The Working Girl Must Eat
Not even the most determined Live-Aloner could entertain every night of the week, of course, but there were few resources that provided menus or recipes for one. Several reviewers noted that Corned Beef and Caviar was filling a clear gap in the market by giving working women at least a few ideas for solitary suppers. “Brief as this volume is, it provides assistance along lines no one else has ever deemed necessary to take any pains about,” wrote one newspaper, while The New Yorker offered a surprisingly down-to-earth assessment, calling the book “an extremely practical little volume” that would be “a blessing to young women making a salary of less than fifty a week, who realize that the second men and parlormaid of the fashion magazines are not exactly their dish, but want savory meals and pleasant parties.”18
Yet the problem of the solitary meal was not just a question of what to eat. Eating alone flouts more than just social convention: across cultures and eras, breaking bread at the family table is a fundamental human ritual, and a solitary meal is usually a matter of fuel, not fulfillment. “There is no denying that it is hard to make meals for one only seem worth the effort,” Marjorie admitted in Live Alone. Years later, in an essay about eating alone, food writer Laurie Colwin put her finger on the secret pleasure and not-so-secret shame of these unsupervised meals: “People lie when you ask them what they eat when they are alone,” she writes. “A salad, they tell you. But when you persist, they confess to peanut butter and bacon sandwiches deep fried and eaten with hot sauce, or spaghetti with butter and grape jam.”19 But Marjorie’s vision of solitary happiness was meant to be one of pride, not secrecy. Was there a way to harness the pleasure of eating alone and jettison the shame—and the grape jam?
First, the family table had to go. Why should the Live-Aloner feel beholden to a piece of furniture that was little more than a bulky reminder of the company she lacked? Marjorie urged her reader to swap the table for a tray and take dinner wherever she fancied: at “a little table beside the fire,” on a chaise longue, on the balcony, or in bed (she was a firm believer in the pampering power of breakfast in bed, so why not dinner?). Wherever one ate, it should look like an occasion, the table brightly dressed with cloths, napkins, dishware, glasses, and flowers. If a meal of corned-beef hash and coleslaw was to look like more than “pretty poor pickings,” the backdrop needed to be coordinated and chic: “Black-and-tan checked linen . . . yellow pottery, amber glassware, and yellow marigolds in a black bowl,” might not solve the existential challenge of dinner for one, but they would help to offset the gloom. Having dressed the table, the solitary diner should also dress herself, not in a restrictive evening gown, but something privately luxurious and impractical, like “a trailing négligée and froufrou” (presumably taking extra care how she ate her soup). Dress for the company you want, not the solitude you have, Marjorie insisted: “the woman who always looks at night as though she were expecting a suitor is likely to have several.”
In Corned Beef and Caviar, Marjorie and Bertina Foltz offered soup-to-nuts meal plans for solitary suppers, which strove for maximum variety with minimum effort, resulting in some frankly bizarre combinations. The main selling point of “A Dinner Anyone Could Get”—chicken gumbo soup, Triscuits, baked beans, salad, and grapefruit—was that the beans would keep warm in a covered dish during the soup course, and there would be no need to get up and dash to the kitchen halfway through the meal. Lowering the bar even further, “If You Can Only Boil an Egg” and “All Out of Cans” promise to be quick and easy to prepare, even if they will only taste, at best, “perfectly good.” The book strained to conceal the gap between the reality of affordable ingredients and the promise of elegant dining; creamed chipped beef, we are assured, is better than it sounds. Readers who belonged to an older generation, or shared its suspicion of canned foods like soup, spaghetti, spinach, and cherries, were reminded that Grandmother lived in inconvenient times, when such delights were not available. On the evidence of her first two books, Marjorie herself relied heavily on these convenient culinary shortcuts—in Live Alone she extolled “the great army of canned things” newly available to a Depressionera cook, and dispensed in two pages with actual cooking suggestions. The menus in her cookbook were guided more by style than flavor—“elegance,” for instance, is the quality uniting a meal of mushroom beignets, boned trout amandine, wilted cucumbers in French dressing, asparagus vinaigrette, and cheese and biscuits.
The few other cookbooks that addressed time-pressed single women rarely suggested that eating alone, rather than cooking for a family, could be a pleasure. The Working Girl Must Eat, published the same year as Corned Beef and Caviar, made dinner sound like an obligation. It tried to minimize the effort by making the most of convenience foods—a natural extension, for its author Hazel Young, of her day job at the rapidly expanding General Foods conglomerate. Under the leadership of one of the twentieth century’s wealthiest women, Marjorie Merriweather Post, who inherited her father’s packaged-cereal company at the age of just twenty-seven, General Foods quickly absorbed brands like Birds Eye, Jell-O, Minute Rice, and Maxwell House. As the company grew, it relied on the expertise of trained nutritionists like Hazel Young to test new convenience foods and find ways to sell them. Young was exceptionally well qualified as a recipe writer, having studied chemistry and nutrition at Colby College and Yale, and, after quitting her job as a home economics teacher, going on to gain a master’s degree in food and nutrition from Columbia. Her qualifications dwarfed the hostess-editing experience of Marjorie Hillis and Bertina Foltz, but she was similarly inspired by a problem of contemporary culture, which she believed she had the skills to solve.
