Women Didn’t Run the Kitchen in Those Days

by Brianna Wallen

Rosa Lewis was a notable exception in culinary history. At a time when women were barred from celebrated culinary professions, Rosa Lewis was cooking for the King of England, lords and ladies, Franklin Roosevelt, Waldorf Astor, and many, many more. Lewis did not fully fit the mold for a proper Victorian lady. Before a big dinner at a "very smart house," Lewis, who often hid her identity from the house's servants and pretended to be an assistant cook to keep the servants from getting jealous, which according to her was a common occurrence, was asked by a maid if Mrs. Lewis still drank. To which Lewis, under the guise of anonymity, replied, "Yes'm, just a little.” “Does she still use bad language?” the maid inquired further. "Oh, yes, quite a lot." The maid's reactions were not recorded, but exasperation seemed likely. Lewis continued, "But I'll stick to her, for you can go anywhere in the world from her.” This was true for Lewis, who privately cooked for powerful men and owned her own hotel. But it was not true for the majority of other women pursuing the culinary arts in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Many tried to break barriers by writing cookbooks or teaching at cooking schools. But few were able to gain the respect and prestige that Rosa Lewis did. Perhaps Lewis’s “masculine” behavior was purposeful in order to gain respect, or maybe the drinking and cursing was her genuine nature. Regardless, through her cooking she "came under the notice of someone that really mattered” and found success.¹

The focus of this paper is on women in professional culinary careers, their education, and how they made a lasting impact on culinary history. I begin this paper by giving an overview of the career options in the culinary arts for women in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Great Britain and America. Next, I discuss the impediments that prevented women chefs from advancement. I end with the notable accomplishments of early professional female chefs, including the first woman to win Michelin stars. This paper combines all of these elements of the early women in culinary history and looks at the results they were able to achieve together. In this paper, I argue that the accomplishments of female private chefs, cookbook authors, cooking school founders and teachers, and even the reformers of the domestic science movement, helped women enter the culinary profession by earning credibility through their tangible and influential success.

A considerable amount of scholarship has been done on the domestic science movement that began in nineteenth-century America. The domestic science movement connected moral reform and national advancement directly to the American home and specifically the food being prepared. The food historian, Laura Shapiro, saw the domestic science reforms as having “devastating” and long-lasting effects on American cooking. Shapiro also argued that the domestic scientists themselves “really believed in man, and what they wanted for women was progress in his name.”² While other historians such as Jessica Derleth saw the women of the time as using cooking and domesticity “as powerful tools against gendered and political restrictions.”³ From this movement stemmed an increase in the need for training in the domestic sciences. Many cooking, or cookery, schools popped up all over Great Britain and America. Most of the graduates of these schools went on to either teach themselves, become domestic servants, or improve their own home management.⁴ The domestic science movement and its resulting cookbooks focused only on the nutrition and practicality of food. In Coming Out of the Kitchen: Women beyond the Home, Una A. Robertson wrote that women at this time felt it necessary for cooking “things useful, substantial, and splendid, and calculated for the preservation of health, and upon the measures of frugality.”⁵ Historians have differing opinions on the efficacy of the domestic science movement and its subsequent ideology on the increase in women joining the workforce.

The domestic science movement took the newly emerging scientific revelations and applied them to the home, with women at the helm. The women reformers were convinced that they “could guide the nation's homes out of their chaos and into the scientific era.” The chaos of poverty, disease, alcoholism, and unemployment could be corrected by women modernizing the home with new time-saving appliances, feeding their families the most nutritious yet practical foods, and incorporating a scientific approach to every aspect of their housekeeping.⁶ Food and how it was cooked became a very important topic. One domestic science reformer wrote, “The proper preparation of food is a vital problem, and the relation of nutriment to personal morality no longer to be ignored… The ministry of diet in the work of character-building is therefore one of the most important studies a woman can undertake.”⁷ So it fell upon the women’s shoulders to remedy the moral failures of their household as they were the ones keeping the home. One way the reformers responded to this was by developing a style of cooking called scientific cookery. It focused on “food value, systematic measurements, kitchen procedures, and the process of digestions.”⁸ The one thing that scientific cookery did not focus on was taste. It was seen as unimportant. In fact, one reformer wrote that taste was only useful because it caused a “greater outpouring of the needed digestive juices, thus furnishing the means for more rapid and complete digestion.”⁹ Taste was even seen as dangerous because it led people to indulge too much. Women who wanted to appear high-class were encouraged to keep their diet as minimal as possible to avoid the risk of appearing “gross and unfeminine.”¹⁰ The pragmatic and austere methods of scientific cookery greatly influenced American cooking schools for women.

