Joy of Cooking

St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture, Jan 29, 2002 by Carol Brennan

An eight-hundred page cookbook that begins with a quote from Goethe's Faust seems an unlikely candidate for a spot on a list of the best-selling books of the century, but Irma S. Rombauer's Joy of Cooking (first edition 1931), sold 14 million copies before 1997--a record that speaks for itself in terms of the enormous influence it has wielded in the development of social culture. In 1977 a revised edition was issued by its new publisher, Simon & Schuster, and despite the vast changes in the eating habits of American households over the decades, the detailed tome again landed on the best-seller lists. By the end of the twentieth century, it was the top-selling all-purpose cookbook in publishing history, deemed the bible of American culinary customs, from cocktails to custards.

Part of Joy of Cooking's success lies in the way it presents the art of food preparation in simple, forthright terminology. Rombauer was a widowed St. Louis socialite of patrician German birth when she began assembling her wealth of recipes into book form in 1930, partly at the request of her two grown children. Married to a lawyer in 1899, she had had little experience in the kitchen as a young wife, and like other affluent women of the era, she relied on domestic staff to help plan and cook meals for family dinners and social events. Her husband was an avid outdoor man, however, and had instructed her in some of the basics of the camp stove. Over the next few decades Rombauer matured into an accomplished chef and renowned hostess. One of her aims in writing the book was to persuade American women that cooking was not a daily, labor-intensive, time-consuming chore, but rather a delight, indeed, a "joy." The book's title has something of an ironic tinge, because Rombauer's husband had suffered from depression for much of his adult life, and committed suicide in the family home in St. Louis a few months after the stock market crash of 1929. He left his wife and two children an estate of just 6000 dollars, and Rombauer used half of that sum to put her first edition into print.

The recipes that Irma Rombauer assembled for the first Joy of Cooking: A Compilation of Reliable Recipes with a Casual Culinary Chat (1931) provided new cooks with the basics. Illustrated by her artistic-minded daughter, Marion Rombauer Becker, the book sold 3,000 copies, literally out of Rombauer's St. Louis home. The stylized, art-deco cover depicted a gowned St. Martha of Bethany, the patron saint of cooks, slaying a dragon representing kitchen drudgery; inside were to be found old European recipes, such as braised heart slices in a sour sauce, adapted for use with American ingredients and tools. There were several meat dishes that reflected traditional peasant economics, whereby when an animal was slaughtered almost no inch of it went to waste--neither brains nor tongue, intestine or feet. On a lighter note, Rombauer told readers about her cook, Marguerite, and Marguerite's culinary prowess. Her chatty style extended to explaining the mechanics of food preparation: she assumed, for example, that novices in the kitchen did not know how to separate egg whites when a recipe called for it, and so guided them through it; likewise, she instructed them in other fundamentals such as flour sifting and deboning chicken.

In 1936, Indianapolis publisher Bobbs-Merrill brought out a Joy of Cooking edition rewritten and enlarged by the author. This version displayed Rombauer's unique set-up for each recipe that became the book's most famously identifying feature. Ingredients were listed in bold type so that a recipe could be quickly scanned to determine whether the ingredients were on hand in the pantry or refrigerator; more importantly, just what to do with those ingredients was detailed in a step-by-step sequence. This edition was an immediate success, due in part to the fact that, with the Great Depression, many well-to-do households could no longer afford to keep servants, and numerous affluent American women had recently entered the kitchen full-time. They sorely needed Rombauer's instructions.

In 1939, Rombauer was far ahead of her time in recognizing the need for a cookbook designed to help working women prepare quick and easy meals. Streamlined Cooking was the result, and the relatively recent invention of the pressure cooker was a key element in many of the main-dish recipes. It was not as successful as her first volume, but when she merged the two into a 1943 edition of Joy of Cooking, she hit upon the perfect formula. Combining the easy recipes from Streamlined with the step-by-step instruction method of Joy produced an instant classic. Large numbers of women were working outside the home as a result of labor shortages created by World War II, and Rombauer's recipes took the countrywide wartime food rationing into consideration. When the third revision of the book appeared in 1951, household help had become a relic of a bygone era for all but the wealthiest of households. Census figures from between 1930 and 1960 tracked a decrease in the median age of men and women at the time of marriage, and the number of households, families, and married couples zoomed from 34.9 million in 1940 to 52.7 million in 1960. Though many women worked outside the home during this era, the image of the competent, attractive homemaker advanced by advertising and television programs was firmly entrenched by the postwar decade, and Joy of Cooking became the "how-to" guide to achieving domestic fulfillment for legions of American women.