TAC Bookshelf: The Joy of Cooking During a Depression
Gilbert T. Sewall, TAC contributor: I’ve been reading the 1943 wartime edition of Irma S. Rombauer’s The Joy of Cooking, a long-ago marriage gift to my parents. It comprises a fascinating historical document of how Americans cooked and ate three quarters of a century ago. First published in 1931, The Joy of Cooking remains one of the nation’s most beloved instructional manuals. From the Great Depression on, the middle class no longer had cooks, and well-reared women were expected to cook for themselves, their families, and guests. Rombauer filled their needs with a reassuring, enthusiastic, yet exacting voice.
War or no war, what stands out is the narrow palette of ingredients even the most accomplished cooks worked with. Frozen foods and freezers were yet to come, and microwaves were decades away. Canned vegetables and fruits were a godsend to households where fresh produce was expensive or unavailable much of the year. The volume contains ample advice on rationing, using leftovers, stretching meat dishes, and conserving sugar. Meat loaf, chicken a la king, and tuna casseroles were economical, no-waste dishes spawned by a depression and wartime economy. Veal and game were far more popular than they are now. Old-time winners in the 1943 edition include—this is a highly personal list—chipped beef on toast, Newburg sauce, baked eggs, and cheese rarebits. A Rombauer salad of shrimp, apples, cucumbers, and celery sounds pretty tasty right now. Sure, if we look for midcentury drab, it’s there to be found. Canned spaghetti in any recipe is a deal breaker. Good riddance to succotash. “Calves brains have a bad repute,” Rombauer declares, and most of us will agree.
In spite of some overtures to continental cuisine, the fare is distinctly American: lamb roasts with mint jelly, fruit salads, aspics, and lots of baking. It’s so-called comfort food, that bizarre expression we use in an age of whey and mango smoothies. Rombauer’s old recipes are clear and straightforward, not acts of virtuosity—or food virtue. Her readers did not cook glazed pan-roasted carrots in whipped feta and hazelnut dukkah—nor did they want to learn how. The gluten-free, ovo-nervous, and dogmatically organic were cruelly ignored. Rombauer simply dismissed kale, lumping it with lowly turnip and mustard greens. By contrast, the new doorstop 2019 edition—encyclopedic and multicultural, the victim of mission creep—dutifully features a dozen kale dishes. None of them sound appetizing or joyful. Is this indicative of contemporary times?
Michael Warren Davis, TAC contributor: The seventh of Russell Kirk’s Ten Conservative Principles asserts that we who share his faith are “persuaded that freedom and property are closely linked.” I’m sure nobody who calls himself a conservative today would disagree. Indeed, many conservatives probably wouldn’t agree with the first six principles—nor, the eighth, ninth, nor the tenth. (These all have to do with notions like the existence of an “enduring moral order” and the need for “prudent restraints upon power and upon human passions.” It’s very parochial stuff, which makes very little allowance for us to assert the right for 16-year-old girls to star in pornographic films, as one of our eminent conservative journals recently did.)The defense of private property is perhaps the only tenet of conservatism that has survived the slow degradation of our movement, which began in Dr. Kirk’s own lifetime. It became the principal line of attack against progressives and their socialist allies during the Cold War, when “traditionalists” (i.e., conservatives) entered into our ill-fated alliance with libertarians (i.e., liberals). We believe in nothing if not the right to private property. In fact, we believe in nothing but the right to private property.
Yet seldom do we ask: how far are we willing to go to defend property against its usurpers? I don’t mean communists, or not communists only; I mean large agricultural corporations and real estate moguls. These are merely collectivists by other means. These plutocrats, no less than Soviet commissars, are the enemies of property.
The rate of home ownership is falling. So is the number of farmers who own the land they work. The urban poor are herded into towering apartment buildings. If they work hard and pinch their pennies, they may escape to a suburban “housing development”: sprawling, sterile plots of concrete lined with identical hovels with identical yards and identical mailboxes—all with cruel, ironic names like “Verdant Pastures.”
A man who can’t point to a house on a plot of land and say, “This is my kingdom” isn’t a freeman. Whether his laird calls himself a king or a chief executive officer makes a great deal of difference to the economist; less so to the serf.
In January of 1937, there appeared a magazine, aptly called The Free American, devoted to resisting this new serfdom. Inspired by the Southern Agrarians and the English Distributists, it sought to rescue the republic from the twinned tyrannies of bureaucracy and plutocracy. “Without economic democracy,” declared its editor, Herbert Agar, “there can be neither social nor political democracy.”
For the very first time since the magazine went out of print, the best of Free America has been collected into a handsome hardback, edited by the great Allan Carlson and introduced by the late Sir Roger Scruton. All true friends of freedom will delight in these essays by the finest conservative minds of our age, from Hilaire Belloc to Allen Tate. I have no doubt that it will become an indispensable text in the restoration of a republic whose citizens were forced to sell their shares in our commonwealth long ago.
