Home Economics: Scientific Cookery and Social Reform

The movement got its start after the Civil War, as surveys among the urban poor revealed that many families spent as much as one-half of their overall budgets on food. In response, reformers fastened on diet as the means of combating the social problems of the day: poverty, crime, intemperance, and labor unrest. Convinced that workers were ill-fed because of ignorance as much as for lack of money, domestic scientists established cooking schools in many northeastern cities to promote more economical and healthful ways of preparing food. The primary targets of these schools—which opened in New York, Philadelphia, and Boston in the 1870s and 1880s—were immigrant women. The cooking instructors viewed the mixed foods of eastern European and Mediterranean cultures as too spicy and thus difficult to digest. In the place of traditional ethnic foodways, they held up New England Yankee cookery as the cultural ideal that would elevate foreigners—as well as African Americans and Native Americans—to a higher standard of living and thereby transform them into true Americans.