The way to a man's heart: gender roles, domestic ideology, and cookbooks in the 1950s

Journal of Social History, Spring, 1999 by Jessamyn Neuhaus

Marling argues that "cuisine meant to look like something else" aimed to elevate the status of cooking and gave the impression of time and trouble taken.(47)

The emphasis on glazing, decorating, and fussing with food, in the face of rapidly increased exposure to instant and canned foods, indicated unease over the implications of such processed foods. By "doctoring" food, women retained their position as the only real cook of the family. Any member of the family could open a can, but only Mom knew to add chopped watercress and milk to a can of potato soup and make "Watercress Vichyssoise." The nature of food and eating was rapidly changing in the 1950s: supermarkets, suburbs, advertising, consumer testing, the development of fast food, increased mobility, the rise of the scientific "expert," and television were changing what, where, and how Americans ate. And Morn had to make sure that even as diets were affected by outside influences, the warm fuzzy feeling of the family dinner remained unaffected. General Foods, for example, opened their cookbook by evoking women's role in maintaining stable family units, visa vis food, in a world of change: "The times we live in are hurrying times, and we are a hurrying people. But it is still possible to provide the necessary islands of peaceful, enjoyable family living that are traditionally associated with the table."(48)

Even the television, with its distractions from family life, could be incorporated into women's nurturing sphere. General Foods offered the concerned mother a menu for TV snacks when her teenager entertained: "When the group gathers to watch the Series game, or tune in their favorite music show, they'll want a simple but hearty lunch or supper they can devour as they watch, without leaving their chairs at the height of the excitement."(49) One author reassured her readers that you had nothing to worry about if your husband wanted to eat dinner in front of the TV now and then. But there was a caveat:

If, however, he wants to eat dinner cure television every night, you had better look to your dinners, or yourself, very quickly indeed. It is hoped that the recipes in this book will help take care of any dinner deficiencies for a while. As for any deficiencies in your dinner-self which a full-length, 3-way mirror may disclose, you can do something about those too. In fact, you had better.(50)

Not to put too fine a point on it, if the television was a disturbance to a woman's marriage and family life, she was solely responsible, and it was up to her to improve her appearance or her cooking or both.

Was this author's prescription for the housewife's defense against a modernizing world a typical one? Levenstein asserts that even as processed foods spread to every comer of every suburb, town, and city in the 1950s, public concerns about the effects of advertising and food additives and preservatives were growing.(51) Some cookbooks continued to espouse the use of fresh foods and M.F.K. Fisher quietly spoke out against the over-indulgences of the postwar years in the revised edition of How to Cook a Wolf.(52) In 1952, Cussler and de Give tartly criticized the way advertising played on emotions and how it linked consumption (and digestion) with worldly success: