Recipes

All these recipes, and yet nobody he knew cooked from recipes. That was something actors did on television and in the movies: white women with stiff clothes and crisp-looking aprons and perfect hair who never sweated as they ran around doing housework for the husbands they called "hon." (146)

This particular passage severely complicates two aspects of GraceLand. First, if nobody cooks using recipes in Lagos, why has Elvis' mother chosen to write so many down in her diary she wrote for Elvis? Second, why are their recipes included in the novel itself? 

Perhaps the reason Elvis' mother chooses to write her recipes down is because she acknowledges the erosion of traditional Lagos culture. Food is a definitive part of any culture, and there are always cultural notes included in the recipes. The problem with this idea is that the recipes in themselves exist outside of their own culture, and instead rest inside the imported perception of American culture. In this sense, maybe the entries are a way of bridging the two cultures for Elvis, since she knew she would not be around to do it for him. If the reader views these recipes in this sense, and considers the cultural notes to be a supplementary tool geared towards the same ends, then perhaps Elvis' mother knew he was not made for Lagos life. That is, maybe she was providing him with a bridge not extending from America to Lagos, but instead from Lagos to America (or at least anywhere that isn't Lagos).

If one thinks of the recipes as a cultural bond to Elvis' home, then perhaps the entries work the same way for the foreign reader, as I have suggested in an earlier post. Perhaps the entries and recipes are to function as a channel so that the heritage and customs can move in two directions. After all, reading is a source of knowledge transfer, and there are no restrictions on how and what is to be shared.