The first American cooking school to open for women was the New York Cooking School. In 1876, Juliet Corson was asked by her women’s reform organization to give cooking lessons in her home to the local women of the working class. Though Corson herself had no professional training in cookery, these lessons quickly developed into a school teaching all levels of cooking. Even after the school opened its doors to the upper classes, “economical cookery for the poor remained her culinary specialty, and she was a frequent guest instructor at missions, orphanages, and industrial training schools.”¹¹ Despite Corson’s commitment to teaching the poor and the school’s original purpose to assist the working class, the cooking classes were firmly segregated by economic and social status. The New York Cooking School

offered four courses: First Artisan Course (‘for the instruction of the young daughters of working people’), the Second Artisan Course (‘for the grown daughters and wives of workingmen’), the Plain Cooks’ Course (‘for young housewives beginning married life in comfortable or moderate circumstances’), and the Ladies’ Course in Middle Class and Artistic Cookery… when preparing fish, for example, the First Artisans made boiled haddock with parsley sauce; the Second Artisans fixed boiled ray with piquante sauce; the Plain Cooks made boiled cod with hollandaise sauce; and the Ladies worked on halibut filets à la Maréchale.¹²

The New York Cooking School set a precedent for the other American cooking schools regarding demographic focus, class structure, and limiting access to high-end dishes.

One of the most famous cooking schools in America was the Boston Cooking School. The school was founded by the Woman’s Education Association in 1879 and took an “intellectual approach” to cooking. Their motto was “Better ways, lighter burdens, more wholesome results.” Like the school in New York, Boston Cooking School’s original goal was to train poor women and cooks for domestic service at a reduced rate. Unfortunately, this business model was not profitable enough and the school had to shift its focus to the middle-class housewives who were clamoring to learn the latest in scientific cookery. At this school, the classes were not divided by socioeconomic status but between “Plain Cooking, Richer Cooking, and Fancy Cooking.”¹³ Boston Cooking School also produced some of the most famous culinary professionals of the time.

One of those professionals, Mary J. Lincoln, began her career as a teacher at Boston Cooking School. Lincoln became a surprise triumph at the school. Having no professional exposure to cooking or teaching, Lincoln was initially the school’s second choice, with the very popular teacher, Maria Parloa, being the first. Parloa’s fees were too high for the struggling school to afford though. So Lincoln, after a two-week crash course with Parloa as well as other lessons, began teaching at Boston Cooking School.¹⁴ Later in an article of the magazine, New England Kitchen Magazine, for which Lincoln was the editor, she claimed to have received far less training. She wrote that after teaching a few classes the “ignorance shown by some of [her] pupils increased [her] confidence in [her] own knowledge.”¹⁵ In the magazine, Lincoln was trying to appear self-taught so that her success was seen as only a product of her own hard work and natural ability. Under her five-year tutelage, the Boston Cooking School still dealt with a sizable amount of debt but nevertheless doubled the student population. Lincoln’s crowning achievement was writing Mrs. Lincoln’s Boston Cook Book, the school’s textbook for ten years.¹⁶ She attributed its success in and outside of the school as “the result of practical work.”¹⁷ Mary J. Lincoln’s approach was emblematic of cooking in the domestic science era.

