Susanne Mühleisen
[Varieties of English Around the World G67] 2022
► pp. 17–42
Language and food studies form a rich source for social history and anthropology of the Caribbean (e.g. Mintz 1986, 1996, Goucher 2014). The creative transformation of food in the Caribbean in the formative period of plantation slavery brought together ingredients from four different continents, adapting Old World dishes to New World creolized food. While the written genre “recipe” is younger than the oral transmission of food preparation instructions, it is one of the oldest and most tightly structured ones in English language contexts.
In this chapter, the text-external and text-internal features of Caribbean recipes will be explored first in traditional Trinidadian recipe collections (Hunt 1988, Indar et al. 1988). A particular focus will be placed on the use of lexical items and on ingroup/ outgroup markers which define the intended target readership. These questions will become all the more relevant in a comparison of traditional print recipes to more globally accessible online versions that have appeared in recent years.