Manly Meals and Mom's Home Cooking: Cookbooks and Gender in Modern America.(Book Review)

Manly Meals and Mom's Home Cooking: Cookbooks and Gender in Modern America. Jessamyn Neuhaus. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003.

Embedded within the pages of American cookbooks, aspiring chefs find cultural messages about gender roles and domesticity. Women, it seems, prefer "fussy" recipes like finger sandwiches, while men prefer "hearty" foods like steak and potatoes. Above all, women assume responsibility for cooking daily meals, while men take command of the kitchen only on special occasions.

In Manly Meals and Mom's Home Cooking, Jessamyn Neuhaus effectively analyzes American cookbooks through the lens of gender. Her research reveals the depth and evolution of gendered discourse that has populated cookbooks since the 1790s. Neuhaus, who teaches history at Denison University, sees advice on food preparation as prescriptions for being a good wife and a devoted mother. Cookbooks normalize gender ideologies, reinforcing the disparate spheres of men and women in the home.

Through cookbooks, Neuhaus investigates "how foods, food preparation, kitchen labor, gender, class, and race have intersected in the United States" (1). Cookbooks are historical documents that reveal much about social values and trends. Suggestions on shopping, parenting, weight loss, time management, and home decorating are interspersed with directions for preparing dishes. Cookbook publishers were quick to recognize the role of housewife as consumer.

Cookbooks publicized notions of an ideal nuclear family in which women reigned over the kitchen. Neuhaus asserts that twentieth-century cookbooks tried to convince women that making dinner was their societal obligation. Women were advised that they should enjoy cooking instead of regarding it as drudgery. During World War II, cooking was a woman's patriotic duty. Even as more families had to relinquish their servants and women increasingly entered the work force, it was still the wife, not the husband, who fixed breakfast and prepared the nightly meal. Many cookbooks even included lists of food that men like to eat.

Neuhaus describes how, in the 1950s, cookbooks "helped create a kitchen-based version of the feminine mystique that we might aptly call 'the cooking mystique'" (159). Of course, women did not always agree with the rosy picture of domestic tranquility ...