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While cooking at home is no longer an odious chore, many critics lament what they see as the demise of cooking from scratch. These critics promise that a return to the kitchen will make Americans healthier and happier. By claiming that home cooking is in a state of decline from an idealized past and proposing that the only solution to the stress of modern life is a return to those past kitchen practices, these critics adhere to a traditional rhetorical pattern known as a “Jeremiad.” However, the weakness of the American home cooking jeremiad is that it only serves to increase anxiety as Americans fail to capture a past golden age that never really existed.

The rhetoric of commercial cookbooks mirrors the “death of home cooking narrative” by promising to provide the fulfilment that Americans are seeking. Creating an idealized picture of cooking at home, commercial cookbooks sell “comfort cooking” in which the kitchen becomes an oasis that allows the reader to shut out all of the stress of modern life and reconnect with family, community, and food. The first step in creating a healthy meal, comfortable home, and happy family is, of course, buy the cookbook.

The Depression caused a cutthroat price war that turned the baking powder industry on its head. Royal lost and never recovered, while Clabber Girl, through aggressive marketing under its new leader, Tony Hulman, became the industry frontrunner. New Deal policies changed management-labor relations and attempted to regulate businesses in unprecedented ways. Housewives rejoiced in new baking powder products like Bisquick and Jiffy but continued to struggle with baking powder chaos in cookbooks, especially the new Joy of Cooking and racist cookbooks spawned by Gone with the Wind. World War II continued the trend toward purchasing baked goods out of the home.

This chapter examines the work of producing food and preparing meals in Moonshadow Pond. The gendered and generational configurations of agricultural labor changed profoundly from the Old Society through the collective era to the present. With the exodus of youth to non-agricultural employment, the future of agriculture in Moonshadow Pond is unclear. In addition to the production of food through rice cultivation and vegetable gardening, meal preparation is integral to the labor surrounding food in Moonshadow Pond. Thus, both agriculture and cooking are at the center of domestic food production and preparation. These need to be differentiated from production for the market — raising pigs, tending fish ponds, or growing citrus and other fruit trees, all of which are oriented toward earning cash income. Finally, just as cultivating rice (gengtian), is central to peasant identity, so too, cooking rice is at the center of family identity.

History looms large in much recent writing about food, with a particular nostalgia for home cooking. But much of this wistfulness for traditional food carefully prepared at home replicates long-standing efforts to rein in women, argues Tracey Deutsch. Because women still do much of the cooking in American homes, any history of home cooking has to acknowledge the inequalities of work in the home. Deutsch encourages us to look at kitchens and home cooking through the lens of women’s history to see them as places of joy and power, authority and possibility, tradition and resistance.

Americans have been known to idealize home cooked meals eaten with the family, but the general trend in our history has been to move away from these things. Ken Albala, one of America’s leading food historians, makes an impassioned plea for the importance of cooking from scratch, using fresh ingredients, and sharing the food with others, as one of the most meaningful and humane acts we can do. He is cognizant of the fact that cooking is not always easy, nor has it always been voluntary, but in his mind that should not prejudice against the social importance of spending time preparing food, which is a creative, emotionally fulfilling, and loving act.

Griddle- and pan-fried across generations in the crucible of the everyday cuisine of the Eastern Shore of Virginia, the clam fritter's origins emerge from a coming together of African and European cooking traditions. When it comes to the simplicity and perfection of clam fritters, everybody has an opinion. A lot of mischief lurks in simple things. This chapter explores the complex histories of ordinary things through storytelling, natural history, documentary history, and Eastern Shore of Virginia cuisine and terroir.

In One Crazy Summer and its sequels P.S. Be Eleven, and Gone Crazy in Alabama, Rita Williams-Garcia tracks the movement of African-American diasporas, generationally and geographically, through changes in food preparation and consumption. This chapter examines the third novel in the series first, showing how Delphine, the protagonist, becomes aware that her family’s identity is grounded in the deep roots of southern country foodways, dependent on personally raised or locally produced foods (especially milk and eggs) that are usually slow-cooked. The middle novel demonstrates the popularity of post-war convenience foods, cooked quickly and simply to match the faster tempo of urban life common to the generation that had made the Great Migration. The first novel, set in urban Oakland in the revolutionary year of 1968, shows the revolutionary power of food, most overtly through the Black Panthers’ breakfast program, which sought to better life for urban families by improving poor nutrition as well as to empower them politically. The novel also presents the deconstruction of the traditional kitchen: Cecile, the mother of Delphine and her sisters, rejects and revises the “yoke” of women’s service to men and family by making her kitchen into an art studio, redefining it as a new space that is both maternal and professional.