Manly Meals and Mom's Home Cooking by Jessamyn Neuhaus

MANLY MEALS AND MOM’S HOME COOKING: COOKBOOKS AND GENDER IN MODERN AMERICA Jessamyn Neuhaus (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).

Published in Food, Culture, and Society (vol. 8: no. 2)

Arising from Jessamyn Neuhaus’ detailed examination of over 500 cookbooks alongside magazine “recipes and cooking tips,” Manly Meals and Mom’s Home Cooking illuminates the construction of middle-class domestic ideology through cookery instruction. As Neuhaus points out, the recipes and prescriptive lessons housed within a given cookbook “tell us less about the real, lived experience of women in the kitchen than about how cookbook producers imagined the ideal, ‘normal’ American home and the roles that men and women would play within it” (p. 4). Neuhaus convincingly demonstrates that these idealized versions worked to keep the middle-class wife bound to the stove and the husband away from daily meal preparation, a task so feminized it could emasculate even the most virile man.

Although Manly Meals and Mom’s Home Cooking focuses primarily on the years 1920–1963, the first chapter begins with a whirlwind tour of written cookery instruction in eighteenth-century America, which largely comprised cookbooks imported from England. Throughout the remainder of the chapter, Neuhaus charts the development of a distinctly American cookbook tradition from Amelia Simmons’ American Cookery, which appeared in 1796, up through World War I. This first chapter begins to suggest that Manly Meals and Mom’s Home Cooking might benefit from a heavier reliance on footnotes to help weed the fact-saturated passages.

In her second chapter, Neuhaus begins the detailed examination of cookery instruction that makes her project a work of scholarly significance. To begin, she notes that during the 1920s and 1930s, industry yoked itself so successfully to home economists that “by 1940 the primary task of home economists and cookery instructors became to train women in consumption rather than production” (30). As cookbook authors aligned themselves with specific companies, hawking products ranging from electric stoves to canned goods, they also began to address the steady disappearance of servants from the middle-class home.

Working to convince middle-class housewives that a duty formerly assigned to domestic workers—cooking three meals a day, 365 days a year—was a fulfilling task, “cookbooks in the 1920s and 1930s aimed to give cooking an image overhaul and to reinvent it as an amusing and delightful occupation; [sic] an occupation suitable to the artistic, creative sensibilities of white middle-class ladies and not a laborious task best relegated to” the working classes (pp. 55–56). As Neuhaus points out, however, although their ideology centered around women’s confinement to the kitchen, cookbooks also provided a form of escape for the middle-class housewife; cookbook sales rose during the Depression even though few “economical cookbooks” were published during this time—a fact indicating that at least some women bought cookery books to stir their imagination rather than for practical application. In other words, the same ideology that worked to contain the housewife in the kitchen likewise provided her with an escape from the budgetary constraints that made Depression-era cooking a daily struggle. By juxtaposing the “ideal” and the “real” Neuhaus foregrounds the provocative tension between two versions of domestic life, a tension that underscores a concurrent resistance and acquiescence to the prevailing domestic ideology.

Neuhaus’ research repeatedly touches on the tensions between the real and the ideal in thought-provoking ways. She finds, for example, that while authors began to depict cooking as a “fun and creative task,” they likewise made clear that it was a woman’s duty—one upon which the family structure and even a stable society depended. Contrasting the ideal portrayed in cookery instruction with social reality, Neuhaus concludes that such instruction increasingly linked a family’s well-being to the housewife’s home cooking, in part to salve both the economic anxiety arising from the Depression and the domestic anxiety created by record numbers of women entering the workforce.

Such contextualization helps crystallize the importance of Neuhaus’ research. So too does her observation that the more women stepped outside the home, the more powerfully cookery instruction worked to keep housewives safely contained in the home kitchen. In fact, Manly Meals and Mom’s Home Cooking might include more such synthesis and analysis to shepherd the reader through the vast amount of material covered in each chapter and to tease out the broader implications of Neuhaus’ research. The book might also benefit from tighter organization; at times, Neuhaus’ argument circles back on itself, repeating material that has already been covered.

In her fourth chapter, Neuhaus examines 1920s and 1930s cookery instruction geared toward the male reader to show how it furthered the ideology of women as domestic creatures by depicting men as hobby cooks who “would never, ever cook like a woman” (p. 93). Nor should they want to, given the depiction of women’s cooking as bland, fussy, and uninspired. Situating the message of men’s cookery instruction within the broader historical context of the era, Neuhaus concludes that it insisted on the feminization of daily cooking in part because the traditional link between women and food preparation had been challenged by technology and the loss of hired help in the kitchen. As a result, she argues, authors “could not let a man enter the kitchen without scrupulously showing that male hobby cooking would not undermine the long-standing connection between women and food preparation and would not threaten masculine identity” (p. 76). This comment begs two questions. Precisely why did cookery instruction consistently maintain such a conservative stance that it “could not” let men cook for the family on a regular basis? And what did its authors stand to gain by keeping women in the kitchen?

Neuhaus devotes the middle section of her book to demonstrating how the trend toward domestic conservatism was heightened during World War II, when authors portrayed “cooking as the most important wartime employment of women” (p. 138) and as “an act of patriotism” (p. 117). They also began to employ rhetoric that echoed that of the Victorian era: women must create a restorative home environment that nurtured the family’s well-being and prepared men both nutritionally and emotionally for public duty. After the war ended, cookbooks once again defined masculine and feminine appetites against one another. Just as it had in the 1920sand 1930s, instruction aimed at men often included what Neuhaus characterizes as “testosterone-infused directions” that drew largely on hunting and other sporting metaphors to describe cooking (p. 197). According to Neuhaus, male authors also repeatedly “insisted not only that men made inspired and excellent cooks, but that women prepared dull and tasteless daily meals” (p. 204).

While men, on one hand, were depicted as part-time gourmets, or, on the other, were given brief, and often humorous advice, on how to create “manly” dishes such as ”Spanked Baby Dressing,” women were given step-by-step instruction on “heating, combining, and augmenting canned and frozen foods” (p. 175). Some cookery instructors even felt compelled to tell their women readers precisely when to get dressed, light candles, announce dinner, and make coffee (p. 175).

According to Neuhaus, it was not until the late 1950s and the early 1960s that cookbooks and magazines began to openly address “the instability of the domestic ideal” (p. 257). Authors such as Peggy Bracken, whose I Hate to Cook Book became one of the nation’s best-selling cookery titles, took part in a growing “resistance to the cult of domesticity” (p. 269). Despite this “resistance,” however, Neuhaus concludes that “a powerful domestic cooking ideal” that places women in charge of daily meal preparation “continues to shape cookery instruction” to this day (p. 264). And, as her brief look at contemporary instruction suggests, “writers still characterize the man in the kitchen the same way their counterparts did” in the 1920s—as either a caveman who cooks outdoors over an open flame or as a hobby cook who, if the mood strikes, can concoct a few decidedly masculine dishes (p. 265).

Overall, Manly Meals and Mom’s Home Cooking provides a thought-provoking examination of modern cookery instruction and its perpetuation of gender stereotypes. This last fact leaves me longing for a bibliography of Neuhaus’s primary sources, although a lengthy essay covers the secondary ones.