Defining Terms Part 2: A Recent History
The requirements of creativity and vast knowledge tied to the term "chef" hardly apply to the conventional image of the home cook, who is generally laboring for the benefit of her family, and is focused on providing nutritional value—or at least full stomachs—with whatever resources she has. However, a look at the evolution of cookbooks shows that this has not always been the case, nor is it necessarily today. In Can She Bake a Cherry Pie?: American Women and the Kitchen in the Twentieth Century, Mary Drake McFeely offers two radically different visions of the home cook as guided by instructive cookbooks. She details how in the 1920s, America’s burgeoning consumer culture changed the relationship of women to food by turning them into “scientific consumers of goods:”
The scientific approach not only regularized cooking, making the product more predictable, and increasing the cook’s confidence, but also, not coincidentally, granted a certain seriousness to what women were doing in the kitchen. Cooking no longer depended on instinct (a female characteristic) …Nutritionists weighed the value of the elements of food composition. Domestic scientists in laboratories determined through experiment the exact formulas for successful food preparation. [1]
In this era, cooking became wrapped up in science, business, and technology, rather than being based upon recipes passed from mother to daughter or circulated through community and tradition. We might even say that home cooking took on the precision we now associate with professional culinary schooling. At the very least, the prescriptive literature offered to middle class women attempted to strictly regulate cooking practices using the principles of the public sphere.
Now let us fast forward half a century to when New American cuisine emerged. Cookbook authors were less like mothers, such as Irma Rombauer of The Joy of Cooking, and less focused on teaching for the “home kitchen,” as Julia Child was. Instead they were professional cooks, and their recipes were available in the cursory copy of Gourmet, Saveur, or Bon Appetit as well as in the bookstore. McFeely finds that “these chef-instructors have given cooking a very different look, placing a high value on sophistication and the novelty of imaginative cooking.”[2] Additionally, the focus on great ingredients and the proliferation of international cooking styles which influenced the New American cuisine meant that the home cook was able to broaden her horizons not only by reading about but by actually buying and cooking with a much wider range of foods.
This sounds like cooking more for self-actualization than for nourishment alone, and indeed, McFeely points out the somewhat hedonistic perspective that went along with this cooking zeitgeist:
Pleasing others was no longer necessarily the primary motive. The busy culture demanded that if a woman or man spend time cooking, the activity itself must be entertaining. The self insisted on first consideration. Cooking is a form of self-expression that is ready at hand; the cook seeks pleasure in the kitchen.[3]
Attached to this rather private and individualist cooking practice, McFeely identifies a very public motivation, as for some home cooks, “the kitchen became…a theater.”[4] Further, for these bourgeois cooking subjects who cooked “creatively” rather than out of necessity, cooking became yet another “area of competition for people who had become accustomed to striving at work or play.”[5]
Interestingly, Emily Matchar charts a completely different point of view for what we would now call the “foodie” home cook. In her book Homeward Bound: Why Women Are Embracing the New Domesticity, published thirteen years after Can She Bake a Cherry Pie, Matchar describes a similar embrace of creative and difficult cooking among Generation Y and Millenials. However, Matchar finds that this interest in the kitchen is just part of a general movement toward domesticity which originates partially from quibble with Generation X mothers who were so concerned with the public, productive sphere that they paid less attention to the private sphere and the reproductive labor which their children craved. Presumably these are the same Generation X mothers who McFeely found thumbing pages of Gourmet in the checkout aisle, but perhaps this was not enough of a widespread phenomenon.
Matchar shows how home cooking has been taken up by the current generation as a nurturing responsibility. She describes how young women are retreating from a corporate world that does not fit their needs to become “femivores” who become deeply involved in cooking and sustainable food culture in order to escape the feeling of being “just a housewife.”[6] By making homemaking more difficult through a focus on providing the best possible foods for their families, they make their lives more fulfilling. They guard their families from the “dangers” of processed foods, conveniently forgetting that as much as the FDA caves to food corporations about labeling of imitation foods and GMOs[7], their regulations have also prevented millions of deaths via food-borne illness. They buy from farmer’s markets and other local sources, or even garden, raise chickens, or grind their own flour in order to combat the environmental and moral consequences of the nation’s current food system.
Unfortunately, these goals tend to drive these women out of the public sphere—why not lobby for better food policy instead of opting out of public options completely?—necessitate either very frugal living or financial dependence on a partner, and, as long as the onus falls on women to fulfill them, tend to support maternalist discourse about the relationship between women and kitchens. These femivores are certainly taking up challenging work to provide the best possible food options for themselves and their families, and perhaps acquiring the chef’s encyclopedic gastronomic knowledge and prodigious skill in the process. But they are limiting their talents and energies to a domestic setting. Can all of that creativity be called the work of a chef if it only enters the public sphere through a food blog? If you produce the most perfect roast chicken ever to bless the culinary world but no one pays for it, does it make a sound?
[1] Mary Drake McFeely, Can She Bake a Cherry Pie? American Women and the Kitchen in the Twentieth Century, (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000), 42.
[2] Ibid., 152
[3] Ibid., 153
[4] Ibid., 161
[5] Ibid.
[6] Emily Matchar, Homeward Bound: Why Women Are Embracing the New Domesticity, (New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 2013), 103.
[7] This is a major focus of Michael Pollan’s crusade against processed food in In Defense of Food
