Pineapple glaze and backyard luaus: Cold war cookbooks and the fiftieth state

Pressing the Fight: Print, Propaganda, and the Cold War

Volumn , Issue , 2010, Pages 193-208

  Reddinger, Amy ^a  

^a University of Wisconsin Marinette   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 84895152115     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
DOI: None     Document Type: Chapter

References (19)

1. Elizabeth Ahn Toupin, The Hawaii Cookbook and Backyard Luau (Norwalk, Ct.: Silvermine, 1967), 9, 13.
2. It is not until well into the twentieth century that we begin to see a sustained trend in which all of the minute steps of a recipe are spelled out in great detail, a textual feature that suggests a shift in the cultural know-how assumed in cookbook readers. This is a textual shift that Erika Endrijonas traces as both a result of efforts at standardization (reforms led by food experts like Fannie Farmer) and the assumption that important training of housewives had lapsed during wartime and other periods of national and economic upheaval (e.g., the Great Depression): Endrijonas, "Processed Food from Scratch: Cooking for a Family in the 1950s," in Kitchen Culture in America: Popular Representations of Food, Gender, and Race, ed. Sherrie A. Inness (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 162.
3. It is important to note that General Mills was experiencing significant expansion during this period and was well on its way to becoming the multinational corporation it is today. (For more on the history of General Mills Corporation, see James Gray's Business without Boundary. The Story of General Mills [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1954.])
4. Better Homes and Gardens, Holiday Cook Book (New York: Meredith, 1959), 5.
5. The success of the 1950s statehood movement-a movement which had been unsuccessful in the past-can be attributed largely to the coming-of-age of Nisei veterans who used the G.I. Bill to obtain educational, professional, and law degrees. This political power contributed to the 1954 Democratic overthrow of the Republican oligarchy that had dominated island politics for decades. These island political powers still had to negotiate statehood with the U.S. Congress, which had in the past expressed tremendous hesitation at the incorporation of a state with a largely non-white constituency; this racism and hesitation were successfully combated by the creation of a master narrative of Japanese American (and particularly Nisei veteran) patriotism. For a thorough discussion of the history of the Hawaiian plantation economy and the sugar and pineapple corporations' role in the process of statehood, see Gavan Daws, Shoal of Time: A History of the Hawaiian Islands (New York, Macmillan, 1968),
6. Lawrence H. Fuchs, Hawaii Pono: A Social History (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961).
7. Jane and Michael Stern, A Taste of America (Kansas City: Andrews and McMeel, 1988);
8. Fuchs, Hawaii Pono, 381.
9. Stern and Stern, A Taste of America, 56.
10. Better Homes and Gardens, Best Buffets (New York: Meredith, 1963), 6.
11. A claim that Khrushchev notably responded to by stating, "I still think women should get on their hands and knees and scrub the floor." Kathi Ann Brown, Meredith: The First 100 Years (Des Moines: Meredith Books, 2002), 75.
12. Ruth Cowan, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 15.
13. Endrijonas, "Processed Food from Scratch," 159.
14. Photo from Better Homes and Gardens, Holiday Cook Book (New York: Meredith, 1959). The word "Polynesian" is a term deeply rooted in colonization. According to the OED, the origins of the word " Polynesia" are French. First used by De Brosses in 1756, it became a popular term with traders and explorers, used to describe the islands of the South Pacific.
15. Donna Gabaccia, We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 231.
16. Betty Crocker, Outdoor Cookbook-Barbeques (New York: Golden Press, 1967), 100.
17. Stern and Stern, A Taste of America, 56.
18. Janice Radway, A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 84-85.
19. Better Homes and Gardens, Holiday Cookbook, 4.