Abstract
This article examines the inclusion of ancillary verbal material, especially poetry and song lyrics, within twentieth-century vegetarian and vegan cookbooks and cookzines (small-batch independently produced publications) in order to discuss connections between cookbook authors and publishers and vegetarian movements in the United States. Authors as well as publishers of vegetarian cookbooks with lyrical material tended to be part of particular social worlds connected by religious, health, musical, and other cultural practices. Vegetarian cookbooks with lyrical content were either self-published or published by small presses with religious, political, or countercultural affiliations. Publishers’ outsider and often amateur status gave them freedom to break from conventional expectations about book content and design. The bridging of literary forms, which juxtaposes the lyrical with the highly practical, blurs the boundaries between the mundane and the imaginative. Through referencing, repurposing, and modifying textual material from other sources, and by creating new lyrical material, these vegetarian cookbooks reinforce a moral and political conception of food preparation, and address readers as members of distinct communities.