Manly Meals and Mom's Home Cooking

From the earliest tomes on the art of cooking to the latest works by today's celebrity chefs, cookbooks have always reflected more than just passing culinary fads. As historical artifacts, they offer a unique perspective on the cultures that produced them. Twentieth-century America, which witnessed profound social, technological, and economic changes in only a few decades, is no exception, and in Manly Meals and Mom's Home Cooking, Jessamyn Neuhaus looks at how the content and tone of cookbooks published between the 1890s and the 1960s reveals America's cultural assumptions and anxieties–particularly about women and domesticity. From Fannie Farmer to Julia Child, Neuhaus undertakes an in-depth survey of twentieth-century American cookbooks, analyzing the new ideals of food preparation and presentation they introduced to help readers–mainly white, middle-class women–become effective, modern-age homemakers who saw joy, not drudgery, in their domestic tasks. (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 cookbooks aimed at ''the man in the kitchen'' and the biases they display about male and female abilities, tastes, and responsibilities. Neuhaus also chronicles 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.