User talk:Anthro SR/Can She Bake a Cherry Pie

Mary Drake McFeely’s Can She Bake a Cherry Pie? recounts the history of American women and their kitchens in the 20th century. The scope of her book is narrowed to white, middle-class Americans. The aim of the book is to help white women recognize the world, as described by McFeely, that they have inhabited in the past century and do inhabit now. In the introduction, McFeely describes a goal of the book as helping white women to realize they too have a distinct culture that defines them just as much as other ethnic groups are presumed to be defined by their cultures (4). Due to the clear and simple reading of the text, and because there is no theoretical perspective offered by McFeely, the book can be successfully geared toward a general audience.

Author's Disciplinary Background and Methodology of Book

McFeely’s background includes holding the positions of head of the reference department and assistant librarian at Smith College. In addition, she has been a resident scholar at the Bellagio Study and Conference Center in Italy, a visiting scholar at the Schlesinger Library and Radcliffe College. She has also authored Lady Inspectors: The Campaign for a Better Workplace, 1893-1921. On the topic of McFeely’s methodology, it is clear that she uses era-specific cookbooks to frame and describe the lives of the women living during those specific times. Other than that, she does not explain any other type of research she conducted nor does she cite other academic works to support the information in her book.

Content Summary and Major Conclusions

McFeely sets the beginning of her book in the early 20th century. She describes the way in which women of that era worked tirelessly to make everything from scratch, toiled through each summer in order to can and preserve the harvest of fruits and vegetables, and lived an overall self-sufficient American farm life. McFeely even includes some turn-of-the-century recipes, such as sugar cured pork and marble cake (12).

She then describes the lives of early feminists, such as Melusina Fay Pierce, who worked to change the way domestic work was accomplished. Pierce schemed a way to get household chores out of the house. She (unsuccessfully) created a cooperative association organization in which members would prepare meals, complete daily chores, and do other housework for each other in exchange for cash. The female members’ husbands did not allow for the proliferation of this organization, as it required them to pay for services they had thus far been entitled to for free (24).

In the next chapter, McFeely discusses developing science that allowed for new technologies to be available to women in the 1920s. New appliances and gadgets helped to make a woman’s work in the kitchen easier. For example, small refrigerators eliminated the time-consuming task of curing meat. New stoves came equipped with three settings—high, medium, and low—so that women no longer had to guess the level at which they were cooking. McFeely concludes in this chapter that the new science involved in the kitchen granted “seriousness to what women were doing in the kitchen[, and c]ooking no longer depended on instinct (a female characteristic) and folklore (the province of women),” (42).

McFeely then moves on to describe the frugal times of the Depression era. She explains that during this time it was the women’s job to provide emotional strength and support that would help her family get through the hardships of lost jobs and the insecurities of low wages. She references Depression-era cookbooks that offered recipes on how to make meat last for more than one meal or give the illusion of fulfillment to a meal of bread and rice (65).

The next chapter describes both the era of war and women’s roles in the kitchen as a patriotic duty. Women became “captain of the kitchen” during the war (69). McFeely describes the frugality and ingenuity of women of that era, which allowed them to face housekeeping and cooking challenges due to the scarcity of ingredients and equipment, and the rationing of staple cooking items such as meat, butter, and sugar. Once the war was over though, women’s status returned from captain to housewife (87). The 1950s were a decade of plenty in terms of ingredients and food staples. It was also the time canned foods had in the limelight. Everything from soups to macaroni and cheese to tuna came from a box or a can. Cookbooks of the era included recipes that called for opening two or three cans or boxes and creating fulfilling casseroles, not just for the family but also for company. Not only was this the heyday for ready-made food manufacturers, this was also the era for domestic life in suburbia, when women dropped out of college in masses in order to marry and start families (94).

McFeely begins the next chapter of her book describing that the xenophobia during the time of the Cold War had reached even the cookbooks of the time. At first, women were wary of “exotic” ingredients such as garlic and herbs and served dishes that included these suspect ingredients with caution. However, with some time Italian, Hungarian, Australian, Irish, and Polish dishes were introduced to the masses through recipes in women’s magazines and other cookbooks. This was also the time of Julia Child and her personable cooking show on television (123).

The next chapter describes the health food movement that swept the country during the 1970s. This brought new foods into the kitchen. Tofu, miso, hummus, pita bread, and brown rice all contributed to a healthy diet of whole foods. Vegetarianism also became popular during this time. In this chapter, McFeely introduces Frances Moore Lappe; an activist who believed the U.S. was wasting food resources that could be used by the world’s hungry. Lappe worked to change the diet of Americans. She was well received and people adapted to an alternative diet of beans, nuts, and grains; a diet that deterred from one that was primarily meat-based (138). In the last chapter before the conclusion, McFeely talks of the affluence of the 1980s, which included glamorous cookbooks, some with international themes for women. McFeely also discusses kitchen appliances (some at much length) of the time such as food processors, mixers, juicers, pasta makers, rice cookers, ice cream machines, and bread machines that were created to make cooking more efficient and enjoyable for women (158). McFeely concludes with the idea that women have “freed themselves from the sole responsibility for family food,” (168). She ends the book with the notions that that cooking can be an act of renewal instead of depletion, it can be expressive of one’s personality instead of suppression of identity, and that it can be compared to creative work (169).

Strengths and Weaknesses

One of McFeely’s strengths in the book includes her idea that cooking and the women who did it hold a crucial role in American history. From the farm women of the early 1900s, who woke up at four or five am in order to keep house and provide three meals for their families to the 1940s “captains of the kitchen” whose responsibilities included preparing meals that kept the morale of the family high in the difficulties of war, McFeely is able to maintain this idea throughout the book.

On the other hand, one of McFeely’s weaknesses is that she implements very few resources to provide evidence supporting her ideas in the book. She does use era-specific cookbooks as references to describe women’s lives during those times. However, she limits these to a couple of cookbooks, which may not be conclusive of those specific time periods.

Furthermore, there is no real, sufficient evidence offered for the claims she makes. For example, in her conclusion, McFeely says, “Many women have, in cooperation with their families, freed themselves from the sole responsibility for family food,” (168). She does not provide any citation for this statement, nor does she explain where she was able to find statistics or surveys that support this claim.

Who Should Read This Book and Why

Since the book is written clearly and is an easy read, I would recommend it to a general audience. It offers rudimentary information on the history of American cooking. However, I do not think scholars in the field of gender studies and food studies, who are already familiar with this basic information, would benefit much from this reading other than for pleasure.

The source for this book review was "Can She Bake a Cherry Pie?" Mary Drake McFeely. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000 194 pp.

This book review of "Can She Bake a Cherry Pie?" was written for the fall 2008 Food and Culture (E621) class at Indiana University. Dr. Richard Wilk of the Anthropology Department led the course.