The Woman Who Created the Modern Cookbook

June 18, 2024 4:02 AM

"When Ms. Jones began her career in publishing in the 1950s, cookbooks and food writing in general weren’t taken seriously, often lumped in with technical manuals and textbooks. Their editing focused on the recipe instructions, without thought to point of view, cultural context or the beauty of language." [Archive]
posted by cupcakeninja (16 comments total)

for historical cookbooks, Schlesinger has an extensive collection
posted by HearHere at 4:28 AM on June 18 [3 favorites]

It's starting to change now, but for a long time there was an absolute dearth of cookbooks suited for single diners. One of the rare exceptions was Judith Jones' own book on the topic - I've made one of the recipes so much I practically have it memorized (and if it weren't going to be so damn hot this week I'd likely be making it this week too, I have a glut of one particular ingredient).

It's not just a dry recipe list; she also has some practical advice for how to store different ingredients and how to shop for ingredients (along with a lament that supermarkets seem to emphasize the family-size packaging and overlooks the single diner) - but the best part is a whole section of what I would best describe as "recipe groups," where you start out making one thing one night, and then you use the leftovers from the first thing to make the second thing the next night. This is a GOD-DAMN BOON if you are a single diner who doesn't want to eat the same thing every night for a week.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 4:30 AM on June 18 [15 favorites]

I just want to jump in here and say that Betty Crocker's New Picture Cookbook (held up here as a bad example) is absolutely fantastic on cakes, and it's also fun to look at - heavily illustrated, has cute little asides, etc. As you might expect, the cakes and frostings sections are amazing. If you like old fashioned cakes and are interested in older techniques* you can't go wrong. Unlike many contemporary cookbooks, which emphasize obvious distinctiveness among cake recipes (apricot cake, olive oil cake, vegan chocolate cake, millefeille, etc) this cookbook has many variants on more common cake types - there are a number of chocolate cakes, for instance, each subtly different in texture and flavor.

The cookie section looks good too, but I don't make a lot of cookies most of the year. The other recipes seem a bit hit and miss, because of course this is Betty Crocker, but there are some clear gems among them. You get quite a lot of insight into what was commonly available to cook in the mid-century US.

It's not that I wish to impugn Julia Child or, god knows, the excellent Madhur Jaffrey, but these older books have quite a lot of interest of their own.

*A lot of the recipes have you beat the cake batter a LOT - modern recipes always tell you to beat just until the batter comes together and threaten you with tough cakes if you overbeat even a little. Well, I can tell you that it is difficult to overbeat a cake, because lo, I have beaten cake batter five hundred strokes. It is fascinating to see the difference that complete ingredient incorporation and/or incorporation of air into the batter can make in the finished product.
posted by Frowner at 6:10 AM on June 18 [5 favorites]

Not to be forgotten was the old habit of sharing family recipes far and wide and ginning up a kind of culinary samizdat underworld. In the 1950s the Junior Leagues began to bring the practice to more professional level (e.g. Charleston Receipts. (Apparantly unmentioned in the biography.)

Mrs.A has her grandmother's carefully typewritten loose-leaf notebook of recipes gathered from any number of fellow Richmond VA housewives. We're talking the 1920s. The instructions are by turns barebones ("'bake in hot oven"), hardcore ("put the live terrapin into the boiling water and let them stay for five minutes"), the measurements idiosyncratic ("one glub of molasses"). I've half a mind to throw it up on kindle for a nominal fee.
posted by BWA at 6:17 AM on June 18 [4 favorites]

I have some mixed feelings about the ahistoricity of the Julia Child bioseries streaming on Max; but I really do appreciate how they made Judith Jones an equally vibrant character in the series with her own B-plot evangelizing the value of women's writing and food writing at Knopf.

