1925 Missouri Farm Women’s Cookbook

originally published by MFA. Electronic text by the Missouri Folklore Society, with permission. MFS extends its special thanks to Chuck Lay, Director of Communications, MFA Incorporated.

Editor’s note: I purchased the well-worn volume on Ebay, and found it provided a fascinating series of glimpses into foodways, food technologies, and norms of domestic felicity for the first quarter of the twentieth century in Missouri. Some of the distinctive dishes listed here were specialties in my own family, who clearly were connected by tradition to the women writing here.

As a document, a compiled cookbook must be read critically; it presents opportunities for display, and invites the novel rather than the norm. The selection is tilted disproportionately (in terms of any reasonable, practical or survivable diet) to cakes, pies and cookies. Is this because these involve greater degrees of challenge to technical skill and more opportunities for creativity? Does the selection represent a gustatory fantasy-life, what one scholar has called a mild kind of “food-pornography”?

The condition of the book did not permit us to reproduce the line-art of the advertisements, charming though it was, and significant as it might be from the perspective of popular culture studies, for establishing the context in which the texts were first experienced. The photographs inserted here do not appear in the original. There is of course no substitute for direct archival work. Scholars of women’s studies will find much of interest here, including the distribution of topics: cookery, farmwork, home remedies. At the very least, perhaps websurfers looking for a particular family favorite will find it here.

ABD