Introduction: Recipes for Revolution

Notes Introduction: Recipes for Revolution 1. Other works that focus specifically on women and cookbooks include Bower, Fordyce, and Zafar. 2. For studies of women and food culture, see Bentley, Haber, Meyers, and Shapiro, Perfection. 3. She also discusses that recipes need a reason to exist and exist as one smaller element of a larger discourse. “A recipe is...an embedded discourse, and like other embedded discourses, it can have a variety of relationships with its frame or its bed” (Leonardi 340). Both cookbooks and their recipes are part of a larger discourse community about women, cooking, and gender roles. 4. She continues, “There is much to be learned from reading a cookbook besides how to prepare food....Leafing through a cookbook is like peering through a kitchen window. The cookbook, like the diary and journal, evokes a universe inhabited by women both in harmony and in tension with their families, their communities and the larger social world” (Theophano 6). Whether cookbooks, diaries, or journals, such forms of writing offer a unique view into women’s lives. 5. General works on food culture in the United States include Hooker, Gabaccia, and Levenstein, Paradox and Revolution. 6. See Lustig, McClain, M. F. Porter, and Wynette. 7. Examples include First Congregational Unitarian Church, Ladies’ Aid Society, and Muddy Pond Mennonite Community. 8. See Granny’s Cookbook, Hispanic Recipe Book, Tausend, and Urdaneta. 9. A few are Grossinger, Kasdan, Katz, Leonard, Nash, and Nathan. 10. Similarly, Laura Schenone observes, “Cookbooks gave many women their first public voice....Through cookbooks, women would help define the values of the growing nation” (107). She points out that cookbooks, although intimately intertwined with life in the private sphere, also had a public role, giving women a place to be heard outside the home. 190 Notes 11. Not all of these feminine genres were standard written ones. For example, women also used patchwork quilts and cross-stitch to express themselves, finding they had to use whatever forms of expression were most available to voice their thoughts. 12. Examples include Christina Deyo, Bobby Flay, Emeril Lagasse, Rachael Ray, Rocco DiSpirito, and Wolfgang Puck. 13. A number of recent scholars have written about culinary culture and women from different races, ethnicities, or class backgrounds. See A. Avakian, Counihan and Esterik, Heldke, and Witt. 1 “34,000,000,000 Work-Hours” Saved: Convenience Foods and Mom’s Home Cooking 1. “No Relief” 43. 2. One 1960s article noted, “Quick-serve food products intended to lighten the housewife’s kitchen tasks are pouring onto the market in a rush. New ones show up almost daily at stores and supermarkets” (“Better Days” 118). Despite the fact that the 1960s was an era in which some women began to experiment with natural foods, countless other women continued to depend primarily on convenience foods. Large manufacturers met this need with a plethora of new products. 3. Mary Drake McFeely describes a typical middle-class refrigerator as filled with convenience foods, including “onion soup dip, three bean salad, tuna-noodle casserole, frozen spinach ‘creamed’ with canned mushroom soup, fanciful struc- tures based on Jell-O, cream pies made with packaged graham cracker crust and pudding mix and topped with Reddi-Whip” (98). From appetizer to dessert, a whole meal of convenience foods could be easily prepared. No longer did a woman need to worry if company was coming; she could whip together an elaborate meal in a short amount of time. Convenience foods transformed the entire cooking process. 4. For articles that discuss the shift toward using more convenience foods, see “Frozen” and Nagle. 5. For more cooking literature that suggested that marvelous meals could be produced in minutes with convenience foods, see “From the Larder,” “Good Things,” “How to Be,” “New Foods,” “Treat Yourself,” and Watts. 6. Among the articles that argued that convenience foods were superior to homemade ones were “Spend & Save” and Weston. Notes 191 7. For scholarship that focuses on the relationship between women and convenience foods, see Marling 202–240. 8. Other cookbooks from this period that focused on convenience foods include General Foods and The Guide. 9. The mass media were enthusiastic when describing the pathbreaking nature of authors who wrote about convenience foods. In her introduction to Cannon’s The Frozen Foods Cookbook, Helen E. Ridley wrote, “One of the valuable contributions that Poppy Cannon has made during her distinguished career has been to study and analyze the finest cooking all over the world, refining and simplifying the techniques so that women with ‘educated palates’ can prepare them in their own homes” (viii). Not everyone was equally enthusiastic, however. For example, Cannon’s cooking segments on NBC’s Home show horrified James Beard. He lamented, “Cannon is [a] food person, and she did a vichys- soise with frozen mashed potatoes, a leek sautéed in butter, and a can of cream of chicken soup from Campbell’s” (qtd. in Shapiro 4). This stood in contrast to his authentic version made with cream and homemade chicken stock. Cannon recognized that countless women did not possess the time or desire to prepare his recipe, no matter how delectable, and this was acceptable. A businesswoman did not have to fret that her soup lacked Beard’s touch because she was busy with work and family responsibilities. She owed it to herself, Cannon believed, to take any possible kitchen shortcuts. 