What is queer food? How we served a revolution

Birdsall (The Man Who Ate Too Much: The Life of James Beard, 2020) pores over queer history through the lens of food. While some names are recognizable (James Baldwin, Gertrude Stein), the restaurants and dishes Birdsall uncovers aren't always obviously queer. But that's partly his point. "What makes the food queer is intention: the obstinacy of survival sealed in gelatin, white bread, Spam." Certain figureheads in queer American history may be new to many readers. Take Harry Baker, who introduced the well-known oil-based chiffon cake to the world by way of Los Angeles. Establishments like San Francisco's Brasserie, opened by Alexis Muir (grandniece of John Muir), feature "walls and ceiling [that] are painted to look like leather," a decor characteristic that starts to define queer gathering places. Singular in its approach to culinary history via famous and lesser-known queer icons alike, this deserves a place in any food history collection.

James Beard Award winner Birdsall (The Man Who Ate Too Much) provides an eye-opening exploration of how food has helped shape "the queer arc of survival" in American life. Moving from the mid-19th century to the early 1990s, he covers how restaurants like the Paper Doll in San Francisco (which opened in 1944 as arguably "the first queer restaurant in America") demanded "respect for gays, lesbians, and those whose... presentation" deviated from typical gender norms, while New York City's Café Nicholson became a popular postwar meeting place where queer, bohemian artists felt a "growing... confidence" in publicly congregating. Birdsall's best insights derive from individual profiles that chart broader shifts and power struggles in queer life. For example, Harry Baker, who in the 1940s sold General Mills his recipe for chiffon cake (which was then stamped with branding for "feminine icon of home and family" Betty Crocker), illustrates how gay people could be erased from the cultural record, while Alice B. Toklas, who in 1954 published a cookbook full of "un-makeable recipes" (and coded references to lesbian desire), reveals how the queer community subtly challenged straight power by pushing against "utility, standardization, replicability." Combining a novelistic imagination with razor-sharp analysis, Birdsall fills in historical gaps to highlight the resiliency of queer people and cast the culture of food and dining as an unlikely but powerful symbol of resistance. Readers will be eager to dig in. (June)

Exploring how food has helped define the act of queer survival across decades of sexual prohibition. Sectioned into four chronological parts, Birdsall, a celebrated culture and food writer, explores how the art of gastronomy became integrated into queer culture despite the prevalence of a closeted 20th-century "homosexual underground." His narrative first probes the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when same-gender desire was considered a pathology and restaurants like San Francisco's Paper Doll provided a safer haven for gender-challenging individuals. This was also true at the marble tables of Café Nicholson in Manhattan, which emerged as one of several queer-friendly "spaces with a dynamic mix of art and performance…where people's masks could slip." As the book meanders into the "audacious tang" of mid-1980s queer liberation, Birdsall expansively cites influential queer pioneers and disruptors like Harry Baker, inventor of the chiffon cake in 1927; Café Nicholson's renowned chef Edna Lewis; James Baldwin; and Truman Capote, among others. Birdsall emphasizes relevant volumes likeThe Alice B. Toklas Cook Book, scouring it for cloaked queer meaning, as well as 1940s food editor Genevieve Callahan's lesbian-codedThe California Cook Book, since, at the time, the publishing industry imperative was to "scrub manifestly queer voices from cookbooks." Through an enthusiastic narrative, Birdsall names names and cites legacies of those responsible for ushering forward the evolution of queer food despite "a system determined to deny, prosecute, marginalize queer existence." Naturally, Birdsall's toothsome, astute four-course queer culinary history lesson begins and ends with cake. An informative and expert analysis of the culture of food fueling a queer revolution. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.