Paper presented to the 23rd Symposium of Australian Gastronomy, July 2020
When I first read Oh, for a French Wife!, the 1952 book written by Ted Moloney and Lloyd Ring (Deke) Coleman, my gaydar, that unspoken set of signals gay men often have when in the presence of another gay man, pinged. The book is something of a curiosity for its time: Coleman’s seven entries are, in his words, ‘On the Chemistry and Philosophy of Cookery’; Moloney’s entries are recipes and take up the bulk of the book. It’s these latter that set off my gaydar. Why that happened is the subject of this paper. I think what Moloney created in this book, and in the half dozen other cookbooks he would go on to write over the next 20 odd years, are gay male cultural objects.
