The word is brioche.

If nobody’s home, I might slip my mom’s copy of The New York Times Cook Book from the shelf in the hutch and flip through it. I always stop on page 473 and study the black-and-white picture: a small round table in front of a window scrimmed off with sheer drapes filtering a too-harsh daylight. The table’s set for two, there’s only one chair visible: one solitary, empty chair. Golden brioche—the caption—can be a festive addition to a leisurely weekend breakfast. Here brioche is shown with marmalade and butter, and glasses of orange juice encased in ice.

“HERE BRIOCHE IS SHOWN.” The elegant, ambiguous perfection of the passive voice.

Whose leisurely breakfast? Whose hands will tear at the fluted, shiny-skinned brioche crowned with plumped-out nipples of dough? Or slip these elegant juice glasses out of their crushed-ice sheaths? 

The person-less table, the invisible chair, presumably pushed back out of view to allow the photographer in: There is a subjective ambiguity that saps agency from the viewer, casts them as a lonely adolescent voyeur—which I was. A sexual mute living with the secret of my gayness as if it were a second, separate me. Maybe that’s why I felt I had this extra palette of senses I could use to disambiguate truth from situations presented without face and in the passive voice: Here brioche is shown. 

From this one shot I swear I could catch a whiff of bodies just beyond the frame: guys with Sunday-morning shadowbeards waking together in a thrashed bed, about to brace for the cold shock of juice.

I figured out much later that the vignette in my mom’s 1961 edition, the image I scoured for its every detail, was staged. 

Those brioche weren’t photographed in anyone’s Manhattan apartment. They were shot in the New York Times studio on West 43rd Street near Times Square: a dummy apartment, fake window casting spotlight radiance on a table with borrowed prop plates and glasses. The original story, by Craig Claiborne, appeared in the paper on June 18, 1959, with the headline “Brioche Add Elegance to Week-End Breakfast, Brunch.” 

Also appearing in the Times that day was a story about a jury in London awarding Liberace a libel settlement of £8,000 against the Daily Mirror tabloid. A columnist had described him as “the pinnacle of masculine, feminine, and neuter. Everything that he, she, and it can ever want…A deadly, winking, sniggering, snuggling, chromium-plated, scent-impregnated, luminous, quivering, giggling, fruit-flavored, mincing, ice-covered heap of mother love.” Which, to me, explains almost everything about Craig’s brioche; explains the mood of fear they exist in; explains the intricate coding applied to them—a cryptography so effective that even a dumb virgin kid, 14 years and a couple thousand miles away from where that photo was staged, could crack it. 

All you needed to be was queer.

Also: It was almost ten years to the day before the Stonewall rebellion when the dual stories of brioche and Liberace arrived to readers in the New York metropolitan area. That Liberace won his case suggests things were starting, slowly, to change. There were situations and places where you needed to be slightly less batsh*t crazy when verbally f*g-bashing someone.

Cookbooks from mainstream publishers, though—they were going to hold on to their homophobic ways for as long as they could.

That 1984 edition of The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book from Harper & Row has a foreword by M. F. K. Fisher that has to be one of the strangest ever to frame a cookbook.

When she’s not talking about Janet Flanner’s gluttony for Parisian patisserie and M. F. K.’s own regret at not meeting Alice when she had the chance, she talks a lot about how hideous Alice was—“probably one of the ugliest people anyone had ever seen,” she writes. About Alice’s mustache, “not the kind that old women often grow, but the sturdy kind”; about her “clunky” sandals over thick woolen socks, “almost offensive.” 

Is it homophobic? She registers extreme dislike for Alice’s objectified queer body and the way she dresses it—a body M.F.K. never, she admits, has come face to face with. And yet, she’s a grotesque old lesbian in unforgivable footwear. What in the hell was anyone associated with this edition thinking?

To me it’s clear. This is part of a broader cultural cliché of queer people, the straight world’s distancing of us. Part of a hetero gaze that vilifies, exoticizes, and ridicules queer people for how we dress, style ourselves, move, sound; a gaze that objectifies us as categories: butch, flamboyant, normie, femme. By 1984, the year I began my search for queer voices in cookbooks, the dominant culture was able to rip open Alice’s queer coding and press its scattered pieces into a hideous caricature of us as the other.

And then you open the book to find the original scribbly Francis Rose frontispiece, where Alice looks monumental in the classical mode—a Minoan lady in profile, a goddess from the palace at Knossos; serenely peeling pears with enormous hands in the drawing room at Bilignin, in the house in Belley she and Gertrude rented in summer; the sandals that so offended M.F.K.’s eye, with straps crisscrossed above her ankles, disappearing under her caftan. It’s a representation of a woman who dwells in mythic space, a kind of bookend to the photo of Alice with Harriet Levy in Fiesole, from that summer in 1907, when Alice and Gertrude wedded one another.

I look at Rose’s illustration and think of Monique Truong: “GertrudeStein [as Truong styles her name] thinks it is unfathomably erotic that the food she is about to eat has been washed, pared, kneaded, touched by the hands of her lover.” This is the voice of Bình, Gertrude and Alice’s semi-fictional live-in cook, gay and from Vietnam, the narrator of Truong’s 2003 novel, The Book of Salt. “She is overwhelmed by desire when she finds the faint impressions of Miss Toklas’s fingerprints decorating the crimped edges of a pie crust.” 

In 1984, queerness could exist only as the story buried in a dish: a cake, a pot of stew, a salad, or a quiche. Food was a site for concealing the care we couldn’t show under the open sky in daylight; for displaying the bruises of our dislocation; for airing the silence we were forced to keep through times of loss, and the joy of finding love and connection. Food was the empty page onto which we wrote our stories, signed with our true names, in letters the haters could not or would almost never make out.

Beard’s second book, released in 1941, flaunts a voice of unfiltered camp with flashes of bawdy innuendo: He compares having an occasional taste for raw garlic with enjoying a tussle now and then with a roughneck. The work came a decade before Beard molded himself into America’s tweedy, asexual gourmet uncle.

This recipe-filled travel memoir published in 1944 has a secret backstory: Smith hastily embarked on his global voyage because he was fleeing an indictment in a 1912 gay sex scandal in Portland, Oregon. Smith would reinvent himself decades later as a food writer in New York City.

In between recipes for casseroles and molded salads in this 1946 work, Callahan drops hints about her domestic life in San Francisco with her intimate partner Lou Richardson—who most readers (and perhaps Callahan’s editor) probably assumed was a man.

Hollywood, food, and sex star in what is essentially a cookbook spin-off of Gore Vidal’s gender-twisting 1968 novel, Myra Breckinridge. Howard Austen, Vidal’s longtime companion, collaborated with sculptor Beverly Pepper in this book of outrageously camp recipes, including Gangbang Gumbo, Cumin Covered Cock, and Saucissons d’Île d’Eau (say that five times fast).

An American expat artist in France, Olney was part of James Baldwin’s circle in Paris before rooting himself in a rustic house in the hills of Provence. Olney’s remarkable recipes—often more improvisational than formulaic—reveal a queer understanding of both nature and French culinary tradition.

Reprinted from What Is Queer Food? How We Served a Revolution by John Birdsall. Copyright © 2025 by John Birdsall. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

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