The culinary coding of gender construction : simplicity rhetoric in cookbooks from the Little Blue Book Series

Abstract

This article examines the use of rhetoric that emphasises simplicity with reference to home food preparation while also considering different possible motivations behind this use in order to bring the movement and juxtaposition of these categories to light. The Little Blue Book Series focused on improving peoples’ lives with easy-to-follow directions. Their mission enabled the creation of an abundance of simplicity rhetoric used in cooking instruction that contributed to the construction of gender for many middle-class, white, American women. Though the Haldeman-Julius Publishing Company printed these types of booklets for over sixty years, I focus on the years of its greatest popularity, from about 1925 to 1940. The three books covered here were chosen because of their specific use of language within their cooking instruction. Specifically, I look at Gaylord Du Bois’s Simple Recipes for Home Cooking (No. 997, 1927), Albert Hohl’s The Simplified Cook-Book: Hints on Cookery (No. 1756, 1938), and Gloria Goddard’s The Perfect Pocket Cookbook (No. 1360, 1929). I also use other cookbooks of the era to further delimit the historical context as well as contemporary scholarship on cooking to assist in my analysis. I situate my study at the intersection of gender, food, and rhetoric studies.