Ambiguous and Absent Imagery in Contemporary Culinary Memoirs

Culinary memoirs, a hybrid genre of life writing which explore origins and identity through culinary traditions, raise the question of the role of imagery in personal narratives. Many of these works offer rich descriptions of food which are never illustrated and tell personal tales which are rarely accompanied by photographs, seeming to resist pictorial collaboration. The literary intention of the culinary memoir as more than memoir and more than cookbook, omits or decorrelates images. Marginalised imagery thus preserves the force and gravity of these diasporic narratives. Is their role to authenticate, to illustrate or to act as discreet memory support? Also, is the narrative potential of images betrayed by narrational ambiguity? We will consider images that serve to authenticate origins in a temporal dimension, or alternatively as spatial anchors, as well as the presence of recipes that substitute for lost photographic memories, and also autobiographical interpretation from static pictures.