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Multimodal Recipe Telling on Cooking Shows

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Food Discourse of Celebrity Chefs of Food Network
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Abstract

This chapter examines recipe telling on how-to cooking shows, not only on what is communicated about food, but how it is communicated. Informed by Kress and Van Leeuwen’s (2001, 2006) social semiotic framework, a narrative approach gives the ‘recipe’ for recipe telling on how-to cooking shows. Principles of “performance” (Goffman, 1959) are contextualized within television’s “personality system” (Langer, 1981) in which “personalities are distinguished for the representativeness, their typicality, their ‘will to ordinariness,’ to be accepted, normalized, experienced as familiar” (p. 355). Within the recipe genre structure, there is variation. We illustrate the overall characteristics of recipe telling followed by an analysis of how celebrity chefs distinguish themselves from others through four distinct performances of recipe telling: (1) intertextuality, (2) personification, (3) humor and (4) direct address to viewers.

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Correspondence to Kelsi Matwick .

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Matwick, K., Matwick, K. (2019). Multimodal Recipe Telling on Cooking Shows. In: Food Discourse of Celebrity Chefs of Food Network. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31430-9_2

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