Secret Ingredients: Race, Gender, and Class at the Dinner Table by Sherrie A. Inness

Abstract

Secret Ingredients: Race, Gender, and Class at Dinner Table Sherrie A. Inness. New York: Palgrave, 2006. Sherrie A. Inness has emerged as a leading scholar in areas of girls' culture and food culture. Her latest work, which explores issues of race, gender, and class in American cooking, provides another substantive study in popular culture. Inness notes that cookbooks, although important to readers and booksellers, have been marginalized by scholars, in part because of their connection to women; however, they are anything but trivial. As Inness observes, Cookbooks and other cooking literature are rich, complex texts that reveal a great deal about society and its changing mores, not just culinary ones (2). In particular, cookbooks, which are primarily written by and used by women, contain important messages regarding gender roles. Given this, Inness begins her study in 1950s, coinciding with changes in women's lives in post-World War II society. She explains connection between Betty Friedan's ground-breaking work, The Feminine Mystique (1963), and Peg Bracken's two popular cookbooks, The I Hate to Cook Book (1960) and Peg Bracken's Appendix to The I Hate to Cook Book (1966). These books underscore women's dissatisfaction with domestic life and dominant social values, which Friedan called the problem that has no name. In The I Hate to Cook Book Bracken expressed with humor same sentiment: This book is for those of us who want to fold our big dishwater hands around a dry martini instead of a wet flounder, come end of a long (qtd. in Inness 67). Bracken cautioned homemakers that they did not have to spend all day cooking but could prepare good meals quickly, often using foods, and still have time for themselves and their other interests. Inness also devotes an entire chapter to foods, which changed way Americans thought about cooking. Cooking literature encouraged women to use foods so that they could be more modern, express their own creative desires, both in and out of kitchen, and speed up preparation time so that they could do other things. According to Inness, convenience food literature made it clear that women should develop their own interests; this was a small step toward second-wave feminism in 1960s and 1970s, which emphasized that women had to cultivate themselves as individuals who possessed concerns other than purely domestic ones (19). …