"In Manly Meals and Mom's Home Cooking, Jessamyn Neuhaus offers an analysis of the tone and content of American cookbooks published between the 1790s and the 1960s, adroitly examining the cultural assumptions and anxieties - particularly about women and domesticity - they contain." "Neuhaus's in-depth survey of these cookbooks questions the supposedly straightforward lessons about food preparation they imparted. While she finds that cookbooks aimed to make readers - mainly white, middle-class women - into effective, modern-age homemakers who saw joy, not drudgery, in their domestic tasks, she notes that the phenomenal popularity of Peg Bracken's The I Hate to Cook Book (1960) attests to the limits of this kind of indoctrination. At the same time, she explores the proliferation of cookbooks for bachelors, aimed at "the man in the kitchen," and the biases they display about male and female abilities, tastes, and responsibilities." "Neuhaus also addresses the impact of World War II rationing on homefront cuisine; the introduction of new culinary technologies, gourmet sensibilities, and ethnic foods into American kitchens; and developments in the cookbook industry since the 1960s. More than a history of the cookbook, Manly Meals and Mom's Home Cooking provides an account of gender and food in modern America."--BOOK JACKET.