John Barleycorn
Author: Jack London
It all came to me one election day. It was on a warm California afternoon and I had ridden down into the Valley of the Moon from the ranch to the little village to vote Yes and No to a host of proposed amendments to the Constitution of the State of California.
Upton Sinclair
Assuredly one of the most useful, as well as one of the most entertaining books ever penned by a man.
Book review: Dominion of Memories or You Can Lead a Politician to Water But You Cant Make Him Think
Manly Meals and Mom's Home Cooking: Cookbooks and Gender in Modern America
Author: Jessamyn Neuhaus
"This detailed analysis of the gendered nature of American cookbooks surveys more cookbooks than any other work I'm aware of. The clear and consistent thesis is that these cookbooks reflect and reinforce a long-standing ideology of domesticity that situates women as the primary cooks, caretakers, and nurturers of the idealized nuclear family. With sound scholarship and a focus on prescriptive food literature, Manly Meals makes an original and useful contribution to our understanding of how gender roles are institutionalized and perpetuated." -- Warren Belasco, senior editor of The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Food and Drink
From the first edition of The Fannie Farmer Cookbook to the latest works by today's celebrity chefs, cookbooks reflect more than just passing culinary fads. As historical artifacts, they offer a unique perspective on the cultures that produced them. In Manly Meals and Mom's Home Cooking, Jessamyn Neuhaus offers a perceptive and piquant analysis of the tone and content of American cookbooks published between the 1890s and the 1960s, adroitly uncovering the cultural assumptions and anxieties -- particularly about women and domesticity -- they contain.
Neuhaus's in-depth survey of these cookbooks questions the supposedly straightforward lessons about food preparation they imparted. While she finds that cookbooks aimed to make readers -- mainly white, middle-class women -- into effective, modern-age homemakers who saw joy, not drudgery, in their domestic tasks, she notes that the phenomenal popularity of Peg Bracken's 1960 cookbook, The I Hate to Cook Book, attests to the limitations of this kind of indoctrination. At the same time, she explores theproliferation of bachelor cookbooks aimed at "the man in the kitchen" and the biases they display about male and female abilities, tastes, and responsibilities.
Neuhaus also addresses the impact of World War II rationing on homefront cuisine; the introduction of new culinary technologies, gourmet sensibilities, and ethnic foods into American kitchens; and developments in the cookbook industry since the 1960s. More than a history of the cookbook, Manly Meals and Mom's Home Cooking provides an absorbing and enlightening account of gender and food in modern America.
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