The ahistoricity makes me wary about taking anything in that series as fact. Did Judith really spend a ton of time commuting between New York and Boston to be an informal adviser to The French Chef and thus also have a hand in shaping the modern cooking show? Did she go beyond being an editor and spend a ton of time with Juila Child and Simone Beck as a sous chef while working on the second volume of Mastering The Art of French Cooking? I'd really love to know because it's such a fascinating life lived fully, and such an understated legacy. But Julia, the series, also makes Boston look much more racially integrated than it actually was, and depicts Juila Child as much, much less homophobic than she actually was -- so who knows what sort of gloss they've applied to the other characters?

There was a nice small scene in the second season where Judith sits down with actress, Madhur Jaffrey, and encourages her to write a cookbook and reassures her that America is ready to be exposed to Indian cuisine, and it's a very sweet nod to the future of Judith's career.

The first book that actually taught me how to cook was Mark Bittman's How To Cook Everything, and the first edition, published in 1999, has this amazing appendix with a fly-in-amber list of contemporary Cookbook Recommendations. It was that list that led me to Marcella Hazan, Claudia Roden, and Madhur Jaffrey -- and that particular way that a cookbook can be more than a manual but also a portal to another culture and part of the world; and I love how we have this form of writing largely through Jones' influence.
posted by bl1nk at 6:19 AM on June 18 [2 favorites]

I've made one of the recipes so much I practically have it memorized

Well, go on!
posted by HotToddy at 7:43 AM on June 18

I have mixed feelings on the whole thing because often I find cookbooks to be a bit too verbose on things and that even for someone who loves cooking there is an element of drudgery to it. The focus on cookbooks and recipes as aspirational/lifestyle objects vs a technical manual to create the best thing in the most efficient way possible is something I find frustrating.

The pendulum on food culture swung towards america's test kitchen/serious eats style "here's the most baroque method to make a thing that's going to create a mountain of dishes and take a day" and it's hard to separate that ethos from cookbooks moving to romanticize the unpaid labor that went into elaborate cooking instead of recognizing the difficulty and tedium of providing food for a family.
posted by Ferreous at 9:07 AM on June 18 [2 favorites]

Watching things like Tasting History or Sandwiches of History (or looking back at old brewers journals) really demonstrates just how much knowledge was "presumed" by recipe writers of old.

I will say that modern recipe practice (in the form of blogs and what not, because sadly, who buys practical books anymore?) has reached that SEO fueled over indulgence of the personal with the decades long novelesque accompaniments to the recipes themselves. (Whether in that Serious Eats vein of "We tried a bunch of stuff and this and that and found " or in the millions of lifestyle blogs that tell very very very long stories and make me think that maybe the brevity old cookbook writers had a point)

Also, to shepherd not only Julia Childs, but countless others would be enough, but also to bring Anne Frank to the US market - what a way to make hay.
posted by drewbage1847 at 9:54 AM on June 18 [1 favorite]

I'm always surprised that MFK Fisher is not brought up more often in telling the history of food writing. Her writing is superior to most of the folks mentioned (imho), and was published a couple of decades before Child's first tome.
posted by SoundInhabitant at 9:57 AM on June 18 [2 favorites]

> I've made one of the recipes so much I practically have it memorized

Well, go on!

LOL - she calls it a "tian", but it's a bit of a simplified version of that dish. You just need a couple handfuls of spinach, a clove of garlic, a cup of cooked white rice, a little grated parmesan and some bread crumbs if you want, and about a tablespoon each of olive oil and butter. Slice up the garlic, heat up the olive oil in a skillet and then throw in the garlic. Let that just barely start to brown and then throw in the spinach; let that wilt down. Then you throw in the rice and the butter and stir it all up good until it's heated through.

But THEN you turn the whole thing out into a small baking dish, sprinkle the top with the parm cheese and bread crumbs and bake at 350 for about 15 minutes. That's it. It's a good "i don't know what else to make" fallback, it helps eat through a backlog of spinach and it's fast.

I'm always surprised that MFK Fisher is not brought up more often in telling the history of food writing. Her writing is superior to most of the folks mentioned (imho), and was published a couple of decades before Child's first tome.

