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This chapter investigates the inherent gender biases in culinary schools and apprenticeship through the author’s personal experiences and that of the winners of the Eugénie Brazier Fellowship. This chapter looks at these young women’s motivations for choosing to become chefs, their experiences at culinary school and during their apprenticeships in order to understand the ways in which these young cooks navigate gender norms and inequality during their culinary training. The author analyses the gendered nature of both professionally training and apprenticeship in order to reveal the structural nature of gender inequality in the culinary arts.

Who were the mères lyonnaises and what is their legacy in professional French kitchens? This chapter traces the movement of female cooks in Lyon from employment in the domestic sphere of the bourgeois households to work in restaurant kitchens at the turn of the twentieth century. At the time, male gastronomic writers began to create a legend around these women and their food. This chapter considers the power of the story of the mères lyonnaises for women today who cook professionally. Women have appropriated this legend to bring meaning to their work and to gain legitimacy in a male-dominated field.

This essay follows the iguana, an indigenous genus of herbivorous lizards, to the Caribbean dinner table, from the fifteenth century to the present. Inspired by historian Jerry Bentley’s scholarly contributions to questions of cultural encounters, the essay argues for the importance of indigenous foods in complex, often ambiguous, and consistently nuanced processes of cultural interactions between indigenous peoples and transplanted Europeans, Asians, and Africans. The story of how and why the iguana consistently appeared in the region’s foodways provides a critical perspective on the history of globalization in the Atlantic world. Mapping the variety of these culinary experiences can also reveal insights into the Caribbean’s changing ecology and the role of indigenous beliefs and African interpretations in the eco-cultural encounters that reshaped the flavors and choices of the region.

The Puerto Rican cuisine has been radically transformed during the past fifty years. Foods and activities previously accepted as part of an inevitable routine are now regarded as voluntary in nature, dictated not by necessity but by personal preference and choice. The introduction and mixing of non-Caribbean dishes into the menus of restaurants specializing in native cuisine likewise illustrates the changing face of Puerto Rican cooking. Despite all the changes in the country's cuisine, certain elements in the island's culinary history have remained constant and coherent. Certain agricultural products as well as traditional Puerto Rican cooking are still present in their cuisine. The combination of new influences and experiences in Puerto Rican cooking will result in the redefinition or reinvention of culinary maxims.

The first chapter deals with Boston's wealthy elite. They were the first to demand new kinds of public dining options. Though Americans had been scornful of European cultural models as enervating and corrupting, wealthy Bostonians increasingly looked to French modes for inspiration when it came to sophisticated dining. In the 1820s, Boston's upper class, in their role as “patrons of culture” organized the construction of the Tremont House in Boston. The main attraction of this Boston institution was its dining room and the opulent, heavily French-influenced cuisine it produced. In this chapter, the author examines the venue of the Tremont House and other luxurious public dining rooms that soon arose to compete against it for the patronage of the elites. In such venues, the Boston elite demonstrated itself to be a republican aristocracy and strove to enact social and cultural codes that, it hoped, would stabilize society. But these very codes also underscored, and in some ways facilitated, fluidity and mobility and thus undermined social and cultural hierarchies.

The fourth chapter discusses how, in the last decades of the century, as shifting mealtimes successfully postponed the main meal until after the workday was complete, a wider range of mixed-gender cafés opened that specialized in providing more relaxed evening meals to working- and middle-class Bostonians eager to take advantage of new opportunities for commercialized leisure. Many establishments, owned by the city's now even more heterogeneous population of immigrants, specialized in “ethnic” or foreign foods, fostering ethnic-class enclaves within a larger urban environment. Indeed, opening a restaurant represented an entrée to entrepreneurship and an avenue of economic mobility for immigrant proprietors. The city's growing assortment of ethnic restaurants helped to expose Bostonians of all backgrounds to new tastes and dining rituals. Throughout the nineteenth century, Boston's restaurants thus contributed to a dynamic consumer-oriented public culture and shaped a new understanding of the role of difference in American society and culture.

This introductory chapter discusses the rise of Chinese food in America's gastronomical landscape in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and sets out the book's central question: Why did Chinese food become so popular in America? It argues that the long and winding journey of Chinese food to Main Street America is not simply a culinary story but one that is intrinsically connected to larger historical developments that shaped America and the transpacific world. To comprehend the development of America's Chinese food is to understand the division of labor along the lines of culture and race within American society. The rise of Chinese food is also a story not just of marginalization and exploitation but one of the resistance and perseverance of Chinese Americans in the face of enormous hostilities.

In the epilogue of Restaurant Republic, the author traces the story of commercial dining in Boston into the early twentieth century and reviews the major points of the previous chapters. The findings will be useful to those interested in exploring relationships between food, culture, and identity in other cities, as well as in our own time.

In the second chapter, as economic opportunities in Boston continued to proliferate and diversify, men in various occupations–from factory workers to bankers–turned to eateries to provide convenience meals during the workday. It considers Boston's eating houses, which all aimed to provide straightforward noontime meals to men in a hurry. But there were many grades of eating houses, each catering to a different economic class of male diner. Class was also tied importantly to ethnic and racial difference. Distinctions in location, décor, service, and menu among various eating houses were all central to the standing of the patrons a particular establishment attracted, therefore significantly shaping a customer's dining experience. At the same time, all eating houses helped to construct new notions of urban masculinity and contributed to the creation of a more consumer-oriented society.

The third chapter presents that nineteenth-century dining venues, including eating houses, were male spaces and typically inaccessible to women. But middle- and upper-class women, through their expanding roles as the main consumers for their families and their participation in women's associations and reform activities, increasingly found themselves downtown in the middle of the day and in need of dining options of their own. In this chapter, the author turns to the growing number of dining establishments earmarked specifically for respectable, affluent women. These ladies’ dining venues strove to uphold mainstream gender ideals and distinguish themselves as appropriate for female use through their location, décor, and menu, all gendered as feminine. Nevertheless, by providing semipublic spaces for women to patronize, ladies’ eateries helped to draw women into the public sphere, thus posing a fundamental challenge to gender norms. The public and commercial dining activities of respectable women also became a vehicle for the discussion of anxieties associated with the rise of consumer pleasures.