“Writer. Eater. Cook.”: Deconstructing the Feminist/Housewife Debate in the Works of Ruth Reichl

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Acknowledgments

Special thanks goes to The George Washington University for their financial support of this project. Additionally, I would like to thank the staff at George Washington’s Gelman Library and the staff at The David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Duke University for their help with my archival needs. Finally, thanks to Bill Gillis and Frank Stearns for their research assistance and feedback on various drafts of this essay.

Notes

¹ As a young girl, Reichl’s mother wanted to become a doctor but was told by her parents, “’If you become a doctor no man will ever marry you” (8). Instead, she received a Ph.D. in musicology and opened a bookstore where she corresponded with people like Christopher Morley and Max Eastman. Miriam eventually married and had a child, Robert; she divorced Robert’s father, married again, and gave birth to Ruth.

² The Matrix Awards ceremony, according to their website, is sponsored by New York Women in Communications, Inc. to honor “exceptional women from advertising, arts and entertainment, books, broadcasting, magazines, newspapers, public relations and new media.” A video of Reichl’s speech, given at the Hillside Club in Berkeley, California for the Berkeley Arts and Letters program, can be found at Grateful Not to Be My Mother.

In her online interview for Macclean’s, Kate Fillion characterizes Reichl’s mother this way. The title of Reichl’s book was changed when the paperback edition was released. In an article for The Huffington Post, Colin Sterling reported that Reichl felt the original title never adequately captured the sentiment of the book but her publishers preferred it.

³ In her introduction; Inness defines kitchen culture as such: “the various discourses about food, cooking, and gender roles that stem from the kitchen but that pervade our society on many levels” (3). Her anthology includes essays which examine such texts as cookbooks, advertisements, and marital manuals among others.

⁴ In Chapter 4 of Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (1990), Patricia Hill Collins uses the term “controlling images” to discuss the damaging portrayals of black women throughout history. While Friedan does not use the term to describe her image of “the happy housewife heroine” that advertisers of the 1960s were exploiting, it seems applicable.

⁵ (Tax, Tax Meredith) A handwritten copy of Tax’s lyrics accompanied by illustrations can be found in the online collections of Duke University’s Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture. Tax explains on her personal website that as a member of the early feminist-socialist, Boston-based group Bread and Roses that “When Bread and Roses started in 1969, I had a great burst of creativity and started putting new lyrics to old folk tunes. I even learned how to play the autoharp, though not very well. I have always believed that the most powerful and satisfying movements are ones that sing, and we certainly did.” This particular song was to be sung to the tune of Alan Mills’s “There Was an Old Woman Who Swallowed a Fly.”

⁶ It is worth noting that Reichl has roots in an incredibly rich literary tradition of food writing – from cookbooks to food memoirs. Cookbooks are some of the first places where women’s food writing appeared in print. Historians, such as Janet Theophano (Eat My Words: Reading Women’s Lives Through the Cookbooks They Wrote) and Ann L. Bower (Recipes for Reading: Community Cookbooks, Stories, and Histories), examine these texts as a way to get a glimpse into the everyday lives of early American women. In contemporary American society, the cookbook – though today much more of a public act of writing – continues to have a strong female presence. From Julia Child, writing in the 1960s, to Rachel Ray, writing today, women have been testing, writing, and publishing their recipes, bringing the importance of food and food preparation to the American public consciousness. Women writers have also produced food memoirs, texts that combine narrative with recipes. M.F.K. Fisher (Serve It Forth, 1937, Consider the Oyster, 1941, How to Cook a Wolf, 1942), Alice B. Toklas’s The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book (1954), and Mimi Sheraton’s From My Mother’s Kitchen: Recipes and Reminiscences (1979) have all contributed to this genre. Interestingly enough, despite the major contributions that women have made to the field of food writing, there has been little examination of these texts, particularly of the writers of Reichl’s generation.

⁷ Reichl mentions these dishes in the February 8, 1987 article, “A Departure for Alice,” which can be found on The Los Angeles Times’s website.

⁸ The article on McCarty was published in New West on June 18, 1979 while the article about Chinese cuisine appeared in Metropolitan Home in May of 1980.

⁹ Reichl notes in her prologue to My Kitchen Year that in the ten years since first being hired at Gourmet she’s seen the public become increasingly preoccupied with food. In the early 21st century, food stories appeared virtually everywhere – in the news, on the screen, and even in department stores. With the election of Barack Obama in 2009, Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” organization with its emphasis on healthy eating and exercise as well as updates about her White House Garden, an initiative which sparked a renewed interest in gardening and consuming organic foods, frequently appeared in the news. Documentaries such as Robert Kenner’s Food, Inc. (2008) and feature films such as Nora Ephron’s Julie and Julia (2009) appeared on the big screen, and on television, shows like the Food Network’s Iron Chef America, Paula’s Home Cooking, and The Next Food Network Star dominated the ratings. The success of the Food Network’s programming prompted other networks to follow suit, capitalizing on this trend; most notably is Bravo’s successful series Top Chef, which premiered its fifteenth season at the end of 2017. Celebrity chefs featured on this programming capitalized upon their fame, connecting with their public by not only writing and selling cookbooks but also marketing the equipment necessary to successfully master their recipes within. Bravo even created a Top Chef University, which launched in 2010; those interested in learning more about cooking could enroll in the school and be taught online by previous contestants. On the web, food blogs such as Smitten Kitchen, Joy the Baker, and Homesick Texan, abounded. Finally, in some cities, you cannot walk down the street without bumping into a food truck selling macaroni and cheese, Íberico jamón sandwiches, lobster rolls, and red velvet cupcakes.

¹⁰ In her May 2009 article “Heartburn” for The New York Times, Christine Muhlke writes, “Memoirs with recipes have captured the money-making imagination of the publishing industry … Lately, bookstores seem to be crowded with cooks who write and writers who cook.” She continues to review three food memoirs (Molly Wizenberg’s A Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes From My Kitchen Table, Giulia Melucci’s I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti: A Memoir, and David Lebovitz’s The Sweet Life in Paris: Delicious Adventures in the World’s Most Glorious – and Perplexing – City) published within only months of one another. The food writing produced in the early 21st century ranged from books that took readers behind the scenes of the restaurant industry (Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, 2000 and Dalia Jurgensen’s Spiced: A Pastry Chef’s True Stories of Trial By Fire, After-Hours Exploits, and What Really Goes On In the Kitchen, 2009) to books that chronicled the culinary adventures of food writers (Jeffrey Steingarten’s The Man Who Ate Everything: And Other Gastronomic Feats, Disputes, and Pleasurable Pursuits, 1997). Authors produced eating manifestos (Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, 2008 and Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, 2007), and they recalled childhood memories through the meals that were eaten (Eduardo Machado and Michael Domitrovich’s Tastes Like Cuba: An Exile’s Hunger for Home, 2007 and Kate Moses’s Cakewalk, 2010).

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Funding

This work was supported by the The George Washington University [Internal grant].