I love her too. But I think that in the 40s and 50s she was a bit of an acquired taste, maybe - you only read her stuff if you were a mega-foodie. Julia Child and Judith Jones were after a bit of a wider audience so they got a bit more attention.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 10:09 AM on June 18 [4 favorites]

I also think of MFK Fisher as a food essayist and memoirist and her writing is the root of a branch that includes, say, Michael Pollan, Ruth Reichl, and Mark Kurlansky. Yes, she does include recipes in her books, but you don't read MFK Fisher to learn how to cook. You read Fisher to learn how to eat.

You are a human being who has an appetite. How do you let that appetite shape you and refine what you consider a pleasure, as well as see how that pleasure leads to joy.

I would absolutely not be surprised if Judith Jones read a lot of MFK Fisher and brought that same passion and curiosity from the world of writing essays into the world of writing cookbooks.
posted by bl1nk at 11:07 AM on June 18 [1 favorite]

Thanks for posting, and thanks for the links, those who have posted them in the comments.
It's very interesting how that post-war period gave us a lot of legendary cookbook writers. I can see how people were longing for delicious international food after the war, but I'm also surprised at how rapidly people were reacting against the industrialisation of food that was speeded up by the war effort.

I love cookbooks. For the last few years, they've been my place to go for peace of mind. My work literature is work (which it wasn't always) and fiction is too much emotion and drama for me because of PTSD. I like all types, but I agree with those who say the story-telling has gone a bit over the top during the last decade. Mostly because it sometimes seems more like a formal convention than someone who has something they genuinely want to tell us. I have a couple of recently published cookbooks where the actual recipes feel like an afterthought rather than the core of the book.

I don't have any Julia Child books. For some reason they don't interest me. I have a lot of the other classics, including the lesser known The Art of Turkish Cooking by Neset Eren, which I strongly recommend. But Child's food is too much project food, I think, for me.

Anyway, it isn't the formidable Ms. Jones' fault that what she started became so popular.
posted by mumimor at 11:39 AM on June 18 [1 favorite]

I agree that Child and Jones might have had differing goals from Fisher, and that the reading public was craving an modernist "entertaining lifestyle" more than just reading about food. But Fisher was already doing innovative instructional writing a la cookbooks in How to Cook a Wolf, and Jones wasn't the only one in the 50s trying to pull good writing and cultural context into discussions of cookery.
posted by SoundInhabitant at 11:42 AM on June 18 [1 favorite]

I feel like Irma Rombauer deserves a place in the conversation – The Joy of Cooking was published in 1931:

This was a moment in American history when women were moving far away from their families of origin, following their husbands into growing cities for jobs; the oral tradition of sharing recipes from mother-to-daughter was breaking down, and what had taken over were newspaper columns by home economists and advertisements from food purveyors like meat-packing firms who offered recipes to their readers in impersonal, formulaic ways.

Rombauer’s style represented a major departure from the home economics-driven recipes that looked like nothing more than math problems; her recipes became teaching tools, and following them felt to users as if there was a good friend standing right at their elbow guiding them along in words as well as numbers.

posted by Lexica at 2:57 PM on June 18 [3 favorites]

I'm feeling a little confusion on whether or not this thread is about highlighting the work of someone who has largely worked in the shadows of publishing (MFK Fisher has multiple FPPs on this site and the Joy of Cooking's importance as a cookbook is well known) or if it's a thread to debate who should be credited with inventing the genre.

I thought it was the former but it feels like people want to steer it to the latter, which also feels like falling into this pattern of privileging the work of authors over that of editors.
posted by bl1nk at 4:25 PM on June 18 [2 favorites]

Thanks for posting - looks like an interesting book. The quote the article ends with is intriguing. "Food was our rebellion ... It gave us courage to see things, make things happen."
posted by paduasoy at 3:42 AM on June 19 [1 favorite]