Good Women Bake Good Biscuits

Abstract

Culinary skill figures as a measure of a woman's self-worth in mid nineteenth-century US culture. For novelists as varied as Fanny Fern, Caroline Howard Gilman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Susan Warner, women who cook well serve as moral exemplars while women who cannot face social stigma. By popularizing this extended metaphor, these authors participate in a much larger cultural response to accelerations in industrialization and urbanization. They join the writers of conduct books, domestic manuals and cookbooks in an effort to replace support networks being destroyed by the breakdown of the extended family, modernize old workways superseded by new technology, and stress the importance of the domestic sphere in a period when “work” increasingly meant something that took place outside of the home.