1974
Author: Dawn Parker
Written by my grandmother as a gift for her sister’s wedding, this cookbook covers a complete range of foods for feeding the family and entertaining guests. Breakfast, desserts, vegetables… even cheap homemade Kahlua and mixed drinks are included for the poor newlywed. The book was reprinted via photo copier by my great grandfather’s secretary and distributed to my grandmother’s friends and family.
The recipes are mostly drawn from friends, family, and other contemporary cookbooks. However a good few were allegedly learned by my grandmother after she tasted something good at a restaurant and “barged into” the kitchen to ask the chef for the recipe. The recipes are simple, normally containing around 5 ingredients. They are paradigmatic of 20th century American home cooking.
This cookbook is significant because it represents multiple factors of the typical upper class, newlywed white woman’s knowledge of cookery in the 20th century, with some of the more eccentric elements being entirely a product of my grandmother. My grandmother was never taught to cook growing up, due to her mother claiming sole occupation of the kitchen, so when my grandmother got married she taught herself everything. Thus this cookbook represents the priorities and interests of the newlywed wife in the 70s. Additionally, my grandmother claims she was incredibly poor after leaving college, which is why she made a cookbook instead of buying a gift for her sister. And this is also why many of the recipes emphasize substitutions for meat and avoiding needless expenditure. However, my grandmother was given a lot of money by her family. Therefore this cookbook also represents the self conscious, 60s informed embarrassment over wealth that some people harbored, with the cookbook being an extension of my grandmother’s broader need to project a humbler image of herself to others (despite wild and reckless expenditure outside of the kitchen.)
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