SOURCE: Sceats, Sarah. “Food and Manners: Roberts and Ellis.” In Food, Consumption and the Body in Contemporary Women's Fiction, pp. 125-54. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

In the following essay, Sceats discusses the significance of food and cooking to the creation of female identity in the fiction of Roberts and Alice Thomas Ellis.

Food is an essentially social signifier, a bearer of interpersonal and cultural meanings. It is, and has been, constructed as symbolic in all sorts of ways, either intentionally (Passover, the Eucharist), through custom (harvest suppers and hot cross buns) or by commerce (the ‘ploughman's lunch’); the resonances are, initially at least, culture-specific. (These resonances may change, of course: hot cross buns began their life in ancient Egypt as bread marked with horns for fertility.)¹ Both the acceptability of particular foods and what they signify are part of cultural identity. Not only might raw fish, witchetty grubs...