Manly meals and mom's home cooking : cookbooks and gender in modern America / Jessamyn Neuhaus.

Author
Neuhaus, Jessamyn [Browse]
Format
Book
Language
English
Published/​Created
Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003.
Description
x, 336 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Availability

Copies in the Library

Location Call Number Status Location Service Notes
Lewis Library - Stacks TX714 .N52 2003 Browse related items Request

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    Summary note
    "In Manly Meals and Mom's Home Cooking, Jessamyn Neuhaus offers an analysis of the tone and content of American cookbooks published between the 1790s and the 1960s, adroitly examining 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 The I Hate to Cook Book (1960) attests to the limits of this kind of indoctrination. At the same time, she explores the proliferation of cookbooks for bachelors, 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 account of gender and food in modern America."--Jacket.
    Bibliographic references
    Includes bibliographical references (p. [271]-323) and index.
    Contents
    • Part 1: "A most enchanting occupation": Cookbooks in early and modern America, 1796-1941
    • From family receipts to Fannie Farmer: cookbooks in the United States, 1796-1920
    • Recipes for a new era: food trends, consumerism, cooks and cookbooks
    • "Cooking is Fun": Women's home cookery as art, science and necessity
    • Ladylike lunches and manly meals: the gendering of food and cooking
    • Part 2: "You are first and foremost homemakers": Cookbooks and the second World War
    • Lime loaf and butter stretchers
    • "Ways and means for war day": The cookbook-scrapbook compiled by Maude Reid
    • "The hand that cuts the ration coupon may win the war": Women's home-cooked patriotism
    • Part 3: The cooking mystique: Cookbooks and gender, 1945-1963
    • The Betty Crocker era
    • "King of the kitchen": Food and cookery instruction for men
    • The most important meal: Women's home cooking, domestic ideology, and cookbooks
    • "A necessary bore": Contradictions in the cooking mystique.
    ISBN
    • 0801871255 ((hardcover))
    • 9780801871252 ((hardcover))
    LCCN
    2002006465
    OCLC
    49743380
    Other standard number
    • 99806440760
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