Fannie Farmer was another well-known teacher to emerge from the Boston Cooking School. As a child, she contracted what doctors now believe to be polio and never graduated high school. At 31, Farmer enrolled in Boston Cooking School, which did not require a high school diploma, and in only a few short years was promoted to principal. The school thrived under her eleven years of leadership. Her success stemmed from her approach to cooking. Farmer deviated from Lincoln, the other scientific cooks, and their “hygienic living.” She cared about taste and “the possibility for enjoyment” for the cook and the diner.¹⁸ Farmer eventually grew bored of teaching basic cooking skills and scientific cookery approved dishes, so she opened her own school, Miss Farmer’s School of Cookery, for those who wanted to cook at a higher and tastier level. The perfect example of her love of rich foods was the menu for the final dinner party that she threw before her unexpected death. It began with a salad made with avocado, truffles, orange pieces, and a dressing of orange juice, condensed milk, and whipped cream, with a side of fried pimentos stuffed with cheese. For the main course, bacon-wrapped veal and a very interesting potato side (potatoes mashed with banana, stuffed in the banana skin, topped with Parmesan cheese, then baked) were served. To end the dinner, a dessert of pineapple sherbet with custard and candied fruit was provided.¹⁹ Her style of cooking appealed to the “socially ambitious” middle class who now had access to a genteel style of cooking. At her death, Fannie Farmer was worth $200,000 (around five million dollars today) and was deemed “the most successful by far of the cooking-school cooks.”²⁰

Great Britain was also experiencing a rise in cooking schools for women. Although the domestic science movement and scientific cookery were solely an American phenomenon, the closely associated temperance movement was very popular in Great Britain. Therefore there are many similarities between the two countries’ cooking schools. An article regarding cooking schools from the British ladies’ magazine, The Lady’s Realm, complained, “A large percentage of British cooks leave quantities to luck, and ‘the oven’ bears the brunt of the failures. But we are waking up to the fact that cooking is an elaborate art, needing much time, attention, and training. We are beginning to understand that cooking must be done with brains.”²¹ The desire for a more professional, disciplined, and precise practice of cooking was apparent in both countries.

In London, the National Training School of Cookery was established in 1873. Similar to the American schools, The National’s “objective was to pioneer a national effort for the recognition and teaching of cookery and hygiene as being vital to the interests and well-being of the country.”²² They wanted to focus on working with children “rather than ‘the present generation.’”²³ Girls aged eleven to fourteen would spend forty hours of their schoolyear taking cookery classes, where they would learn “to be clever little housewives and competent cooks of a working man's dietary.”²⁴ The girls from working-class families learned to make “’poor man's venison,’ shepherd's pie, and other cottage dainties;” while the “ladies of high degree” were taught how to make “ice puddings, fold serviettes in the daintiest fashion, and write menus in the approved French.”²⁵ The school also trained women in cookery to teach throughout the country. In its first fifteen years, The National taught 40,000 students and graduated 327 of them as teachers.²⁶

Elsewhere in England, the Bristol School of Cookery was founded in 1893 and was supported by reforms of the temperance movement. The reformers believed “the first object of this work is to impart thrift, economy and domestic skill, all conducive to the temperance, prosperity and health of the whole community, as well as to the happiness of home life.”²⁷ The school offered classes for all, including domestic servants, ladies, artisans, and professional cooks. But as the historian, Elizabeth Bird, stated, the classes were “segregated both physically…and by the curriculum.” Training teachers was the main focus of Bristol’s school. The need for teachers in England “coincided with increased educational opportunities for middle-class girls and an increased need for them to earn their own living.” The Bristol School of Cookery’s training was manageable enough in length and cost for a middle-class family to send their daughter.²⁸

Marshall’s School of Cookery opened in 1883 in London. The founder, Agnes Marshall, was already renowned. Some of her many accomplishments include inventing the ice cream cone, writing four cookbooks, and selling readymade food items that were very popular with short-staffed housewives. Her contemporaries saw her as “a monument to woman’s business enterprise and energy.”²⁹ She was always up-to-date on the latest culinary trends and ensured her students were as well. Her school was described as a “republic” where “amateurs, aristocrats, and hotel proprietors rub shoulders in the classes with chefs, confectioners, and ambitious kitchen maids” which provided “keen competition and some rivalry among the members of these mixed classes.”³⁰ With 3,000-5,000 students a year, Marshall taught every class with only an assistant.³¹ Her books, food products, and cookery school helped make sophisticated cooking approachable to the middle class.

