“How well can we live,” Juliet Corson asked herself, “if we are moderately poor?” On the radical origins of home economics.
As it was for many who went to school in the early 1990s, my junior-high experience with home economics was brief. In theory, I liked cooking, but the idea of doing it in a dour classroom outfitted with fridges and Formica conjured visions of trembling Jell-O molds and glaucous mounds of pistachio-cream salad, crumbly refrigerated biscuits and mushy pinwheels of deviled ham, all tasting the way the cafeteria smelled. I registered for Beginning Consumer Sciences not out of a great love for things domestic but because I wanted to avoid physical education (the only other available elective) and to get an easy A. But my first assignment, broccoli salad, proved unexpectedly difficult: I glopped on too much Miracle Whip and burned the bacon, mistakes that earned me a C- and a gentle admonition to “follow the recipe.”
Thanks to the guidance of a teacher both cheerful and good-natured — as you inevitably must be when supervising a roomful of 13-year olds employing sharp knives and hot ranges — I managed to reverse my course. I soon found myself chopping, roasting, and frying with brio, turning out soggy but delicious pineapple upside-down cakes and loads of peanut brittle more salty than sweet.
As I was baking and cooking in that classroom, with its four small avocado-green ovens, little did I think that I was participating in something of cultural importance. But recently, academics and food critics have called for a return of home economics to high school curricula. In a 2011 National Public Radio interview, Michigan State University history professor Helen Zoe Veit sang the praises of instruction in the domestic arts. “Just by virtue of making foods at home,” she said, “you’re almost guaranteed to be making them much more healthfully than they would be if you buy them at a fast-food restaurant or in virtually any restaurant where fats and sugars are used in … enormous quantities.” In summer, Slate ran an article by Torie Bosch, who claimed that “home ec is more valuable than ever in an age when junk food is everywhere, obesity is rampant, and few parents have time to cook for their children.” What’s more, she argues, a course in home economics could help students to teach their cash-strapped families to stretch their dollar. Frugality and thrift, watchwords of austere times past, would once again see recession-wracked Americans through their present ill fortune.
Americans’ present ill fortune has persisted for a number of years now and threatens to grow worse, because most politicians appear to agree that present economic realities have made inevitable a rollback of New Deal programs. In a time of diminished prosperity, the thinking goes, citizens are summoned to tighten their belts further. Talk of austerity has the attractive effect of conflating notions of individual conduct with those of economic justice, and so shows itself utterly befitting a neoliberal age. Yet as history demonstrates, the present morality play involving a people perched perilously on a “fiscal cliff” has seen several dress rehearsals.
The association of clever cookery with economic security had long abided in pre-Roosevelt America. Early home economists thought a well-cooked roast could quell or eliminate everything from public drunkenness to factory riots. For them food was a way not only to ease the bitter pangs of poverty but also to curtail its more disruptive social repercussions. Juliet Corson, founder of the New York Cooking School, was one such advocate of better living through sensible-meal prep. The good life could be had through good cooking, she believed. Eager to show the working classes how to make the most of available foodstuffs that, thanks to the railroad’s aggressive expansion over the course of the 19th century, had increased in both variety and quantity, she penned one of the most popular cooking guides of the era, Fifteen-Cent Dinners for Workingmen’s Families(1877). Its simple, sensible advice helped thousands weather the period’s financial panics and made Corson one of the century’s most notable social reformers. (...)
After the onset of the 1873 depression, Corson offered her services to the Women’s Educational and Industrial Society of New York, which provided vocational training to women at a time when thousands of them needed to support themselves but lacked the knowledge and means. It sought to keep these women in work to prevent them from succumbing to “moral degradation,” as one contemporary circular phrased it. The school’s administrators tapped Corson to teach culinary arts. Having had little previous experience beyond that of making coffee and grilling steak, she turned to the best European cookbooks for guidance. “The thoroughness of the German and the delicacy of the French” impressed her, and she synthesized these two Continental influences into “a philosophy of her own.”
