Manly Meals and Mom's Home Cooking: Cookbooks and Gender in Modern America.

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.

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 and 1930s.

The most interesting cookbook Neuhaus describes is a wartime scrapbook assembled by Maud Reid, a school nurse from Lake Charles, Louisiana. In focusing on "Ways and Means," Neuhaus was able to examine how one woman thought about cooking and eating during the war--a perspective that was very different from that of published cookbook authors.

Despite wartime food restrictions, a new genre of cooking appeared during the war, namely the gourmand treatise. The grande dame of this literature was M.F.K. Fisher. Fisher wrote lyrically about food, especially French food. Gourmet magazine and James Beard were also hallmarks of this new movement. The gourmands not only developed recipes, which focused on the quality of the food, but they also advocated a lifestyle that revered eating. This was a radical shift from previous food writing.

With the return of war veterans to factories and presumably women to the home, early postwar cookbook authors reinforced the war's rhetoric about home cooking. Although the patriotic language vanished, the notion that the health of the family was dependent on a mother's cooking skills dominated postwar discourse about cooking. Cookbooks increasingly emphasized that women were solely responsible for family meals. Unlike the 1920s and 1930s, cooking was no longer portrayed as being fun, it now became the way women nurtured and loved their families. Although cookbook writers acknowledged that sometimes cooking was a chore or monotonous, they told women to overcome these feelings for the sake of the family. Another postwar development was the popularity of the backyard barbecue. This distinctly male space inspired many cookbooks that reinforced masculine ideologies.

By the late 1950s and early 1960s some cookbooks did acknowledge that women worked outside the home and did not have time to make fussy elaborate meals and that not all women enjoyed or wanted to spend the day cooking. Although these books gave helpful hints and shortcuts, none of them rejected the notion that women were still the ones responsible for feeding the family. Neuhaus explains that although the domestic ideology remained strong throughout the 1950s, by the end of the decade women could reject the domestic ideal by taking advantage of the proliferation of more highly processed foods.

Throughout the book, Neuhaus aptly describes how domestic ideologies were constructed in cookbooks over the course of the twentieth century. Her observations on masculinity in cookbooks provide new insights into the relationship between gender and food writing. Yet, the book suffers, as do most other books based on prescriptive literature, from a slippage between rhetorical arguments and lived reality, even though Neuhaus continually reminds readers that discourse is not reality. The inclusion of Reid's cookbook goes a long way to remedy these lapses. Neuhaus also overestimates the extent to which new technologies were incorporated into the home and the amount of processed food available before World War II. Despite these shortcomings, Neuhaus gives us new insights and a better understanding of domesticity and gender in twentieth century American cookbooks.

Gabriella Petrick

University of Delaware