Can She Bake a Cherry Pie?: American Women and the Kitchen in the Twentieth Century

By Mary D. McFeely

Book Overview

In the rural America of the past, a woman's reputation was sometimes made by her cherry pie-or her chocolate layer cake, or her biscuits. As America modernized and as women left the home, entered the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 155849250X
• ISBN13: 9781558492509
• Release Date: January 2000
• Publisher: Univ of Massachusetts Pr
• Length: 194 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.8" x 1.0" x 6.5"

Customer Reviews

History meets cooking meets gossip

What a great book! Mcfeely's writing is so effortless and chatty you may not realize how much there is too learn.She takes you, historically speaking, from the time when women HAD to bake the family bread (and had to remember the correct, locally produced flour that would actually work) to where we are blase about our optional and hands-off bread machines.She gives mini-bios on people important in cooking history, and also her opinions on them--she cheerfully skewers Irma Rombauer (Joy of Cooking) for being opinionated yet admires Rombauer's personality just the same. She is strangely taciturn on Martha Stewart--arguably the best known cook today. A criticism here and there on how Martha's _techniques_ are difficult, but nothing like her pleasant gossip on Julia Child and on Rombauer. Is Mcfeely, too, afraid of Martha's wrath?This is a history book and a social criticism that is also a lot of fun to read.