Women in the Kitchen: Twelve Essential Cookbook Writers Who Defined the Way We Eat, from 1661 to Today by Anne Willan

Abstract

Reviewed by: Women in the Kitchen: Twelve Essential Cookbook Writers Who Defined the Way We Eat, from 1661 to Today by Anne Willan Jennifer Cognard-Black Women in the Kitchen: Twelve Essential Cookbook Writers Who Defined the Way We Eat, from 1661 to Today. By Anne Willan. New York: Scribner, 2020. xv + 305 pp. $28.00 cloth/$17.00 paper/$12.99 ebook. Feminist literary critic Margaret Beetham has argued that "there is a relationship between eating and reading" (15). This relationship is at the heart of Anne Willan's Women in the Kitchen, an overview of twelve "essential" cookbook authors that serves as an introduction to these writers, their recipes, and their influence on the eating habits of Anglo-Americans across 350 years. Structured chronologically, the book begins in 1661 with Hannah Woolley, the first woman to publish a domestic handbook in English, and concludes with the contemporary chef celeb Alice Waters. At one level, Women in the Kitchen mirrors the scope and purpose of other foundational studies that demonstrate the cultural import of women's culinary texts, such as Janet Theophano's Eat My Words: Reading Women's Lives through the Cookbooks They Wrote (2002) and Toni Tipton-Martin's The Jemima Code: Two Centuries of African American Cookbooks (2015). Yet Willan's survey is not as meticulous, expansive, or groundbreaking as these previous histories. Rather, it is written for a popular audience, not a scholarly one, as an invitation to rustle up a little gastronomic history while skimming the biographies of female cooks and chefs who are clearly Willan's favorites and sometimes her friends. The first half of Willan's book covers domestic manuals by three British and three American women writers across two centuries, including Woolley's The Queen-like Closet, or Rich Cabinet (1670); Hannah Glasse's The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy (1747); Amelia Simmons's American Cookery (1796); Maria Rundell's A New System of Domestic Cookery (1806); Lydia Child's The Frugal Housewife (1829); and Sarah Rutledge's The Carolina Housewife (1847). Willan explains that these early "domestic kitchen[s], a very different world from the grand establishment of the professional male cooks," demanded a distinct kind of handbook: one that could teach housekeepers, servants, and/or enslaved people the basics of cooking, gardening, raising livestock, concocting home remedies, and managing a household—often with tidbits on economizing, child rearing, or entertaining (11). These books also showcased the home cooks themselves, who established their culinary credibility by being literate, competent, and shrewd. Indeed, these authors were clever saleswomen who knew their audience and shaped their approaches accordingly. In the first published colonial American cookbook, Simmons claims her recipes are "[a]dapted to this country" by incorporating New World ingredients like corn and spruce (56), while Glasse "craftily" changes the titles of other people's recipes to pass them off as her [End Page 120] own (34). In addition to being commercially savvy, though, these texts offered the intimate confidences of a friendly homemaker-guide. Child urges mother-readers to train children in growing and selling food—"they can weed the garden, and pick cranberries from the meadow, to be carried to market" (101)—while Rutledge suggests that a wife should meet any "notoriously thoughtless person" (that is, a husband) who might bring unexpected company to dinner with "a clean table-cloth and a smiling countenance" (116). Rather deliciously, Willan then reveals that Child never had children and that Rutledge was never married, underscoring that these seeming amateurs were in fact canny rhetoricians. The form of Willan's book follows similar functions to these manuals. At least half of Women in the Kitchen is dedicated to reproducing recipes from her selected cookbooks, for dishes such as "English Monkey" or "Mango Salad with Hot Pepper" (140, 273). Willan first tested and then adapted these recipes for modern-day readers, providing a kind of how-to for consuming these texts in both mind and mouth. She writes intimately, providing comparisons between her life and the writers' and making wry asides. Noting that the original cover for Joy of Cooking depicts "the patron saint of cooks and domestic servants . . . seen slaying the brilliant...