This philosophy proved immensely popular, because it informed an approach to cooking that appeared almost effortless. Just about anyone could whip up tasty, economical meals. Women flocked to hear Corson, whose instructional method was immersive. With basket in hand, she led her students to Fulton Market for lessons on selecting fresh meat, fish, and vegetables before adjourning to the cooking school, where, behind a brightly polished range topped with copper saucepans and boilers, she demonstrated how best to prepare them. So successful were her lessons that they attracted the notice of upper-class colleagues. They encouraged her not only to continue penning articles and books but also to open her own school, which she did in 1876.
Corson’s New York Cooking School, initially based in her own home, charged tuition on a sliding scale and taught both practical and more advanced cooking skills to everyone from ladies’ maids to young housewives. Her specialty, however, remained economical cookery. The 34-page Fifteen-Cent Dinners for Workingmen’s Families elaborated its finer points. “The cheapest kinds of food are sometimes the most wholesome and strengthening,” Corson insisted. On three nickels (the equivalent of $2.78 today) the poorest laborer could eat, if not like a king, then perhaps like his boss. “In Europe provinces would live upon what is wasted in towns here,” Corson lamented. Fifteen-Cent Dinners revealed veritable plenty in the midst of apparent dearth. Simply by eliminating waste, Corson claimed, a household could find nourishment to spare. (...)
Corson’s uniquely cosmopolitan approach to economical cookery won her audience’s approval. Critics hailed Fifteen-Cent Dinners as a panacea. The Chicago Tribune claimed that between its covers lay “the secret of economy which gives skill to conceal cheap things,” and another prominent newspaper, the Christian Union, assured readers that, if faithfully followed, the recipes would “put upon the rich man’s table food more nourishing and palatable than nine out of ten well-to-do people ever taste outside of first-class restaurants.” Yet Corson’s book failed to please union leaders, who accused its author of conspiring with capitalists to suppress wages, reasoning that if workers learned they could subsist quite well on 15 cents, they would lose interest in agitating for much more.
by Christine Baumgarthuber, The New Inquiry | Read more:
Illustration: imp kerr
As it was for many who went to school in the early 1990s, my junior-high experience with home economics was brief. In theory, I liked cooking, but the idea of doing it in a dour classroom outfitted with fridges and Formica conjured visions of trembling Jell-O molds and glaucous mounds of pistachio-cream salad, crumbly refrigerated biscuits and mushy pinwheels of deviled ham, all tasting the way the cafeteria smelled. I registered for Beginning Consumer Sciences not out of a great love for things domestic but because I wanted to avoid physical education (the only other available elective) and to get an easy A. But my first assignment, broccoli salad, proved unexpectedly difficult: I glopped on too much Miracle Whip and burned the bacon, mistakes that earned me a C- and a gentle admonition to “follow the recipe.”Thanks to the guidance of a teacher both cheerful and good-natured — as you inevitably must be when supervising a roomful of 13-year olds employing sharp knives and hot ranges — I managed to reverse my course. I soon found myself chopping, roasting, and frying with brio, turning out soggy but delicious pineapple upside-down cakes and loads of peanut brittle more salty than sweet.
As I was baking and cooking in that classroom, with its four small avocado-green ovens, little did I think that I was participating in something of cultural importance. But recently, academics and food critics have called for a return of home economics to high school curricula. In a 2011 National Public Radio interview, Michigan State University history professor Helen Zoe Veit sang the praises of instruction in the domestic arts. “Just by virtue of making foods at home,” she said, “you’re almost guaranteed to be making them much more healthfully than they would be if you buy them at a fast-food restaurant or in virtually any restaurant where fats and sugars are used in … enormous quantities.” In summer, Slate ran an article by Torie Bosch, who claimed that “home ec is more valuable than ever in an age when junk food is everywhere, obesity is rampant, and few parents have time to cook for their children.” What’s more, she argues, a course in home economics could help students to teach their cash-strapped families to stretch their dollar. Frugality and thrift, watchwords of austere times past, would once again see recession-wracked Americans through their present ill fortune.
