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Cooking in America, 1840-1945
Alice L. McLean
ISBN: 0-313-33574-5
ISBN-13: 978-0-313-33574-7
232 pages
Greenwood Press
Publication: 8/30/2006
List Price: $45.00 (UK Sterling Price: £31.95)
Discount Price: $22.50 Sale Price for U.S. Customers Only. Save 50%. Ends 12/31/2009.
Availability: In Stock
Media Type: Hardcover
Also Available: Ebook
Trim Size: 7 x 10
Subjects: Reviews:
  • This is an engaging and useful resource for students from middle school through college. School, public, and academic libraries will want to consider it.
    —American Reference Books Annual     6/30/1905
  • In this fascinating book, McLean examines cookbooks as a primary source, showing the enormous changes that occurred on the tables of Americans from the preindustrial period to the onset of World War II. Divided into three chronological sections, the book kicks off with a brief overview of the cooking and preservation methods, major foodstuffs, cooking equipment, cultural influences, and dining customs of the time. The first section includes recipes from three early American cookbooks; the second section demonstrates the rise in popularity of community cookbooks and includes recipes from the first known cookbooks written by an African American and a Hispanic; and the third section shows the rise of male-authored cookbooks and reflects the changes in cooking habits as a result of two world wars and the Great Depression. Each section also includes popular recipes-over 300 in all-taken from cookbooks of the time, ladies' magazines, newspapers, and family collections. The majority of recipes found in this perusable book, including peach ice cream, baked crab, and corn relish, can be made today, although only the most adventurous cooks might try the recipes for squirrel, squab, possum, and pickled pigs' ears. Recommended for the circulating collections of academic and large public libraries.
    —Library Journal     2/15/2007
  • This interesting collection of old recipes, sample meals, and food trends and tips for the 100-year period from 1840 to 1945 offers insight into life and constraints placed by food--its availability, its preservation, and its processing. How the changes in equipment for food and the marketing of food affected cookery and everyday life is chronicled in this well-researched book. McLean discusses how gas and electric stoves replaced hearth cookery; how changes from local dairy sources of milk products to commercial farms changed foodways; and how canning, bottling, and eventually freezing would alter food preparation forever. The book also comments on how home cooks' duties changed--from processing whole animal carcasses, growing their own yeast, and making gelatin from hooves, to preparing their own preserves. A book useful to food historians, cooks, and others studying family life patterns during this period. Recommended. General readers; lower-division undergraduates; faculty and researchers; professionals; two-year technical program students.
    —Choice     6/1/2007
Description: This cookbook covers the years 1840 through 1945, a time during which American cookery underwent a full-scale revolution. Gas and electric stoves replaced hearth cookery. Milk products came from commercial dairy farms rather than the family cow. Daily meals were no longer bound by seasons and regions, as canned, bottled, and eventually frozen products flooded the market and trains began to transport produce and meat from one end of the country to the other. During two World Wars and the Great Depression women entered the work force in unprecedented numbers and household servants abandoned low-paying domestic jobs to work in factories. As a result of these monumental changes, American home cooking became irrevocably simplified and cookery skills geared more toward juggling time to comb grocery store shelves for the best and most economical products than toward butchering and preserving an entire animal carcass or pickling fruits and vegetables.

This cookbook reflects these changes, with each of the three chapters capturing the home cooking that typified the era. The first chapter covers the pre-industrial period 1840 to 1875; during this time, home cooks knew how to broil, roast, grill, fry, and boil on an open hearth flame and its embers without getting severely injured. They also handled whole sheep carcasses, made gelatin from boiled pigs trotters, grew their own yeast, and prepared their own preserves. The second chapter covers 1876 through 1910, a time when rapid urbanization transformed the United States from an agrarian society into an industrial giant, giving rise to food corporations such as Armour, Swift, Campbell's, Heinz, and Pillsbury. The mass production and mass marketing of commercial foods began to transform home cooking; meat could be purchased from a local butcher or grocery store and commercial gelatin became widely available. While many cooks still made their own pickles and preserves, commercial varieties multiplied. From 1910 to 1945, the period covered by Chapter 3, the home cook became a full-fledged consumer and the national food supply became standardized to a large extent. As the industrialization of the American food supply progressed, commercially produced breads, pastries, sauces, pickles, and preserves began to take over kitchen cupboards and undermine the home cooks' ability to produce their own meals from scratch. The recipes have been culled from some of the most popular commercial and community cookbooks of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Taken together, the more than 300 recipes reflect the major cookbook trends of the era. Suggested menus are provided for replicating entire meals.
About the Author: ALICE L. McLEAN is Honors Postdoctoral Fellow at Sweet Briar College.
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