Michigan Cookbooks: 150 Years of Mostly Good Meals
Some of Kellogg's best-known recipes were originally created for youth groups. What is perhaps the best-known recipe using Rice Krispies, a mixture of the cereal, marshmallows, and butter called Rice Krispies Treats, was created in 1941 by a Kellogg employee, Mildred Day, for a Camp Fire Girls' bake sale. That a Kellogg employee was concocting recipes for the Camp Fire Girls was not unusual. In the 1950s Kellogg's published two cookbooks aimed at Girl Scouts, Camp Fire Cookery for Camp Fire Girls, and Trail Cookery for Girl Scouts, which followed in the tradition of a 1930's publication A Manual of Cooking for Boy Scouts.1
Although recipes could boost product sales, ultimately they could not save an unpopular product. At the beginning of the twentieth century a Chicago physician, Dr. V. C. Price, attempted to combine the magic of the " Cereal City," Battle Creek, with that of the " Celery City," Kalamazoo. The result was "Tryabita," a celery-flavored, hot cereal manufactured just outside of Battle Creek. In 1903 a recipe for Tryabita bread appeared in Mother Hubbard's Modern Cupboard, a 170-page publication distributed without charge to those who purchased Snyder's flavorings, such as vanilla extract. The book printed recipes using Snyder's extracts, as well as general recipes and recipes calling for the use of other manufacturers' name-brand products [who, no doubt, paid for the privilege]. Although the text extolled Tryabita bread as a food that "may truly be called the 'Staff of Life' as it contains all the nourishing qualities to make bone and muscle and feed the nerves," Tryabita disappeared after only a year.2 Americans were ready to eat corn, rice, or wheat first thing in the morning-but not celery.
Ethnic and Regional Cooking
The "receipt books" of the Civil War era and their fundraising successors not only created new purposes for cookbooks but also documented what cooks in the place of publication thought good enough to share. These volumes published the recipes of local cooks, and they were intended primarily for members of the local community. Although the recipes in these books were not exclusively regional, fundraising cookbooks focused on local favorites. Because of this local focus, fundraising cookbooks became, quite unintentionally, the first American "regional" cookbooks,3 and also document how recipes moved from region to region.
A second group of cookbooks, ethnic cookbooks, sought also to go beyond the advice of commercially published books from "back East." Throughout much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries America was the chosen destination of millions of immigrants. These immigrants, however, often longed for a taste of the homeland, which they did not find in a New England pot roast, however seasoned, printed in a cookbook benefiting the local Congregational Church.
Ethnic cookbooks served two purposes. First, the books, which were sometimes published in the language of the immigrant community, helped immigrants recapture the flavor of the old country but used ingredients found in their adopted home. American stores usually lacked the ingredients immigrants were accustomed to using, but clever cooks have adopted old recipes to new surroundings for generations, and these new cookbooks helped immigrants to do just that.
Second, ethnic cookbooks included recipes for dishes that mothers, and later grandmothers, served. In so doing, these cookbooks practiced cultural preservation by saving old-world recipes, although these recipes often reflected grandma's Americanized version of the dish. This combination could raise objections from cultural purists. A small but telling example of this conflict between the New World and the Old World is seen in the rendering of the Polish word for duck blood soup in cookbooks published almost a half-century apart. In 1948 Treasured Polish Recipes for Americans, published in America, gave 
the Polish word for the soup as "czarnina." Robert Strybal, a native of Michigan who wrote the syndicated column "Polish Chef," spelled the word "czernina" in his 1993 book, Polish Heritage Cookery. Noting the different spellings, Strybal, announced that "the spelling is 'czarnina' in peasant dialect," a distinction that resonates with just a hint of distaste for cookbooks that could not keep straight "real" ethnic cuisine from the peasant fare immigrants tended to eat.4
Authenticity, however, is difficult to define in this context. Those bent on capturing true old-world recipes could remove the processed American food products that had crept into grandma's version of the dish and replace them with something more authentic. At the same time, however, the children and grandchildren of immigrants could enjoy an "authentic" recipe from grandma that included those products. Both groups could argue that they were preserving an "ethnic" recipe.
In America ethnic cooking was and remains a two-way street. While immigrants were integrating "American" food products into their traditional recipes, Americans were integrating "foreign" foods into American cuisine. The result was often a unique blending of old and new that, in its most creative mode, gave the United States "foreign" recipes invented in North America. Chop suey and spaghetti with large meatballs did not come in their American form from, respectively, China and Italy, but from cooks in the United States who adapted old-world recipes to new-world tastes. This process continues today as new immigrants and American cooks mix national favorites and American ingredients in a culinary give-and-take.5
Gender Roles and Cooking
It will surprise no one that in the United States cooking has historically been identified as women's work. The question "Who is going to cook dinner?" however, has slowly developed a more nuanced answer. Although women still cook more frequently than men do, for a man to cook a meal is clearly no longer an unusual event.
Identifying the root cause of any social change is always difficult. Several things, however, likely led men to develop at least a passing acquaintance with cooking. One of these factors occurred in suburban backyards in the 1950s. The backyard cookout became fashionable during that decade, and cooking in the yard was a man's job.
