Stand facing the stove : the story of the women who gave America the Joy of cooking / Anne Mendelson.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Mendelson, Anne.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Rombauer, Irma S., 1877-1962.

Rombauer, Irma S.

Becker, Marion Rombauer.

Rombauer, Irma S., 1877-1962. Joy of cooking.

Cooks--United States--Biography.

Cooks.

Cooking, American.

History.

United States.

Cooking, American--History--20th century.

Genre:

Biographies.

History.

Cookbooks.

Physical Description:

xviii, 474 pages ; 22 cm

Edition:

First Scribner trade paperback edition.

Other Title:

Subtitle on cover: Lives of Irma S. Rombauer and Marion Rombauer Becker

Place of Publication:

New York : Scribner, [2003]

Summary:

In this richly detailed biographical portrait, Anne Mendelson not only brings to life the vividly differing personalities of two remarkable women but traces their culinary roots and the course of American cooking from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1970s. Irma Rombauer, a child of genteel, cultured German circles in old St. Louis, was a woman of grand presence and rare charm who came to cookbook writing as a complete amateur after her husband's sudden death in 1930. Soon she was bending all her considerable energies to turn her first little effort, published at her own expense in 1931, into a general cookbook (distinguished by an ingenious new recipe format) that would be a personable, free-spirited alternative to the weighty cooking manuals of the day. Commercial publication in 1936 and national success in 1943 followed, but only at the cost of bitter enmity with Irma's publisher, the Bobbs-Merrill Company. The other half of a loving but difficult relationship, Irma's daughter, Marion Rombauer Becker, joined the effort as coauthor in 1951. A serious-minded aesthete and environmentalist who would rather have been known as a gardening than a cooking authority, she began a process of redefinition that at last would make The Joy of Cooking the most important American culinary reference tool of the twentieth century. Unfortunately, she also inherited the burden of the long-standing author-publisher strife, partly healed only after a spectacular showdown that climaxed in 1962, literally at the moment of her mother's death. To recount the story of the Rombauers' personal and professional lives, Mendelson draws on a mass of family papers and author-publisher correspondence. At the sametime, she uses an imaginative range of culinary evidence to place The Joy of Cooking and its sister cookbooks solidly within the context of the dizzying changes in household technology and American popular culture that took place over a period of more than a hundred years.

Contents:

1 The Golden Age of St. Louis 9

2 Beginnings and Endings 34

3 The Rombauers After the War 65

4 The Birth of Joy 85

5 Chronicles of Cookery 103

6 Rombauer and Bobbs-Merrill: The Making of an Enmity 147

7 Family Regroupings 183

8 War Maneuvers 202

10 Indian Summer Interrupted 284

11 The Last Battle 299

12 Little Acorn and Wild Wealth 347

13 Marion's Last Years 371.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 453-458) and index.

ISBN:

0743229398

9780743229395

0805029044

9780805029048

OCLC:

52548051