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In this study, we will consider the culinary genres emerging from food studies that are satellites of the culinary memoir genre, narratives that recount immigrant women's lives as they confront American culture. The culinary memoir, a recent narrative approach to autobiography, appears to exert a far-reaching influence even amongst writers not pre-destined to food-flavoured self-writing. It is characterized by its capacity to allow immigrant writers to explore their relationship to America and to the American Dream, an ideal which comforted or seduced their parents with utopian promises. Often authored by food studies specialists, food memoirs celebrate culinary legacies as well as experimentation. Many of these memoirs such as those of Louise DeSalvo and Shoba Narayan, wrestle diasporic transnational identities with sometimes illusory contemplations of the American Dream.
