Manly Meals and Mom's Home Cooking by Jessamyn Neuhaus

Author:Jessamyn Neuhaus
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 2003-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 16 In the 1950s local and national televised cookery shows, building on the popularity of radio cooking shows in the 1930s, proliferated. Pictured here is Pearl Silverson, who hosted the Kitchen Magic cooking show out of Memphis, Tennessee. From William A. Kaufman, ed., Cooking with the Experts (New York: Random House, 1955).

Dining à la TV changed how many Americans ate in the postwar years, but in some ways home cooking in the United States did not change at all. Simply because television demanded new, more casual dining and because processed foods increasingly appeared at the dinner table did not mean that the basic composition—meat main dish, a starch side, a vegetable, and a dessert—of a home-cooked meal changed. Even TV dinners followed a similar composition. Moreover, we cannot assume that because certain types of recipes proliferated in the postwar period (especially those produced by processed food companies) Americans regularly followed those recipes. Some cookbook readers may have tried Betty Crocker’s bologna soup, but many probably did not. Certainly, some food writers and columnists complained about the state of American cuisine in the 1950s. For example, caterer, columnist, and cookbook author Helen Evans Brown (who enjoyed a long correspondence with James Beard in the 1950s) scorned highly processed foods. She once described many of the salty snacks often served at postwar cocktail parties as “violently artificially colored, and not a few of them apparently flavored with soot, soap, or stale pepper.”54

Those not directly involved in the food business also complained. In her 1954 memoir about family life on an island near Seattle, humorist Betty MacDonald wrote about having to choke down absurd combinations of food at feminine gatherings. She also criticized and satirized radio and domestic magazine food writers: “Another female house-hold hinter gave a recipe for a big hearty dish of elbow macaroni, mint jelly, lima beans, mayonnaise and cheese baked until ‘hot and yummy.’ Unless my taste buds are paralyzed, this dish could be baked until hell freezes over and it might get hot but never ‘yummy.’” MacDonald surely did not speak for herself only when she complained about these recipe purveyors and about the kind of food served at “ladies only” social events. She scornfully described one such salad as “tuna fish and marshmallows and walnuts and pimento (just for the pretty color, our hostess explained later when she was giving us the recipe) and chunks of pure white lettuce and boiled dressing.” “I almost gagged,” MacDonald stated shortly.55 The fact that Betty MacDonald encountered such food often enough to complain about it indicated its regular appearance at such gatherings. But on the other hand, her critical remarks about these kinds of recipes and the people who created them also showed that Americans did not uniformly accept strange and terrible combinations of processed foods.

Signs of use in cookbooks can reveal, in fragmentary ways, the many different ways individual Americans responded to recipes in the 1950s. For example, one woman who owned a copy of the strictly “home

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