It took me a long time to get into this book. I was about half way through before the author stopped getting on my nerves so badly. I had been so excited when I impulse-bought it. I'm on this homemaking kick and the idea of looking historically at how women have been cooking meals since way back when sounded wonderful! I love old cookbooks. I love doing things like going to colonial re-enactment parks and examining everything in the kitchen. But this book proved to be rather disappointing. The problem is the author's perspective struck me as superficial and her tone as preachy. And instead of giving in depth history in an engaging but objective way (like other popular historians) she kept injecting her own reactions and feelings. I really didn't care for her writing style. It struck me as being a sort of popular magazine kind of writing that doesn't do serious history well. This book won the James Beard Foundation Award (whatever that is; I recognize Beard's name as a big one in the cooking world). What kept me going is my interest in the topic Schenone was covering. And while I learned some interesting new bits of information, most of it was a survey of things I already knew. It was nice to have all the info packaged together in chronological order, though.
The book began all right. In the Preface, Schenone talks about her family heritage and what inspired her to want to write the book. All the personal stuff seemed appropriate there. The first chapter however, instead of being solid history, is Schenone's imagined understanding of 'All Woman', that is actually what the author calls the prehistoric women ancestors of North America. Everything is wildly romanticized in such a policitally correct way, it is nauseating. (In fact, I checked the reviews of this book on Amazon and while a lot of people gave it good reviews, some really panned it. And one person did mention how nausating All Woman was! Bingo! Exactly my reaction!) Then we move on to Native Americans and the paradise the women lived in, apparently, before the coming of the evil Europeans. I know that many, many terrible things were done to the Native Americans and that the appearance of the European settlers tolled the death knell for their culture in many terrible and profound ways, but Schenone's priggish lecturing on this history, instead of letting the history speak for itself, grated on my nerves to the point that I had to keep putting the book down. Instead of feeling sympathetic, I just felt annoyed. Here's the problem, I think. Schenone, instead of writing history that lets the reader process, evaluate and empathize, tends to emote her own judgemental opinions. In one line that inadvertantly made me laugh out loud (very inappropriately so!) she says, when talking about women raising funds for charity through church cookbooks, "I sadly report that the ladies of the Presbyterian Church of Houston did not include any recipes from the Mexicans or Indians who had lived there long before them." This is not a historian who tries to understand the mindset of those she studies. She looks back into history clucking her tongue and shaking her head over how blind and ignorant they were in the past. Unless this clucking wouldn't be politically correct. Then she practically gets all rhapsodic on you!
Perhaps if she was a better writer and historian, she could get away with interjecting her own opinion, but she is neither, and so she takes something that could be a serious study and laces it with her own personal reactions and p.c. self-righteousness. What's ironic is that Schenone decries this very sort of thing in the writing of Victorian cookbook authors who advised woman on how to run their households and maintain their family's health. Excuse me. You might have heard my loud derisive snort when I read Schenone's line about how Catharine Beecher was a prudish writer who annoyed Schenone. All I could think was: "Well, you're really bugging me, lady!" Anyway, am I reading Schenone's personal diary here or am I reading a history of women cooking in America?
Another thing I found annoying was the lack of footnotes. Schenone does have a bibligraphy for each chapter at the end of the book, but she doesn't tie assertions she makes to any authority. For example, at one point she states that 'rice was worshipped' in the Carolinas when rice plantations were at their peak. I doubt very much that rice was worshipped like the Native Americans might have worshipped corn or something. She means that production of rice was vital to the economy of that place and era. She uses that gushy word 'worship' though. She could have cited statements made by the plantation owners about how important rice was, maybe waxing poetic about its glory. That would have felt a bit more scholarly, to my mind. But there's nary a footnote anywhere to support the many statements of that sort Schenone is so prone to making.
About halfway through the book, I finally could ignore the author's tone and just read for the history content. Maybe her writing got better at that point. But again, I felt rather disappointed because there wasn't a whole lot of new material to me. I had not been aware of the food riots of 1917, but everything else was rather a rehash. In fact the last part of the book began to cover the same territory as Radical Homemaker but didn't go nearly as in depth or come to any sort of conclusion.
The thing that saves this book is that it is loaded with lots of drawings, paintings, posters, cookbook covers, advertisements, and photos of women at work preparing food. She also includes excerpts from letters, articles and books that reflect on women and their roles as cooks. These are fascinating. Schonere includes many recipes from different traditions and old cookbooks. These also are wonderful. The book is very visually enticing with big illustrations and recipes dominating the pages.
To me, this book is the kind that you might pick up and glance through for about 20 minutes while browsing at Barnes and Noble. That's all it is worth. Don't bother to buy it, though.
For more book reviews go to Read 52 Books in 52 Weeks.
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