Primary Source Dispatch #1: Juliet Corson and "The Evolution of Home" (1893)

A series of some of the most magical primary sources I got to cite. This week, a key source from my introduction, on the principles and purposes of culinary pedagogy in the late nineteenth century.

Juliet Corson at work, as depicted in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, December 1879,

I’m in the final countdown in my dissertation journey, and as you can imagine, there are more than a few things interfering with my creative drafting process on these posts. (Plus the general anxiety and fatigue that comes with being so close to the end of something that’s consumed the better part of the last four years of my life…) So rather than dedicating this space to new content, I’d like to share one of my favorite primary sources each week with you for potential reading, to encourage you to give it a look and to consider the implications of each source on its own terms. This week, a snapshot from a portion of my introduction, and a chance to consider a key speeches on women’s roles in American life and the future of culinary pedagogy, from the renowned culinary instructor Juliet Corson:

Juliet Corson (1841-1897) was one of the preeminent culinary authorities of the day, founder of the New York School of Cookery in 1876 and a key evangelist for the possibilities of culinary education. Though her cooking school catered to middle-class women and working-class women alike in need of training, Corson had a far greater pedagogical reach, producing textbooks, cookbooks, and regular columns in the New York Times that all spoke to the core principles and importance of good cooking. Good cooking, as Corson saw it, had a fundamentally noble “purpose, the accomplishment of which demands foresight, care, and patience. … the desire of a conscientious cook to economise is proportionate with his or her mastery of the culinary art.” She wrote for both “plain cooks” and “artisans,” and her “receipts for the table” published in the Times were unusually cost-conscious and attentive to the realities that working-class home cooks were facing. In offering her “receipts for the table” to Times readers, Corson incorporated the cost of ingredients into her instructions, detailing exactly the feasibility of any recipe against the home cook’s budget. As much as she encouraged home cooks to stick to a budget, she also encouraged them to stay creatively engaged in the work of cooking, lest meal preparation become a form of intellectually disengaged drudgery. Her aim as an instructor was to promote a lifelong enthusiasm and expansion of culinary knowledge, and through her columns, courses, and public addresses, she remained a constant force for culinary education.

The source I’m sharing with you, however, is a little harder to parse in the sense that it suggests Corson was of two minds about what formal culinary education could actually do for women’s lives. She delivered this address, titled “The Evolution of Home” to the visitors at the Woman’s Building at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, just a few years before her death at the age of 56. In it, Corson declared women to be the eternal managers of the home and hearth, the “custodians of the precious element” of fire. But she also invoked the rhetoric of republican motherhood, which glorified women’s roles as the moral and social safeguards of American life, and their rightful place in the household rather than in the workforce. She made this argument via impassioned callbacks to the Paleolithic era, arguing that “in those desolated margins of the world which had escaped destruction … it was the woman's hand that gathered at the fireside the fruits of the long day’s search or toil.” Corson wanted to celebrate women as the original experts in cooking, but she also had genuine reservations about the application of domestic knowledge outside of the home:

If the test of [women’s] advancement be the degree of influence they exercise upon their age and the part they play in culture and progress, we may seriously ask ourselves in what respect we have raised the standard of womanly usefulness? … If our best and brightest are to be devoted to competition with men in the learned professions, may we not question where the home-makers are to come from to whom we must look for the motherhood of the next generation which shall create our rulers? Without doubt it is sweet and proper to serve one’s country in public; but what will result if only dull-witted ones are left to maintain the elevation of the home?

When I first encountered this paragraph, I knew I had to quote it in my dissertation, in part because it provoked a question I didn’t know how to answer. If we agree that cooking matters—that it requires skill, knowledge, and some process of semi-codified training to do well—then what does that knowledge mean if it is confined to the private home? Corson wanted the innate intelligence of home cooks to be honored and advanced through formal culinary education, and firmly asserted that education was a prerequisite for effective home management. Yet she also seemed contented for such efforts to have a fairly small scope of influence—and in turn, set up a debate that would continue through much of home cooking discourse today. Who benefits from home cooking knowledge—is it only the occupants of the home? And does a discursive divide persist between the “dull-witted” women who settle for homemaking, versus the intelligent women who aim for loftier professional goals? Where do we have to see knowledge in practice such that it can transform cooking—no matter who is cooking, or where they are cooking it—into something that we recognize as informed by skill, craft, and creativity?

I’d love to hear how you read this text, and whether you think, as I do, that Corson foreshadowed a much bigger debate about the practice and purpose of home cooking in the twentieth century…read on!

Recommendation: If I’m doing any free reading this week and next, it’ll be likely in the guise of slowing down my brain for sleep (or for combatting insomnia). So last night’s 2am read was a good one: the first chapter of Sara Ahmed’s The Feminist Killjoy Handbook. Ahmed is such a brilliant model of what it is like to develop a funny, tart narrative voice in scholarship, and what she writes is as critically and theoretically informed as it is delightful to read.

The Perfect Bite: While working from campus earlier this week, I grabbed lunch with my mom at my favorite Boston-area fast-casual chain, Saloniki, and we enjoyed fresh salads topped with roasted delicata squash, chopped walnuts, and zucchini-feta fritters and lamb meatballs. But my favorite part of the meal was our shared dessert: a cup of soft-serve style Greek yogurt, drizzled with olive oil and topped with flaky sea salt. Even though it gave me some major Pinkberry flashbacks, the quality of the ingredients and the contrast of flavors was so excellent that I’ve been thinking about ways to replicate it at home ever since.

Cooked & Consumed: I know that I’m stressed out and on deadline when I’m craving roast chicken, and this week was no exception. Friday night’s dinner was a good one—a super-easy version of this Sam Sifton recipe for miso-butter chicken, converted to a whole bird and roasted over a bed of sliced fennel and onions. (If you’re attempting it at home, budget at least one hour of roasting time—somewhere between 375°F and 425°F—and tent some tinfoil over the top of the bird late in the cooking process so it doesn’t burn on top.) Really excellent flavors, leftovers for days, and finally an excuse to break open a new tub of miso for all kinds of cooking experiments.