At General Foods, there was an in-house store that sold food to employees, and day after day Hazel overheard her single secretary, Virginia, placing the same order over the telephone, for “hamburg and spinach.” Finally she asked the girl whether she didn’t get bored with her menu, and Virginia replied that it was the only thing she knew how to cook. Hazel began to write out recipes for her young colleague, and soon wondered whether her simple instructions might not help other girls, those her book called the “thousands like her who hold down jobs and also do some housekeeping.” Her book held to the principle that there was no instruction too basic, teaching readers how to chop and blend while reassuring them that the dishes would turn out fine, as long as they followed the instructions to the letter.20
The cover of The Working Girl Must Eat announced its philosophy in both words and pictures. Side-by-side photographs depict a Rosalind Russell-type professional in suit, gloves, and jaunty hat (“Five O’Clock”) standing at her apartment door and looking resigned to a dinner of canned spinach and Triscuits. But her Seven O’Clock self, presumably saved by the book, has been transformed into a smiling, apron-clad homemaker, happily laying a small table for two with tablecloth, dishes, and napkins neatly tucked into glasses. “Open it anywhere,” the book invites, and the reader can share Miss Seven O’Clock’s smile of relief that dinner is served, and solved.
Her smile might not have lasted long, however, once she saw the recipes, arranged in complex, multicourse menus that usually featured a main and side dish, a salad, and a dessert or even two. These at least made a concession to practicality by being arranged in a chronological sequence, so that leftovers from one meal could be incorporated into the next. The question of leftovers and the fear of waste could present acute difficulties for the Live-Aloner with only an icebox rather than a refrigerator. Marjorie Hillis, however, thought the problem was overstated. “Incidentally, we think Live-Aloners make too much fuss about the difficulty of using up left-overs,” she wrote briskly. “People with families eat left-overs too, quite as much as you will have to.” The secret lay in careful planning, and in resisting the temptation to roast a whole turkey for one.21
Like the menus in Corned Beef and Caviar, those in The Working Girl Must Eat were organized by sometimes mystifying logic, but the latter book did encourage its youn
g cooks to be adventurous—a recipe for curried oysters included a note suggesting several other ways to use the unfamiliar spice, such as to “pep up a lamb stew.” Although the oyster dish was simple enough, the menu it belonged to could hardly be called quick or convenient. Its full complement of rice, buttered asparagus, and stuffed celery salad, plus an apple brown Betty for dessert, would have dirtied every pan in the working girl’s kitchen, and left her washing dishes for the rest of her night.
In 1940, on the heels of The Working Girl Must Eat, the true queen of midcentury convenience cooking made her debut in the pages of then five-year-old Mademoiselle, “The Magazine for Smart Young Women.” As the author of 1951’s The Can-Opener Cookbook, Poppy Cannon would become the face of 1950s packaged food in all its Jell-O-and-marshmallow glory, but her popularity was established early on, in these vibrant magazine columns. Cannon understood that a young working girl living alone found her independent life both exhausting and exhilarating, and she did not want to simply rehearse the staid existence of her married older sister. Unlike the poised-professional-turned-placid-homemaker of The Working Girl Must Eat, the Mademoiselle girl took risks, in her kitchen and her life, and Cannon urged her on to reckless heights. As food historian Laura Shapiro writes, “The heroines of her column were constantly inviting men to brunch or throwing together a spontaneous after-theater supper or staging a wedding breakfast for ten in a one-room apartment—even though they were working girls and had never cooked in their lives.”22 Their ingredients are whipped and sloshed and splashed; there’s zest in everything and a sprinkle on top, and flavor is far less important than flair. The real joy of cooking as a single woman, according to this energetic new guru, lay in the anticipation of where a meal might lead—to company, pleasure, or (as Marjorie put it) “Who Knows What?”
