Celebrity chefs need help. We treat them with respect when what they really need is our pity, along with a one-way ticket to an institution. They think about food more than teenage anorexics but are they offered support, counseling or psychiatry? No, they’re rewarded with write-ups in Sunday supplements and given their own TV programmes where they race around with knives shouting about the freshness of the parsley.
For women only: Published in 1963, the recipes were culled from the women's page.
Things were very different when Lisbeth Phillips compiled her Recipes From The Guardian in 1963. The Guardian must have been very different too. The introduction reveals that the recipes were gathered from the women’s page of the newspaper, surely just months before those very pages became full of advice on how to go about not cooking. Indeed, it’s possible the wimmin’s movement started right here. The preface pays tribute to ‘…all the clever cook-housewives of this country who are the power behind their husband’s social and business success. As a rough calculation I estimate that during my married life I have cooked about 20,000 meals for family and friends.’ Did she pause, staring at those words, mouthing ‘twenty thousand’ over and over again, bitter tears of despair running down her cheeks? I can find no record of her as an architect of the struggle but it’s nice to think that this book might have kick-started sexual equality.
Putting cookery on the women’s page would be unimaginable today. In the premiership of TV talent it’s men who head the table, although plucky little Nigella always puts on a brave front. It’s the other way round in real life, where the nation’s kitchens are filled with women who have yet to throw off the shackles of the stove and are far too busy to pursue a career in television. It’s only TV fantasy-land that is full of crashing bores crashing pans together and turning food into entertainment. When this month’s books were issued food was sustenance and television chefs were teachers who showed the nation how to boil black and white carrots, roast black and white chickens and make grey soup with the leftovers. Now their job is to thrill, to juggle endlessly with foodstuffs to bring our jaded palettes something tasty.
The Man In The Kitchen, seen here frankly molesting The Woman In The Kitchen.
In fact finding a new angle for re-heated fare has always helped shift units and Malcolm LaPrade came up with a winning title for his 1952 The Man In The Kitchen. Certainly, the chap on the front cover seems to be getting to grips with the essentials but this illustration is actually a clue to the book’s real content. The subtitle is How to teach that woman to cook, where the word ‘that’ tells you all you need to know. It is, in fact, an endless tirade of red-blooded misogyny.
Which brings us to Cooking For Brides, from 1965. The date and the location – Australia – can be taken as mitigating circumstances but even so the title was not, perhaps, guaranteed to chime well with the hopes and aspirations of the rising generation. Those women doubtful of the benefits of wedlock would find little reassurance from the blurb, which states that ‘your future at the stove can be happy and rewarding.’ Not as happy and rewarding as hanging out with a load of surfers and experimenting with drugs, of course, but hindsight is a wonderful thing. Once again it’s an irony-free book of recipes with very little in the way of advice for women poised at the threshold of subjugation, boredom and frustration. The front cover illustration says it all.
The perfect wedding gift for any young bride. Trust me.
It’s a pity this book is a one-off. The niche is ripe for development and in these hip new post-modernist times an enterprising publisher could do well with similar titles. Sex Tips for Brides would be a winner, and why stop at the altar? A lot of men I know would be very happy indeed to shell out for books like Ironing for Wives, not to mention Tidying Up After Themselves For Wives and its companion volume At Least Putting The Butter Back In The Bloody Fridge For Once For Wives.
Cookbooks are popular with collectors and all those featured this month are guaranteed to raise a smile as well as throw light on attitudes to food a generation ago. In fact it’s worth remembering that it would be impossible to publish any of these titles today. They show us that times have changed economically as well as socially. Today’s cookbooks assume wealth beyond the dreams of the original readers of these books, which are chiefly concerned with making the most of a limited list of ingredients. What will cookbooks look like in the 2050s?
You can read more about these and many other wonderful old books in Book and Magazine Collector.