Manly Meals and Mom's Home Cooking

Cookbooks and Gender in Modern America
Erscheinungsjahr 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4214-0584-1
Verlag: Johns Hopkins University Press

Buch, Englisch, 352 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 569 g

From the first edition of The Fannie Farmer Cookbook to the latest works by today's celebrity chefs, cookbooks reflect more than just passing culinary fads. As historical artifacts, they offer a unique perspective on the cultures that produced them. In Manly Meals and Mom's Home Cooking, Jessamyn Neuhaus offers a perceptive and piquant analysis of the tone and content of American cookbooks published between the 1790s and the 1960s, adroitly uncovering the cultural assumptions and anxieties—particularly about women and domesticity—they contain.

Neuhaus's in-depth survey of these cookbooks questions the supposedly straightforward lessons about food preparation they imparted. While she finds that cookbooks aimed to make readers—mainly white, middle-class women—into effective, modern-age homemakers who saw joy, not drudgery, in their domestic tasks, she notes that the phenomenal popularity of Peg Bracken's 1960 cookbook, The I Hate to Cook Book, attests to the limitations of this kind of indoctrination. At the same time, she explores the proliferation of bachelor cookbooks aimed at "the man in the kitchen" and the biases they display about male and female abilities, tastes, and responsibilities.

Neuhaus also addresses the impact of World War II rationing on homefront cuisine; the introduction of new culinary technologies, gourmet sensibilities, and ethnic foods into American kitchens; and developments in the cookbook industry since the 1960s. More than a history of the cookbook, Manly Meals and Mom's Home Cooking provides an absorbing and enlightening account of gender and food in modern America.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Neuhaus, Jessamyn

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Mentalitäts- und Sozialgeschichte
• Sozialwissenschaften Sport | Tourismus | Freizeit Kochen, Essen, Trinken
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziale Gruppen/Soziale Themen Gender Studies, Geschlechtersoziologie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgments
Introduction. "The Purpose of a Cookery Book"
Part I: "A Most Enchanting Occupation": Cookbooks in Early and Modern America, 1796–1941
Chapter 1. From Family Receipts to Fannie Farmer: Cookbooks in the United States, 1796–1920
Chapter 2. Recipes for a New Era: Food Trends, Consumerism, Cooks, and Cookbooks
Chapter 3. "Cooking Is Fun":Women's Home Cookery As Art, Science, and Necessity
Chapter 4. Ladylike Lunches and Manly Meals: The Gendering of Food and Cooking
Part II: "You are First and Foremost Homemakers:Cookbooks and the Second World War
Chapter 5. Lima Loaf and Butter Stretchers
Chapter 6."Ways and Means for War Days": The Cookbook-Scrapbook Compiled by Maude Reid
Chapter 7."The Hand That Cuts the Ration Coupon May Win the War": Women's Home-Cooked Patriotism
Part III:The Cooking Mystique: Cookbooks and Gender, 1945–1963
Chapter 8. The Betty Crocker Era
Chapter 9. "King of the Kitchen": Food and Cookery Instruction for Men
Chapter 10. The Most Important Meal: Women's Home Cooking, Domestic Ideology, and Cookbooks
Chapter 11. "A Necessary Bore": Contradictions in the Cooking Mystique
Conclusion. From Julia Child to Cooking.com
Notes
Essay on Sources
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Neuhaus, Jessamyn
Jessamyn Neuhaus is an associate professor of U.S. history and popular culture at SUNY Plattsburgh. She is the author of Housework and Housewives in Modern American Advertising: Married to the Mop.