The Labor—and Joy—of Cooking
It was not just Live-Aloners who had to learn to shift for themselves in the kitchen in the early years of the twentieth century. By the time the Depression hit, there had been a “servant problem,” as the upper classes saw it, for at least twenty years. Employment options for white women, especially, had expanded over the first three decades of the twentieth century, so they increasingly rejected the drudgery of domestic service in favor of clerical, trade, and professional jobs. But in a labor market firmly segregated by race as well as gender, domestic service remained the dominant form of employment for urban African American women into the 1960s. At the same time, the overall number of servants steadily dropped; they made up almost half of all working women at the turn of the century, but less than a third by 1940. World War II, with its rapacious need for women’s industrial labor, only hastened the decline. Over the same period, child labor laws were tightened so that girls stayed longer in school, largely thanks to the efforts of FDR’s Labor secretary Frances Perkins. Immigration restrictions in the early 1920s further reduced the availability of cheap young maids from overseas, and in an increasingly urbanized landscape, there were more nondomestic work opportunities for women than ever before—spelling a sharp decline for a system of household management that had endured for decades.23
American homes were also beginning to look much more like the mechanized and efficient places they are today, equipped with hot and cold running water, gas stoves, central heating, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, and refrigerators. The spread of electricity was as fast as the flames from an overloaded circuit, leaping from novelty to normality in the space of a generation. In 1907 less than 10 percent of American homes were wired, and then only for electric light. By the time Corned Beef and Caviar was published in 1938, more than 80 percent of households boasted not just lighting but also electric currents that could power appliances. These innovations were prohibitively expensive at first, but their prices fell steadily until they were within the reach of middle-class households. Small electrical appliances, like toasters, waffle irons, blenders, and mixers, promised to make food preparation fast and fun. Home electricity was pointedly advertised as a technological solution to the problem of human labor. In 1923 one magazine described electricity as a female servant, “Push-Button Mary,” that had the immeasurable advantage over her human predecessors of being “wageless and strikeless.”24
But Push-Button Mary could never be more than a sous chef; someone still had to tackle the actual work of deciding what to eat, when, and how. According to Orchids on Your Budget, the Depression made it socially acceptable, even fashionable, for the upper classes to take an interest in food, where previously they would have been sneered at as “kitchen-minded.”25 This was making a virtue of necessity, as many of the women who now faced the task of cooking for their families could no longer afford hired help in the kitchen. But there was no doubt that a profound cultural shift was under way in the meaning and place of food and cooking in middle-class domestic life. The kitchen, once an out-of-sight servants’ lair, was on its way to becoming the so-called heart of the home and the engine of social and family life. At the same time, a passion for food and a curiosity about its preparation was becoming an essential marker of cultural sophistication.
During the Depression, the threefold obligation to create cheap, nutritious, and delicious meals fell on the shoulders of wives and mothers as their patriotic duty—which they were now also supposed to find fun and fulfilling. In the day-to-day provision of family meals—where the rubber met the stove—the new, higher standards for food knowledge and interest only added to the pressure on women at home. The woman who came to the rescue of America’s home cooks and reassured them they were up to the task was not a trained chef or culinary expert. She was a St. Louis housewife named Irma von Starkloff Rombauer, who spoke to nervous cooks like a trusted friend, and whose 1936 book would soon become a staple of kitchens across the country.
Irma Rombauer’s recipe book was the product of the times in more ways than one, born out of both the national crisis and a personal tragedy. At the time of the Wall Street crash, Irma was fifty-two years old and had been married for more than thirty years. Her husband, Edgar, ten years her senior, was a lawyer with political ambitions, and the couple hosted regular dinners and parties at their home in the historic Shaw neighborhood of St. Louis, where they were respected members of the city’s German immigrant community. Irma and Edgar lost their first child in infancy, but after that early bereavement had gone on to raise a healthy son and daughter, Edgar Jr. and Marion. The latter recalled that her mother was famous for her beautiful cakes, “masterpieces of delicate sugar frosting with garlands of wild roses cascading over the sides.”26 But the Rombauers’ outwardly happy, hospitable life had a dark side. Edgar struggled with depression throughout his life, and in the winter following the Wall Street crash, the prospect of financial ruin triggered a severe relapse. On February 3, 1930, he committed suicide, leaving Irma with just a few thousand dollars in savings and no obvious way to earn a living.
Instead of throwing herself on the mercy of her relatives, Irma summoned her boldest Live-Aloner spirit, resolving to find a way to survive on her own terms. What was she good at? And what did people need? In the mid-1920s, she had offered a popular series of cooking lessons at the local Women’s Alliance, so she now decided to try to bring her teaching to a wider audience, gathering her notes into a small compendium of what she called “reliable recipes with a casual culinary chat.” No publishers were interested—the timing could not have been worse, with the industry floundering in the wake of the crash—so Irma, undeterred, enlisted her daughter Marion and her husband’s former secretary in preparing and printing the cookbook themselves. Marion designed a striking blue-and-green cover depicting “St. Martha of Bethany, the patron saint of cooking, slaying the dragon of kitchen drudgery.” The book’s title, however, discarded allegory and boldly proclaimed its goal of turning a chore into a pleasure: The Joy of Cooking.27
The first three thousand copies sold briskly to Irma’s friends and local contacts—so briskly, in fact, that they soon needed to print more.
For a few years, the book sustained Irma as she published it out of her apartment, while she continued to try to convince a publisher that she was on to something. In 1935 she found her mark. On a visit to her cousin in Indianapolis, Irma met Marjorie’s editor and regular correspondent Laurance Chambers, president of the local firm Bobbs-Merrill, over a game of bridge. She told him that she’d been looking for a commercial publisher without success, and Chambers—captive in a bridge foursome—agreed to take on Joy. The following year, Bobbs-Merrill published its version of Irma’s cookbook. It had expanded to more than six hundred pages, and had lost Marion’s whimsical cover art to a no-nonsense yellow and brown design that, on its dust jacket, established the central message of the book: It was all you needed. “As American as ham and eggs, as modern as China Clippers and television, this is one of the most complete collections of recipes for good food ever assembled,” the book promised. Not only that, it was detailed, practical, and thoroughly indexed as well.
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