Cookbooks and their authors were often associated with the cooking schools of the time. However, the first cookbook to be published by a woman was printed long before the cooking schools existed. Hannah Woolley, a widowed schoolteacher, was in desperate need of money. So in 1662, she wrote her first book, The Ladies Directory, which contained recipes mainly for food but also for perfumes and elixirs to treat illnesses like the plague and palsy. One of these drinks called for seven grains of unicorn horns.³² According to the scholar Elaine Hobby, Woolley was the first woman to live off the income from her cookbooks.³³ However, she was not the last.

Mrs. Dalgairns, a Canadian living in Scotland, published The Practice of Cookery in 1829. The 1,434 recipes of the first edition represented many different types of cuisines such as Scottish, English, French, Indian, German, and North American.³⁴ Dalgairns wrote an entire chapter solely dedicated to curries, most likely with help from her brother-in-law who had been stationed in Bengal as a British colonel. Contemporary reviewers praised Dalgairns for “her practicality, her succinct directions, her avoidance of literary fripperies and puns and jokes, and her lack of extravagance,” as well as the variety of recipes that could be used by cooks for “tradesmen to the country gentlemen.”³⁵ The cookbook ran sixteen editions over thirty years, but was eventually surpassed by other more popular cookbooks. One reason for that may have been that the book was aesthetically lacking. The scholar, Mary F. Williamson, said, “In comparison with the other leading cookbooks, the lack of illustrations would have demoted it somewhat in the eyes of potential buyers.”³⁶ Her publisher, Robert Cadell, was the reason for this. At the time, he was approving engraved illustrations for novels by male authors and much larger printings of cookbooks by male cooks. In fact, "there is no doubt that the cookbook would not have been published if Mrs. Dalgairns's friend Captain Hall had not talked it up with Cadell, and shepherded it through the many production stages leading to publication."³⁷ And Captain Hall really did shepherd the project along. Cadell wrote to him, not Dalgairns, weekly if not daily about edits.³⁸ Mrs. Dalgairns’s work was the first of its kind in regard to variety of cuisine and was seen at the time as “far more copious…, far more various, and…more novel” compared to other cookbooks. Nonetheless, The Practice of Cookery did not achieve long-term success.

In England, Isabella Beeton wrote The Book of Household Management in 1861, and it quickly became a success. It is actually one of the most popular European cookbooks ever.³⁹ Beeton aspired to write a “comprehensive manual on cooking and homemaking,” with over a thousand pages of recipes and advice. Recently, historian Kathryn Hughes claimed Beeton plagiarized from many popular cookbooks of the time.⁴⁰ One such instance of plagiarism was when Beeton “embellished” Eliza Acton’s style of writing recipes that included a list of ingredients by “adding details as to the cost of the dish, the cooking time, the number of people it was designed for, and where appropriate, the season of availability.”⁴¹ Beeton was also passionate about measurement. In The Book of Household Management, she expressed her disdain for vague amounts in recipes saying, “All the indecisive terms expressed by a bit of this, some of that, a small piece of that, and a handful of the other, shall never be made use of, but all quantities be precisely and explicitly stated… and that a uniform system of weights and measures be adopted.”⁴² It was unfortunate for the authors whose recipes were plagiarized that Beeton’s cookbook was the most lucrative cookbook of this era. But Isabella Beeton was hugely influential to many culinary professionals and amateurs for decades to come. Her idea of precise and uniform measurements was solidified as standard a couple decades later.

