Ultimately, the way in which Diamond Grill, Monkey Beach, and “Simple Recipes” experiment with formal features reveals their respective approaches to the question of identity. Instead of accepting the rigidity of colonial forms such as the realist novel and the modern recipe, these texts actively work to problematize these established forms and create their own hybrid narratives. In Diamond Grill and Monkey Beach, the non-linear narratives thematically reject the idea of assimilation, with the narrators choosing to embrace cultural hybridity and go against the grain of white Canadian society. The disruption of the realist narrative is a response to external colonial influences on ethnic Chinese and Haisla culture, respectively. In “Simple Recipes,” however, the tension exists within the family sphere—the narrator’s use of non-linear narrative is a way to reject her father’s rigid enforcement of Malaysian culture and instead embrace a hybrid Malaysian-Canadian identity. All three texts aim to expand the landscape of Canadian literature to reflect the increasingly trans-cultural nature of Canadians themselves. This kind of multicultural identity primarily occurs through food habits, passed down in families from generation to generation—an act that all the narrators recreate in their texts by permanently recording their family recipes in writing. By writing about food while rejecting the constraints of the standardised, colonialist recipe form, these authors gain the freedom to embrace hybridity. All three texts share the pressing concern of breaking out of preconceived structures and adopting a fluid, ever-changing cultural identity.
Works Cited
Abrams, Meyer Howard, and Geoffrey Galt Harpham. A Glossary of Literary Terms. Wadsworth Publishing Company, 2005.
Cotter, Colleen. “Claiming a Piece of the Pie: How the Language of Recipes Defines Community.” Recipes for Reading: Community Cookbooks, Stories, Histories, edited by Anne L. Bower, University of Massachusetts Press, 1997.
Löschnigg, Maria. The Routledge Introduction to the Canadian Short Story. Taylor & Francis, 2022. Taylor & Francis, https://doi-org.proxy3.library.mcgill.ca/10.4324/9781003142683.
Robinson, Eden. Monkey Beach. Vintage Canada, 2011.
—. The Sasquatch at Home: Traditional Protocols & Modern Storytelling. University of Alberta, 2012.
Saul, Joanne. Writing the Roaming Subject: The Biotext in Canadian Literature. University of Toronto Press, 2006. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.3138/9781442683730.
Stunden, Sarah. “Past as Presence and the Promise of Futurity in Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach.” Studies in the Novel, vol. 54, no. 4, Dec. 2022, pp. 390–409, https://doi.org/10.1353/sdn.2022.0030.
Thien, Madeleine. Simple Recipes. Vintage Canada, 2016.
Wah, Fred. Diamond Grill. NeWest, 2006.