Cooking Schools: Twentieth Century

In the first half of the twentieth century, cooking schools for housewives and their domestics continued in much the same vein as nineteenth-century schools. But at the mid-century point, cooking schools changed fundamentally as the market for cookery instruction expanded into three new territories. First was the truly revolutionary emergence of vocational schools for training cooks for professional kitchens. Second, hobbyist-cooks who wanted more than the basics began exploring an astonishing diversity of culinary instruction that went beyond the Anglo-French techniques and nutritional knowledge that had marked so much of late-nineteenth-century cooking schools. Third, celebrity chef demonstrations and cooking-school vacations became a new form of entertainment for affluent, curious cooks.