Fannie Farmer wrote a cookbook in 1896 that demanded more uniform and precise measurements. She taught that “correct measurements are absolutely necessary to insure the best results.” In fact, Farmer became known as the “Mother of Level Measurements” due to her dedication to the idea. While she was overseeing the Boston Cooking School, Farmer rewrote the textbook used by the students there. The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book was massively popular outside of the school as well, selling 360,000 copies in its first twenty years in print. Farmer used the recipes of the former principal of Boston Cooking School and author of the original textbook, Mary J. Lincoln, “generously and without acknowledgement.” But Farmer restyled the recipes from Lincoln’s “comfortable, discursive way” to a more “businesslike and to the point” approach.⁴³ Fannie Farmer’s writing style and insistence on including measurements helped usher the cookbook into its current era.

An abundance of cookbooks were written by women of all backgrounds during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Interestingly, the women’s suffrage movement used cookbook writing as a way to placate their opposition, who claimed the suffragists “lacked culinary skills, failed to cook for their husbands, and did not care that their children went hungry in their absence.” Furthermore, the cookbook spread the message of the suffrage movement to more women.⁴⁴ The Suffrage Cook Book was compiled in 1915 with recipe contributions from over fifty supporters. Interludes of writings in support of the women’s vote by the suffragist Jane Addams and governors of states like Idaho, Oregon, and Kansas that already allowed women to vote, were interspersed throughout the book as well. The recipes themselves occasionally addressed the suffrage movement with entries like “Pie for a Suffragist’s Doubting Husband.” With the ingredients listed as “1 qt. milk human kindness/ 8 reasons:/ War/ White Slavery/ Child Labor/ 8,000,000 Working Women/ Bad Roads/ Poisonous Water/ Impure Food” and the directions of “mix the crust with tact and velvet gloves, using no sarcasm, especially with the upper crust. Upper crusts must be handled with extreme care for they quickly sour if manipulated roughly,” the message was clear to the housewife who happened to pick up a copy.⁴⁵

Rosa Lewis was celebrated as the “world’s first lady caterer.”⁴⁶ As previously shown, she was an exception to the rule in Victorian era England due to being a successful, wealthy female chef. But she had humble beginnings. Lewis started as a kitchen maid and eventually worked her way up to running the kitchen for the Duke of Orleans, where she met the future king of England, Edward VII. Rumors about an affair spread but it was neither confirmed nor denied by Lewis, not even in her autobiography. Lewis spent most of her career cooking in private homes. She made around £6,000 (about $200,000 today) catering each season. Lewis’s catering methods were unusual. Her work ethic was militant, and as she stated, “I took full charge. I had complete authority­—as though it were my own house, like a general in command.” She would bring everything she needed to cook and serve a dinner­–her staff, ingredients, pots, pans, chairs, tables. Lewis also owned the Cavendish Hotel in London and, for a time, cooked for “the most exclusive club in London,” the White’s Club. Her doctrine of cooking was to let food keep “its natural proper flavour” and to treat each ingredient with equal care “as if they were gold.” To Lewis, how a potato was boiled was equally as important to how the chicken was roasted.⁴⁷

Restaurants became very popular in Great Britain and America in the nineteenth century for the upper classes. There was, however, one glaring exclusion­–women. Some restaurants allowed women to dine with an escort. Some had special “ladies only” areas designated. Yet some strictly denied women from dining in any circumstance. In fact, women who dined alone could be perceived as prostitutes. Eventually, a shift occurred and women were seen as profitable clients by restauranteurs. That shift was helped along by places that were opened specifically for women to socialize and dine. One of these places was a tearoom opened by Kate Cranston in Glasgow. She created a space for women to meet their friends outside of their homes, to claim a space of their own in the public sphere. And it was so successful that Cranston opened an entire chain of tearooms. She made the spaces unique by having a local artist, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, design all the art and furniture for each of her tearooms. Cranston was a “highly respected businesswoman” who was “also instrumental in drawing attention to, and popularising, the high quality of the art and design emanating from Glasgow.”⁴⁸

So far, I have examined the women who were able to have profitable careers in the culinary profession, but there were many barriers that prevented countless women from doing so. The most obvious and all-encompassing barrier was gender inequality. Women were, and still are, closely linked to cooking but that did not equate to professional acceptance in the culinary arts.⁴⁹ It actually was detrimental.

