The Joy of Cooking?

Last week while I was thumbing through some of my books, I came across this lovely passage about whether cooking is a joy, a topic I’ve been kicking around for several weeks.

For the non-Americans on the list, The Joy of Cooking was one of the two or three iconic American cookbooks from the 1930s until the end of the twentieth century. A totally re-written version is still sold but it lacks the verve of the original, written by Irma S. Rombauer, and of the subsequent editions that were under her and her daughter’s control.

A history of the Rombauers and their cookbook is thus close to being a history of American food in the twentieth century and it’s been wonderfully well told by one of America’s most insightful food writers, Anne Mendelson, in Stand Facing the Stove.

Here are some excerpts from the introduction, where Anne Mendelson ruminates on their choice of “such an unlikely slogan as ‘the joy of cooking.'”

“What on earth is joyous about cooking? People who do not know its capacity to bore, weary, and frustrate are people who have never cooked. When Marion Becker (the daughter) came to publish a brief memoir of the book’s first thirty-odd years, one of the mementos of its success that she chose to reprint was a 1944 New York Times Book Review cartoon in which a well-upholstered dowager lies propped on a sofa gracefully perusing The Joy of Cooking while her harassed maid glares from a steaming kitchen. Marion and her mother knew very well that people do not find joy where they do not perceive freedom, control, leisure, or esteem. To put the matter in bald historical perspective, such things were not socially appropriate to cooking in the days when it was done by servants or those too poor to hire them. Ministering to the cook’s morale became the task of cookbooks only when the cook was also the mistress of the household–or sometimes, as life got more complicated, the master.

The Depression did not initiate the departure of hired cooks from American households, a demographic readjustment that had begun at least a century earlier. But it speeded up the process for middle-class families, leaving many people occasionally or permanently responsible for producing meals that they would previously have paid someone else to get on the table. Irma was born into and remained in a somewhat privileged sisterhood who did more of their own cooking than their counterparts of a few generations back but could rely on ‘domestics’ (as some tactfully called them) to see to a good part of the week’s meals. She knew, however, that millions of women who might once have told the cook what to make for dinner now were their own cooks. It was to assure such people that their new responsibility really wasn’t menial that the social implications of cookery could now be enlarged to include ‘joy,’ a discrete rearrangement of necessity so as to make it not only a virtue but a delight.”

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