10. An assistant professor of Foods and Nutrition at Michigan State College in 1951, Mary Morr reached a similar conclusion in the article she published in the Journal of Home Economics, “Food Mixes and Frozen Foods.” Another study by a home economist about the efficiency and cost of convenience foods is Asp. 11. This fear of modernism was not new in the United States, where it has cropped up repeatedly over the decades. For example, in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, modern design was used in fallen-women films to show that the women were immoral. Donald Albrecht writes, “Modern design came to be associated with forces that were threatening domestic security” (111). See Lea Jacobs 52–56. Americans have always had an uneasy relationship with modernism. 12. Numerous cooking articles focused on the delights of instant potatoes and other packaged potato products. See “Make It,” “Potato Favorites,” and “Work Wonders.” 13. For an article that discusses how convenience foods allowed inexperienced cooks to prepare gourmet dishes, see “Here Is Baker’s Magic.” 14. Easy Ways to Delicious Meals included soup recipes for Mexican chicken gumbo soup, gazpacho, quick borscht, and beef broth Cantonese. For a main course, the cookbook included recipes such as Polynesian ham bake (cooked ham bits, condensed beef broth, and chow mein noodles [44]), mock sukiyaki (71), 192 Notes chicken Italiano (75), and Chinese barbecued ribs (Campbell 80). These recipes were not that unusual, but they did represent a move away from blander Anglo-American dishes. 15. McCarthy 3. 16. A number of articles focused on the speed and efficiency of convenience foods. See “Whole Family.” 17. A 1965 article from McCall’s proclaimed, “Want to be a great cook? It’s a breeze with today’s wonderful ‘convenience’ foods, convenient in a double sense since they’re easily available at your supermarket, and they can be prepared with a minimum of time” (“Instant” 76). In previous centuries, the only way that a woman became a great cook was through countless hours of hard work and practice. Now she could obtain that label with less labor and have time for other pursuits. What was not challenged in this article was that women would still perform the cooking with little or no help from men. 2 “Unnatural, Unclean, and Filthy”: Chinese-American Cooking Literature Confronting Racism in the 1950s 1. Horace Greeley qtd. in Gyory 17. 2. For more information on the popularity of Chinese food in the 1950s, see Claiborne. 3. Other cooking literature that focused on cooking Chinese food included Cheng, “Cooking in a Chinese Wak [sic],” “Chinese Cooking,” “Foods”; Kinard, “One Dish,” “Raviolis,” J. Wong and “You Cook.” 4. Non-Chinese women also wrote cooking literature that focused on Chinese and Chinese-American food. They wrote for different reasons, as Theophano observes: “Nonnative women, as did many others, . used what was close at hand as a way of crossing borders or patrolling them” (153). Non-Chinese women might have wished to write about such foods to increase cultural under- standing. In other cases, they might have desired to police white society’s bound- aries by describing the oddities of Chinese cuisine and changing recipes to represent American taste preferences. Although white women’s cooking literature played a role in spreading Chinese foods, this chapter focuses on Chinese and Chinese-American women, seeking to understand how cookbooks offered them a place to describe their experiences. 5. In the 1950s, the interest in Asian foods went beyond the kitchen. For an article that discusses the influence of Asian tastes in clothing and food, see “A New Notes 193 Simplicity.” This interest, however, was limited by the general paranoia provoked by the Communist scare. 6. Other white stars included Marilyn Monroe, Marlon Brando, Rock Hudson, Frank Sinatra, Cary Grant, Audrey Hepburn, and Paul Newman. 7. Examples of such shows include The Mickey Mouse Club, The Honeymooners, Donna Reed, Ozzie and Harriet, and Father Knows Best. This is just the list’s beginning. 8. The most famous of these villains was Fu Manchu. Sammee Tong played the butler on the television show Bachelor Father, while Victor Sen Yung was the cook on Bonanza. 9. Other 1950s Chinese cookbooks by Chinese and non-Chinese authors include Caleva, Son Chan, Chow, Donovan, Francetta, Hong, Jackson, Oriental, and Richards and Richards.

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