When cooking was done by a woman it was seen as a “natural” and unconscious extension of their biological capacity to nurture their young . . . when cooking [was] done by a man it [was] seen as a manifestation of reason and consciousness, and therefore, as an expression of culture… Men’s learned, professional style of cooking allow[ed] for personal and professional style to be developed and [was] presented as superior to the cooking of women who aim merely to provide sustenance for their families.⁵⁰

Female chefs were not given the same credit as male chefs. Women’s unpaid domestic work had no “market value,” so it was deemed less worthy than paid work.⁵¹ Often, "women's domestic cooking [was] ignored or trivialized. Yet at the same time, haute cuisine depend[ed] upon it for its existence, by drawing upon and appropriating this area of female creativity for its own ends."⁵² The perfect example of this appropriation was by the very famous chef, Auguste Escoffier. He cooked a peasant dish his mother used to make and "refin[ed] it for the gourmet public of Paris" without acknowledging his mother or the origin of the dish. He actually named if after a poet from his home region.⁵³ There is a consensus that “men chefs have always drawn from the recipes and techniques of women, including their own mothers and grandmothers,” ⁵⁴ and often do not give them the credit they are due.

Due to the popularity in Western culture for the French cuisine, the gatekeeping by the male French professionals greatly hindered women’s ability to gain credibility and experience in the culinary world. Rosa Lewis complained of “the jealousy of the average French chef controlling the kitchen” and declared “I could not work with the French chefs.”⁵⁵ Aligned with this behavior, the Frenchman Chatillon-Plessis said a "‘woman cook can never give a table the attractive style that a male chef can bring to it’; and only a male chef has 'the elements of ingenuity which a woman will never know how to carry off.'" More detrimental than their misogynist attitude, the French barred women from attending their cooking schools, participating in competitions, and joining unions for chefs.⁵⁶ Considering that French cuisine was so popular in the Western world, denying women from partaking essentially ensured an all-male kitchen, especially in restaurants.

The ideology of the domestic science movement may have acted as a barrier to female culinary professionals as well. The reformers insisted on highlighting and therefore reinforcing the gender roles of the time. Laura Shapiro wrote of the reformers, "the 'true woman' as they saw her, was no mere creature of tradition; she accepted woman's sphere gladly and then worked to make it a mirror of man's world."⁵⁷ They saw the answers to all their problems residing in how men thought and acted in the world. They believed that "man saw a better way. Used and perfected it. Woman saw only the day's work."⁵⁸ Even the domestic scientists saw the problem. Isabel Bevier, a prominent member of the movement, wrote, “Neither pious intentions nor fulsome oratory about the glories of motherhood nor rules for good housekeeping furnish an adequate working basis for a serious study of the home. There was too much conversation about the ‘sphere of woman’ as interpreted by men fond of that kind of remark.”⁵⁹ Domestic science reformers stressed their strengths as women which enabled them to properly care for those in and outside of the home, but the boundaries of femininity at that time prevented substantial progress.

There are a few women to highlight as those who helped bridge the gap of female culinary professionals from the nineteenth century to present day. The first was Irma Rombauer, the author of The Joy of Cooking. The first edition of the acclaimed cookbook was written and self-published in 1931. It is often seen as the first contemporary cookbook.⁶⁰ The title alone was a shift from the domestic science era and scientific cookery. Inserting joy back into cooking was a common theme with the cookbook by including humor and a friendly tone in sections of what Rombauer called “an occasional culinary chat.” Rombauer created an “all-purpose cookbook” that had “elementary” advice such as how long to boil spaghetti to “more advanced” recipes. Rombauer was a self-taught home cook “creating the illusion that all the good things she had learned to make, others could too.”⁶¹ Millions of copies have been sold, making it one of the most popular cookbooks ever.⁶² Irma Rombauer combined and improved aspects from the cookbooks that came before her including perfecting the tone to be both light-hearted and practical and adding flavorful dishes.