Americans’ present ill fortune has persisted for a number of years now and threatens to grow worse, because most politicians appear to agree that present economic realities have made inevitable a rollback of New Deal programs. In a time of diminished prosperity, the thinking goes, citizens are summoned to tighten their belts further. Talk of austerity has the attractive effect of conflating notions of individual conduct with those of economic justice, and so shows itself utterly befitting a neoliberal age. Yet as history demonstrates, the present morality play involving a people perched perilously on a “fiscal cliff” has seen several dress rehearsals.
The association of clever cookery with economic security had long abided in pre-Roosevelt America. Early home economists thought a well-cooked roast could quell or eliminate everything from public drunkenness to factory riots. For them food was a way not only to ease the bitter pangs of poverty but also to curtail its more disruptive social repercussions. Juliet Corson, founder of the New York Cooking School, was one such advocate of better living through sensible-meal prep. The good life could be had through good cooking, she believed. Eager to show the working classes how to make the most of available foodstuffs that, thanks to the railroad’s aggressive expansion over the course of the 19th century, had increased in both variety and quantity, she penned one of the most popular cooking guides of the era, Fifteen-Cent Dinners for Workingmen’s Families(1877). Its simple, sensible advice helped thousands weather the period’s financial panics and made Corson one of the century’s most notable social reformers. (...)
After the onset of the 1873 depression, Corson offered her services to the Women’s Educational and Industrial Society of New York, which provided vocational training to women at a time when thousands of them needed to support themselves but lacked the knowledge and means. It sought to keep these women in work to prevent them from succumbing to “moral degradation,” as one contemporary circular phrased it. The school’s administrators tapped Corson to teach culinary arts. Having had little previous experience beyond that of making coffee and grilling steak, she turned to the best European cookbooks for guidance. “The thoroughness of the German and the delicacy of the French” impressed her, and she synthesized these two Continental influences into “a philosophy of her own.”
This philosophy proved immensely popular, because it informed an approach to cooking that appeared almost effortless. Just about anyone could whip up tasty, economical meals. Women flocked to hear Corson, whose instructional method was immersive. With basket in hand, she led her students to Fulton Market for lessons on selecting fresh meat, fish, and vegetables before adjourning to the cooking school, where, behind a brightly polished range topped with copper saucepans and boilers, she demonstrated how best to prepare them. So successful were her lessons that they attracted the notice of upper-class colleagues. They encouraged her not only to continue penning articles and books but also to open her own school, which she did in 1876.
Corson’s New York Cooking School, initially based in her own home, charged tuition on a sliding scale and taught both practical and more advanced cooking skills to everyone from ladies’ maids to young housewives. Her specialty, however, remained economical cookery. The 34-page Fifteen-Cent Dinners for Workingmen’s Families elaborated its finer points. “The cheapest kinds of food are sometimes the most wholesome and strengthening,” Corson insisted. On three nickels (the equivalent of $2.78 today) the poorest laborer could eat, if not like a king, then perhaps like his boss. “In Europe provinces would live upon what is wasted in towns here,” Corson lamented. Fifteen-Cent Dinners revealed veritable plenty in the midst of apparent dearth. Simply by eliminating waste, Corson claimed, a household could find nourishment to spare. (...)
Corson’s uniquely cosmopolitan approach to economical cookery won her audience’s approval. Critics hailed Fifteen-Cent Dinners as a panacea. The Chicago Tribune claimed that between its covers lay “the secret of economy which gives skill to conceal cheap things,” and another prominent newspaper, the Christian Union, assured readers that, if faithfully followed, the recipes would “put upon the rich man’s table food more nourishing and palatable than nine out of ten well-to-do people ever taste outside of first-class restaurants.” Yet Corson’s book failed to please union leaders, who accused its author of conspiring with capitalists to suppress wages, reasoning that if workers learned they could subsist quite well on 15 cents, they would lose interest in agitating for much more.
Illustration: imp kerr
