Culinary Impressionism

Abstract Chapter 2: ‘Culinary Impressionism: Ford Madox Ford’s Agrarianism and Cookery’ connects Ford’s literary Impressionism with cookery, forging an integrated culinary/literary path in his writing. Culinary Impressionism illustrates the ways in which cookery and local agriculture contain the potential to establish individual creativity and international exchange, as represented in Ford’s memoir It Was the Nightingale and the novels The Good Soldier, Parade’s End tetralogy, and his late prose works, Provence and Great Trade Route. As a technique, culinary Impressionism creates a channel between both Ford’s creative fiction and life-writing and his cooking and cookery-writing. Following Ford in his travels, this chapter also addresses the transatlantic alimentary connections between England, France, and America, and also from the Far East to the West, which he explores in Great Trade Route. It is particularly through emphasis on the mobility of food and its possibility of uniting diverse cultures that Ford develops his theories of ‘civilization’ and ‘barbarism’.