A Budding Gourmet: Food novel 1
1974

Serial postcard novel in twelve parts, mailed between January and April 1974

In the mid-1970s, Rosler created three “food novels,” each a set of typewritten postcards sent to friends and others in weekly installments. In all three, the interconnections of food, women and labor are central. Delivered by mail, the cards mediate between the interior space of the home and the external network of the postal system. Further, as the artist notes, each pause before the arrival of the next card is “time in which the communication could unfold and reverberate.”

In A Budding Gourmet a housewife confides her desire to become a better, more refined cook, and shares her views about class, upbringing, and other cultures. She learns to cook cuisines from around the world, starting with France and Brazil. A little classist and more than a bit neo-colonial, the protagonist invests much of her own personal self-worth in the dishes she masters and the outward appearance that mastery brings.