Joy Again
Categories: Cookbooks
The Joy of Cooking has gone through several sea changes. First, the indomitable Irma Rombeck pulled together all the recipes of friends, neighbors and church groups in St. Louis to publish a little book to see her through financial hardship after the death of her husband. This was the first Joy, filled with Irma's chatty comments on entertaining, cooking and life in general and featuring her novel way of listing ingredients as they were used.
The Joy of Cooking was a different kind of cookbook, designed for Depression-era, middle-class women like Irma who could no longer afford a cook and suddenly had to learn their way around a stove. Later it became a standard gift for new brides facing their first dinner parties. Initially, it did not sell well, but by the end of the 30’s, sales picked up and it has been in print ever since.
The latest 2006 edition marked the 75th anniversary of the book and Rombauer’s grandson, Ethan Becker, his wife, and local chef Maggie Green returned to the traditional, tried and true recipes of earlier editions. The 1997 edition was written by a team of chef contributors and dropped many of the older, less trendy recipes to the scorn of diehard fans of the earlier editions.
Irma Rombauer was herself not much of a cook but she could spot a winning recipe and reduce it to the printed page with confidence and a familiar, breezy style. To really get a feel for her way with recipes, take a look at her second, and largely unknown, book, Streamlined Cooking. The subtitle says it all: “New and Delightful Recipes for Canned, Packaged and Frosted (i.e. frozen) Foods and Rapid Recipes for Fresh Foods”.
This 1939 gem features easy mixing soups like Mongole Soup, equal parts canned condensed tomato and pea soups, mixed with milk and enriched with a slug of sherry. Modern cooks would gag at some of Irma’s recipes, but her confident, reassuring tone keeps you turning the pages for an amusing view of early convenience cooking.
For more information about the Rombauer-Becker clan, Stand Facing the Stove: the Story of the Women who Gave America the Joy of Cooking by Anne Mendelson is an extensive biography of Irma and her daughter, Marion Becker. Marion wrote much of the later editions of The Joy of Cooking while residing in eastern Cincinnati and her son and literary heir, Ethan, grew up here but recently relocated. Cincinnati connections are long established, as in the early editions of The Joy of Cooking, where in the foreword, Irma charmingly gives a nod to a Cincinnati maid who stole her mistress’s copy of The Joy of Cooking. Happily, today one can just borrow it from the library.
