American Children’s Cookbooks as Scenes of Instruction

This chapter tracks US children’s cookbooks over 150 years, showing how adults’ expectations change based on shifting ideologies of child capability. The essay analyzes cookbooks from three periods: 19th century, mid-20th century, and late 20th to the 21st century. The nineteenth-century housebooks deploy literary tropes (story) to foster agency, focusing on preparing young girls for taking on kitchen and household duties. In the period after World War II, children’s cookbooks transform cooking into an extension of play, reducing childhood agency significantly, a development that mirrors the disempowerment of women in the kitchen through advances in food technology (frozen foods, boxed foods) in the postwar period. Contemporary children’s cookbooks match what Warren Belasco calls the “countercuisine” and the resultant foodie culture: these texts re-empower child cooks with agency in a world that is much more aware of organic, sustainable practices and the downsides of industrial foods.