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  • Manly Meals and Mom’s Home Cooking: Cookbooks and Gender in Modern America
  • Gabriella Petrick
Manly Meals and Mom’s Home Cooking: Cookbooks and Gender in Modern America. Jessamyn Neuhaus (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. 336pp. $42.95/cloth).

Jssamyn Neuhaus’s Manly Men and Mom’s Home Cooking: Cookbooks and Gender in Modern America unpacks how cookbook authors and food writers envisioned gender roles in the kitchen throughout the twentieth century. Neuhaus traces the shifting discourse on gender and cooking by examining popular American cookbooks from the 1920s through the 1950s, although the first chapter quickly examines eighteenth and nineteenth century cooking manuals. Neuhaus divides her book into three chronological sections. The first section chronicles cookbooks from 1796–1941, but focuses mostly on the 1920s and 1930s. The second section focuses on World War II, and the third on the years 1945–1963. Although cookbooks were generally gendered female and encouraged women to diligently and happily cook family meals, Neuhaus finds that cookbook authors used various techniques to communicate their message over the course of the twentieth century.

Part One of the book explains how the proliferation of cookbooks and writing about cooking expanded until World War II. Neuhaus begins by explaining how domestic science advocates sought to instruct new immigrant women in modern, scientific cooking in the first decade of the twentieth century. This rhetoric shifted from focusing on working-class, immigrant women to middle-class white women after World War I. One reason for this shift, according to Neuhaus, was that the work of the domestic scientist, now home economist, changed from uplifting and Americanizing the immigrant masses to getting middle-class white women to consume. By changing the format of cookbooks to list ingredients and by selling advertising in cookbooks the links between cooking the family meal and consuming mass produced goods were forged according to Neuhaus. [End Page 515]

However, by the publication of Irma Rombauer’s Joy of Cooking in 1931, the tone of cooking manuals changed from Fannie Farmer’s authoritative voice in The Boston Cooking School Cook Book, to Rombauer’s motherly advice. Although the tone of these cookbooks shifted, the content was similar. Many cookbooks adhered to the cooking school mantra of precise measuring and following directions exactly, but a new genre of cookbooks told women to have fun in the kitchen and argued that cooking for the family, although a duty, could be a source of joy. Neuhaus explains that this shift in focus was to reassure women who had depended on domestic servants that cooking was not a chore. Neuhaus found that cookbooks in the 1920s and 1930s reinforced these notions of domesticity and produced a homogeneous cuisine.

Although the vast majority of cookbooks were aimed at women, there were a few cookbooks that promoted men’s cooking. Cooking instruction for men throughout the 1920s and 1930s used language that was much more virile and promoted the general superiority of men in the kitchen. By constructing men as hobby cooks, Neuhaus argues that women’s natural role as family cooks was reinforced and that the masculinity of men who dabbled in the kitchen was preserved. In comparing the discourse between cookbooks for men and those for women, Neuhaus shows how the appetite was gendered in terms of male and female food.

While the general advice for women to cook family meals continued during the war, cookbook writers infused their work with patriotic rhetoric and advice on rationing. Cookbook authors defined the home as a place where cooking was not only nutritional and tasty, but also where workers on the homefront were fortified. Neuhaus attributes this focus on home cooking to the same factors the influenced the rhetoric of the 1920s and 1930s: “decreasing numbers of paid cooks in middle-class homes and the need to sell cookbooks and promote home cooking among middle-class white consumers” (p. 137). Cookbooks also reinforced traditional ideologies of women’s duties in the home by stressing “home cooking”. According the Neuhaus, men virtually disappeared from cookbooks and food writing during the war, save for a few books written by men for men that mirrored the cookbooks of the 1920s...

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