Miller - American home cooking - a popular history

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Miller, Tim (Timothy Jon), 1970 author.

Title: American home cooking : a popular history / Tim Miller.

Description: Lanham [Maryland] : Rowman & Littlefield, [2017] | Series: Rowman & Littlefield studies in food and gastronomy | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016057276 (print) | LCCN 2017000530 (ebook) | ISBN 9781442253452 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781442253469 (electronic)

Subjects: LCSH: CookingUnited StatesHistory. | GastronomyUnited StatesHistory.

Classification: LCC TX360.U6 M54 2017 (print) | LCC TX360.U6 (ebook) | DDC 641.01/3dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016057276

TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

I would like to thank Ken Albala, the content editor for this series, and Suzanne Staszak-Silva, the editor at Rowman & Littlefield, for the opportunity to write this book. I had been thinking for some time about the state of home cooking in America, and this book has given me the chance to investigate the history of home cooking and write about it.

This book is a history of home cooking in America, so it is probably good to begin with a definition of just what cooking is. Unfortunately, in the past century or so our definition of cooking has become quite complicated. Cooking exists on something of a continuum. At one end of the continuum is cooking from scratch, preparing (for example) a salad from ingredients gathered in a garden. Toward the other end of the continuum is making something like cheese dip, where the contents of a few cans are poured into a bowl, the bowl is warmed in the microwave, and the dip is ready to serve.

While this is a book about home cooking, a precise definition of cooking is not terribly important for the purposes of this book. This is not a book that strongly advocates a return to home cooking, nor is it a eulogy for the demise of home cooking. Rather, this is simply a history of home cooking written with the knowledge that cooking, like most other activities Americans have participated in over the past few hundred years, has changed with the times. Today everyone has their own definition of cooking, and that, in itself, is a part of the story of American cooking.

The work of cooking is done in the kitchen, so much of this book is focused on that room. Looked at historically, the kitchen is something of a strange room, a leftover from a much earlier time. A few hundred years ago, before factories came along, homes were centers of productionalmost everything was, literally, homemade. Clothes were homemade, starting with the gathering of the wool or flax and continuing with the spinning of the yarn, weaving of the cloth, and cutting and sewing of that cloth into clothes. Cheese and butter were made from milk taken from the family cows. Medicines were made from gathered and grown herbs. All of this was done within the home. Today the kitchen is the final remnant of all that production, the last place where we actually make something in the house. After we gave up making our own clothes, medicine, and everything else, we still have not given up cooking our own food.

There are, after all, perfectly good alternatives to making food. There are restaurants willing to sell us almost any kind of food we want. Grocery stores today do not just sell ingredients for foodthey sell finished food as well, and a well-stocked grocery store sells everything from Chinese and Mexican foods to pizza and salad, which customers can select from an extensive salad bar. Those same grocery stores sell foods that arent quite ready to eat but that require a minimum of work to finish. Frozen pizzas and TV dinners only require minutes in the microwave or oven, and frozen pasta needs no more than a quick dip in boiling water, with an accompanying packet of sauce that only requires warming. These foods need slightly more work than something taken from a restaurant, but far less work than food made from scratch.