The evolution of queer cookbooks

In 2024, seeing a cookbook that celebrates queer culture wouldn’t cause anyone to so much as bat an eyelash, but that has not always been the case. Decades ago, a queer cookbook would have been coded or you would have to know that the author was part of the LGBTQ+ community to understand it as such. A lot of people consider the The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, published in 1954, to be one of the first queer cookbooks, but as Eater’s Bettina Makalintal notes, that observation is mostly due to hindsight. Makalintal discusses the importance of this book and others while describing the evolution of queer cookbooks.

Forty two years after the The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook was released, Donna Clark’s The Queer Cookbook came out loud and proud. Clark’s book represents the other end of the queer cookbook continuum, says Makalintal. It used to be difficult to find a publisher for a cookbook (or a book in general) as a queer author, therefore many of the books were self-published. “So many of the earlier queer cookbooks are community cookbooks because it would be really hard for queer authors to get published while being out and having the book be about queerness,” says Alex Ketchum, Assistant Professor at McGill University’s Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies. There’s been a shift over the last 50 years, and Jenny’s 2020 post celebrating LGBTQ+ authors and chefs shows that today it’s a very different story.

The article notes that John Birdsall is writing a book on the history of queer food, and he finds that “few cookbooks of the past 60 years specifically flexed their lesbian, gay, or queer identities.” He provides a handful of examples from the 60s to the 80s, explaining that most of these books “churned far from the mainstream.” If you are interested in learning more about the history of queer cookbooks, you can view a digitized version of Professor Ketchum’s 2021 McGill University exhibit on the subject.