Culinary Life Writing and Visual Narration in Cipe Pineles’s Leave Me Alone with the Recipes

This article contributes to the growing scholarship on cookbooks as culinary life writing by positioning Cipe Pineles’ Leave Me Alone with the Recipes (2017) within the genealogy of the foodoir genre and exploring its importance as a Jewish American and Jewish diasporic visual source. Leave Me Alone with the Recipes is a prime example of gastrography because its recipes and illustrations are inextricably linked to each other and to personal narratives and political histories. Created in the wake of World War II and the Holocaust, Pineles’s hand-painted work represents a graphic mode of storytelling that allowed her to generate a physical record of recipes that were under threat of loss given the destruction of Jewish culture. The cookbook simultaneously functioned as a way to reclaim her European roots while honoring her mother through an intimate project that, as this article will articulate, adds dimension to her storied graphic arts career. Through the hand-lettered and illustrated pages, Pineles does more than teach us how to cook. She opens a window into her relationship with her family and food, and invites us into a private testimony of survival and artistic mastery. By doing so, Leave Me Alone with the Recipes serves as an alternative pictorial archive of Pineles’s life history that augments official accounts of her professional creative contributions.