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The Cook-as-Criminal Autobiography

2017; Springer International Publishing; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1007/978-3-319-70923-9_3

2730-9193

María Nieves Pascual Soler,

Culinary Culture and Tourism

Pascual Soler offers a reading of chef Marco Pierre White's autobiography, The Devil in the Kitchen: Sex, Pain, Madness and the Making of a Great Chef (2007) within the larger framework of criminal autobiography. The chapter offers a summary of the relationship between cooking and crime, focusing on the gangster conventions used by White, the sensational ingredients in his story and the moral ambiguity that ends the text. As well as looking at the ways in which fact combines with fiction, Pascual Soler explores White as the archetypal example of the criminal-chef persona. The chapter concludes by suggesting that this criminal persona is erected by the chef as proof of his artistic genius and as a defense mechanism against the feminization of the kitchen.