Women in the Kitchen

 

Women in the Kitchen  by Anne Willan, published 2020.

This book tells the story of twelve women who were famous for their cooking, with very enjoyable recipe sections for each of them. I hope to try some of these recipes. I liked reading about Hannah Glasse, Lydia Child, Fannie Farmer, Irma Rombauer, Julia Child, Edna Lewis, Marcella Hazan, Alice Waters, and the others. While some of the subjects of the book are new to me, I have used cookbooks by many of the other authors who appear in this book. 

Illustration from Women in the Kitchen. Note that there is a book open on her table while the woman works at the fire — no doubt a cookbook!

Women in the Kitchen includes many amusing and interesting little facts, such as that The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book by Fannie Farmer “outsold all other American cookbooks of the nineteenth century, its success only checked in 1914 by the outbreak of World War I.”  

I learned about several authors whose works I had only vaguely heard about. Sarah Rutledge (born 1782) for example, was the author of The Carolina Housewife. “By 1847, when Sarah Rutledge published The Carolina Housewife, her only book, she could look back on a lifetime as doyenne of Southern society, featuring rounds of spring presentation parties and languid summer suppers giving way to the festivities of Thanksgiving and the winter holiday season. When she set up house independently in Charleston, she would have been served by slaves.” So her advice on how to run a household is very different from later authors, who address women who had few or no servants!

Predictably, there’s a chapter on Irma Rombauer and her original and insanely successful way of writing a cookbook: The Joy of Cooking. Who doesn’t know this cookbook? By 1974: “No cookbook in American history had achieved such fame. Two decades later Joy of Cooking was chosen by the New York Public Library during their centennial celebration in 1995 as the only cookbook among its 150 most influential books of the century. More than a million copies had been sold by the time the seventh edition was published in 1997. After a series of revisions, a 75th anniversary edition was published in 2006. It contained 1,152 pages and more nearly echoed earlier editions. The urge to modernize was curbed and the teaching text was restored and expanded. As Julia Child put it when she heard about the upcoming anniversary edition: ‘Thanks for putting the joy back in JOY.’”

Women in the Kitchen is a quick and entertaining book to read. I found some of the material new to me, and some very familiar — which is a nice combination, I think. The author keeps her focus on food!

Cooking at our House

Cooking Sunday evening dinner: Alice made salmon with cherry tomatoes. I made au gratin potatoes.