The Joy of Cooking

The Joy of Cooking by Elaine Magarrell

The overall tone of this poem is a kind of dark, sardonic humor. What gives this poem its comedic value, is how Magarrell describes her sister and brother through subtle cooking recipes, "Although beef heart serves six- my brother's heart barely feeds two."The reader is given a good idea of what the narrator's siblings are like through these comparisons to food. The author writes about preparing her sister's tongue with the use of scrubbing it and cleaning it and carving it into slices of thin meat. When Margarrell uses these words that give the sense that the is cleaning her tongue, it portrays the idiom "a dirty tongue", meaning the sister has a vulgar vocabulary. As for the brother, the narrator describes the cuisine as "firm", "dry", and "resembles a muscle more than organ meat". With this description, the brother is portrayed as a unfeeling man, who shows little emotion.