Cookbooks: Community Cookbooks: Changing Styles and Values

As more women entered public life, CCBs’ recipes, along with their prefatory and discursive passages, revealed the ways women negotiated their sometimes conflicting roles. While older CCBs often include everything from how to bake a cake to how to black a stove, prepare foods for invalids, cut up a side of beef, and store various foodstuffs, later cookbooks usually concentrate on food preparation, presentation, and preservation. Ready-made products clearly relieved women of certain duties. But other changes occurred as more women entered the workforce. A book like Who Says We Can’t Cook!, from the National Women’s Press Club (1955), stresses women’s professional roles as journalists, while proclaiming (in the foreword) that many of the women are noted hostesses and have created “short-cut scoops” to produce fine dinners. A number of the recipes use canned foods or items such as “1 roll prepared snappy cheese” (p. 38), and recipe titles often indicate speed or efficiency, as with “Angel in a Hurry” and “Favorite Quick and Easies.”