We have . . . definite opinions about charcoal cookery. We believe that it is primarily a man's job and that a woman, if she's smart, will keep it that way. Men love it, for it gives them a chance to prove that they are, indeed, fine cooks.10
Helen Evans Brown and James Beard, who wrote the above paragraph, were not alone in their opinion. Victor Bergeron (founder of the then popular Trader Vic's chain of restaurants) reassured men in 1952: "You can take my word for it that a yen to cook is in the same rugged tradition as jousting or going on a crusade to fight the Saracens."11 A few years later, Gertrude Booth, went even farther:
We contend that men are better cooks than women, and it is with a great deal of pride that we give you these recipes from men of all parts of the country. Cooking, with a man, is an urge from the heart - he has a great natural talent and he has been at it longer than woman.12
Regardless of the natural talent men had or did not have for cooking, the trend in the 1950s toward men cooking was a slippery slope. If men as a group were fine cooks, as Brown and Beard asserted, or even better than women, as Booth would have it, and a specific man successfully proved the point by cooking an edible slab of meat over a grill, surely he could with equal success put a TV dinner in the oven, a boil-in-bag in a pot of water, or an entrée into a microwave. And having mastered the use of cooking devices not employing charcoal, it was inevitable that the next step would soon occur to men: actually reading a cookbook.
Men's theoretically increasing responsibility for meal preparation also reflected the demographic shift in the workplace as an ever-increasing number of women worked outside of the home. This meant that in many families both parents worked, and when this was the case, something had to give. What gave first was largely the amount of time that could be devoted to cooking.
Cookbooks were an early indicator of this change. Maude Stewart Beagle wrote in the introduction to her book, Can Opener Recipes for the Career Wife: "If you are a career wife who does her own cooking for a husband who likes meals with a Duncan Hines recommendation then draw up a chair, sister, and take out the old can opener. You have found one just like yourself. After many years of careering and cooking quite successfully, at least I'm still living with the same husband I started out with, I have decided to write this book." Beagle clearly recognized the problem of completing household chores in a dual-income family.13 Her can opener would eventually be supplemented by a microwave, but the intent was clearly the same: cooking a meal with as little effort and time as possible.
Cooking faster, however, was not the complete answer. Very soon men were asked to do more housework, including cooking. Although statistics indicate that women living in dual-income households still do a larger share of the housework than men, the amount of work done by men, including cooking, appears to have increased over time.14
Conclusion
Cookbooks prompt us to ask questions about gender, ethnicity, nutrition, class, and taste. The person who opens a cookbook may do so simply because he or she is looking for a new way to prepare chicken. A researcher, however, can open the same cookbook and learn a great deal about our culture and ourselves. Cookbooks are clearly not just for cooking.
1 Information regarding Rice Krispies Treats was found on Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice_Krispies. Site visited on July 3, 2006. Despite the recipe's age, the treat (and the cereal) remains popular. The Kellogg Company currently makes the recipe available in three forms, (regular, microwave, and large quantity) on its website at http://www.kelloggs.com/brand/rk/index.shtml. Site consulted July 5, 2006. See also Camp Fire Cookery for Camp Fire Girls (Battle Creek: Kellogg Co. Home Economics Department, [1955]); Trail Cookery for Girl Scouts (Battle Creek: Kellogg Co. Home Economics Department, [1955]); and A Manual of Cooking for Boy Scouts (Battle Creek: Kellogg Co. Home Economics Department, [1935]).
2Mother Hubbard's Modern Cupboard (Battle Creek: Little-Preston, 1903), 89. For more information regarding Tryabita, see Sylvia Lovegren, Fashionable Food: Seven Decades of Food Fads (1995; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 260; Carson, Cornflake Crusade, 183; and Massie, "Romance of Old Cookbooks," 49.
3 Eleanor Brown and Bob Brown, Culinary Americana: Cookbooks Published in the Cities and Towns of the United States of America during the Years from 1860 through 1960 (New York: Roving Eye Press, 1961), vii-viii.
4 Robert and Maria Strybel, Polish Heritage Cookery (New York: Hippocrene Books, 1993), 195; Treasured Polish Recipes for Americans (Minneapolis: Polanie Publishing Co., 1948), 22-23.
5 Lovegren, Fashionable Food, 89. Lovegren notes that while Americans had heard of spaghetti, as late as 1922 the Good Housekeeping Institute recommended that it be boiled for a minimum of thirty minutes, tossed with butter, and "served hot as a vegetable." Spaghetti with some variant of tomato sauce appears in cookbooks of the 1920s with such unflattering and racist titles as "Wop Spaghetti," or "Dago's Delight." Ibid., 35.
10 Helen Evans Brown and James Beard, The Complete Book of Outdoor Cookery (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1955); quoted in Lovegren, Fashionable Food, 168-69.
11 Lovegren, Fashionable Food, 170.
12 Gertrude Booth, comp., Kings in the Kitchen: Favorite Recipes of Famous Men (New York: Barnes, 1961).
13 Maude Stewart Beagle, Can Opener Recipes for the Career Wife (Flint: The author, 1951), 9-10.
14 For the year 1967, the United States Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that among married individuals with families, 35.6 percent of the families were supported economically solely by the husband, 1.7 percent were supported solely by the wife, and 43.6 percent were supported by the employment of both husband and wife. In 2003 those number had changed respectively to 18.1 percent, 5.2 percent, and 57.5 percent. Statistics viewed July 3, 2006, at http://www.bls.gov/cps/wlf-table23-2005.pdf. Whether men are doing more housework as a result of this shift is a contested question. A study by the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research released in 2002 indicates that the number of hours men devoted to housework increased from twelve in 1965 to sixteen in 1999. In 1999 women performed twenty-seven hours of housework per week. Study cited on the following website http://www.applesforhealth.com/MensHealth/mdohoh3.html. Site visited on July 3, 2006. Also see Andrew Singleton and Jane Maree Maher, "'' The New Man' Is in the House: Young Men, Social Change, and Housework," Journal of Men's Studies 12 (Spring 2004): 227-240 . Singleton and Maher suggest that although the rhetoric regarding the distribution of housework between spouses has changed over the past fifty years, the reality of who does the work may not have changed significantly.
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