AustLit

'Stories are very important in order to understand who we are and where we have come from … Many stories can make us nostalgic for the food of our childhood or for some other happy time. (Alexander 1988, vii)

‘Lovelight Chocolate Chiffon Cake’ is a distinctively Australian story that fits into a subgenre of food memoir. The food memoir is an established and important subgenre of the memoir, with American writer M.F.K Fisher described as its mother (Waxman 2008, 364). Food memoir is traditionally seen as ‘modest and incomplete in comparison to the monumental, self promoting autobiography’ (Pettinger 2008, 135). Reflections on childhood are frequent in memoirs – childhood occupies a central position in the emerging notion of ‘self’ (Protschky 2009, 373) – and in food memoir, the story frequently traces the author's passage from child to adult and their discovery of a passion for food (Fulton 1999; Alexander 2012; Wood 2012).' (Author's introduction)