Stand Facing the Stove

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 same time, 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.