Eugénie Brazier, or more commonly referred to as La Mère Brazier, was the first woman to win Michelin stars and the first chef to win six stars in the 1930s. Her small, simple restaurants in Lyons, France, were beloved by many, including the French presidents Charles de Gaulle and Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, the actress Marlene Dietrich, and many more. Her former student, Paul Bocuse, said, “few have left such an indelible imprint on the world of cooking as la Mère Brazier, whose legacy—even today—remains one of the pillars of global gastronomy.”⁶³ However, he often credited himself for creating the style of haute cuisine lyonnaise that he learned under Brazier.⁶⁴ Her fastidious methods of choosing the best and freshest ingredients were her signature. The quality of ingredients was so important to her that she was jailed for a week during World War II for blatantly ignoring food rations. La Mère Brazier, who learned to cook as a servant, created a cuisine that was “the start of modern French gastronomy” and whose “strict regime…still informs three-star gastronomy today.”⁶⁵

Perhaps the most famous female chef ever, Julia Child, created a solid connection from the nineteenth century to today’s female chefs. She grew up learning to cook with her mother using Fannie Farmer’s cookbooks.⁶⁶ Then after being educated at a cooking school in France, Child created a culinary empire. With her cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and her eventual transition to television with the show, The French Chef, Child reached a level of accessibility that Fannie Farmer, Isabella Beeton, and the others only dreamed of. Her cooking was dedicated to the “servantless American cook.”⁶⁷ So with the adage of “anyone can cook in the French manner anywhere, with the right instruction,”⁶⁸ Julia Child brought the elusive French cuisine to all Americans, including the untrained housewife.

The domestic science and temperance movements in America and Great Britain respectively created a need for cooking school and cookbooks to teach the newly conceived style of ultra-nutritious and austere cooking. Unfortunately, these cooking schools ended up reinforcing class distinctions rather than helping break them. Still, many women found financial success and recognition from their cookbooks. The schools and their very profitable cookbooks helped add legitimacy to female chefs and their work. It was the women like Rosa Lewis and Kate Cranston who really made inroads in the elite culinary world. The women of the nineteenth and early twentieth century laid the groundwork for the achievements of Eugénie Brazier, Irma Rombauer, Julia Child, and the female culinary professionals that followed them.

*My title was inspired by this Rosa Lewis quote: “Women didn’t run the kitchens of clubs in those days – I am the only woman who did.”

Mary Lawton and Rosa Lewis, The Queen of Cooks - and Some Kings: The Story of Rosa Lewis (New York, NY: Boni and Liveright, 1925), 45.

1. Mary Lawton and Rosa Lewis, The Queen of Cooks - and Some Kings: The Story of Rosa Lewis, 38, 91.

2. Laura Shapiro, Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century (Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press, 1986), 10, 222.

3. Jessica Derleth, “’Kneading Politics”: Cookery and the American Woman Suffrage Movement,” The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 17 no. 3 (2018): 457.

4. Harris and Giuffre, Taking the Heat: Women Chefs and Gender Equality in the Professional Kitchen (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2015), 31.

5. Una A. Robertson, Coming out of the Kitchen: Women beyond the Home (Gloucestershire, England: Sutton Publishing, 2000), 19.

6. Shapiro, Perfection Salad, 5.

7. Charlotte Biltekoff, Eating Right in America: The Cultural Politics of Food & Health (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2013), 20.

8. Shapiro, Perfection Salad, 68.

9. Biltekoff, Eating Right, 23.

10. Shapiro, Perfection Salad, 69.

11. Ibid, 127.

12. Shapiro, Perfection Salad, 59.

13. Ibid, 44-5, 59.

14. Ibid, 54.

15. Mary J. Lincoln, “How I Was Led to Teach Cookery,” New England Kitchen Magazine, May 1894, 68.

16. Shapiro, Perfection Salad, 55, 66.

17. Lincoln, “How I Was Led to Teach Cookery,” 68.

18. Shapiro, Perfection Salad, 102-3, 111, 101, 105.

19. Shapiro, Perfection Salad, 112, 118.

20. Ibid, 119.

21. Annesley Kenealy, “London Cooking-Schools and Their Teachers,” Lady’s Realm v.11, 1901/1902, 697.

22. Robertson, Coming Out of the Kitchen, 16.

23. Ibid, 16.

24. Kenealy, “London Cooking-Schools,” 700.

25. Ibid, 700.

26. Robertson, Coming Out of the Kitchen, 16-17.

27. Elizabeth Bird, “’High Class Cookery’: Gender, Status, and Domestic Subjects, 1890-1930,” Gender and Education 10 no. 2 (1998), 3.

28. Bird, “High Class Cookery,” 6.

29. Kenealy, “London Cooking-Schools,” 702.

30. Ibid, 703.

31. Ibid, 702.

32. Hannah Woolley, The Ladies Directory (London, England: Printed by T.M., 1662), 21.

33. Elaine Hobby, Virtue of Necessity: English Women’s Writing 1649-88 (Ann Arbor, Michigan: The University of Michigan Press, 1989), 175.

34. Mary F. Williamson, “The Publication of ‘Mrs. Dalgairns’ Cookery’: A Fortuitous Nineteenth-Century Success Story,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada 45 no. 1 (2007): 61.

35. Ibid, 60.

36. Ibid, 65.

37. Ibid, 64-5.

38. Ibid, 50.

39. Ann Cooper, “A Woman’s Place Is in the Kitchen:” The Evolution of Women Chefs (New York, New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1998), 16.

40. Laura Shapiro, “Domestic Goddess: review of The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs. Beeton by Kathryn Hughes,” New York Times (New York, NY), May 28, 2006.

41. Robertson, Coming Out of the Kitchen, 21.

42. Isabella Beeton, The Book of Household Management (London, England: S.O. Beeton, 1861).

43. Shapiro, Perfection Salad, 108, 109, 106-7.

44. Derleth, “Kneading Politics,” 451.

45. L.O. Kleber, The Suffrage Cook Book (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: The Equal Franchise Federation of Western Pennsylvania, 1915), 38, 156, 182, 220, 147.

46. Robertson, Coming Out of the Kitchen, 14.

47. Lawton and Lewis, The Queen of Cooks, 14.

48. Robertson, Coming Out of the Kitchen, 23.

49. Stephen Mennell, All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the Present (Oxford, England: Basil Blackwell Ltd., 1985), 201.

50. Harris and Giuffre, Taking the Heat, 28.

51. Vicki A. Swinbank, “The Sexual Politics of Cooking: A Feminist Analysis of Culinary Hierarchy in Western Culture,” Journal of Historical Sociology 15 no. 4 (2002): 481.

52. Ibid, 479.

53. Ibid, 470.

54. Harris and Giuffre, Taking the Heat, 27.

55 Lawton and Lewis, The Queen of Cooks, 9.

56. Swinbank, “Sexual Politics,” 469; Harris and Giuffre, Taking the Heat, 26.

57. Shapiro, Perfection Salad, 179.

58. Ibid, 165.

59. Isabel Bevier, Home Economics in Education (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: J.B. Lippincott, 1924), 188.

60. Cooper, “A Woman’s Place Is in the Kitchen,” 17.

61. Jane Nickerson, “They Wanted to Cook Like Mother,” New York Times (New York, NY), Aug. 12, 1951.

62. “Mrs. Irma S. Rombauer Dies; Author of ‘Joy of Cooking,’ 86,” New York Times (New York, NY), Oct. 17, 1962.

63. Eugénie Brazier, La Mère Brazier: The Mother of Modern French Cooking, trans. Drew Smith (New York, New York: Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., 2014), 9, 6.

64. Swinbank, “The Sexual Politics,” 470.

65. Brazier, La Mère Brazier, 9.

66. Julia Child, “Cooking with Children,” New York Times (New York, NY), Nov. 5, 1972.

67. Julia Child, Louisette Bertholle, and Simone Beck, Mastering the Art of French Cooking (New York, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961), xxiii.

68. Ibid, xxiii.