The Women’s Pages: How My Grandmother and Other Women Built Food Writing As We Know It
Mimi had an office of her own on the second floor of my grandparents’ brick home in Richmond, Virginia. Inside was a hulking electric typewriter, which was terrifying and fascinating and no doubt state of the art for its time. During visits, my sister and I would make a beeline for the office and pull the door shut behind us. I’m not sure anyone cared, such was the spirit of benign neglect in that house. When we switched on the beige machine, it became a hot, humming beast that held its breath until one of us dared to press a key, at which point something inside it wound up and smacked the paper with an aggressive metallic thwack. Of the many enticing objects in the house—overflowing jewelry boxes, crystals and corals from travels abroad, antique chocolate molds made of worn copper—the typewriter was the most exciting thing we could get our hands on.
I had a vague idea that Mimi, whose actual name was Mildred Williams, wrote about food—which explained the typewriter—but by the time my memories come online she was retired and to my child’s eye “just” a grandmother.
It wasn’t until Mimi died in 1993 that I read her obituary and understood that she had been a beloved food editor for the afternoon newspaper—the Richmond News Leader—from 1946 to 1976. Her reach was local, though some transplants took the paper from as far away as Florida and California. In her sign-off column at the end of her run she explained how, when she started writing, “along with other postwar shortages, (hired) cooks became hard to find and food columns and cookbooks became the Dr. Spock of the kitchen.” Her career spanned government rationing, the rise of convenience foods, second wave feminism, and surging grocery prices in the mid-1970’s.
Food writing, when she began, had a fraction of the presence it does today, but the tide was already turning, and the landscape transformed during her 30-year career. Although today many of our best-known celebrity chefs and food writers are male, their presence in the field is relatively new; less than a century ago food was still women’s work. Craig Claiborne, The New York Times food editor from 1957 to 1986, commonly gets credit for making food journalism important and has even erroneously been called the paper’s first food editor, according to Kimberly Wilmot Voss in The Food Section: Newspaper Women and the Culinary Community. In fact, his predecessor was Jane Nickerson, who served the paper as its first food editor from 1942 until 1957. American women have been writing about food prolifically for centuries; they built the foundation of today’s food media.
The cookbook authors
There were cookbooks before there were other forms of food media, other than sooty notes jotted by the hearth. The earliest American cookbooks were written for and by women, as home and kitchen were their societally imposed domain. American Cookery by Amelia Simmons was the first cookbook published in this country, in 1797, and offers instruction for preparing native corn, breads, and meats, as well as archaic brews like spruce beer and “emptins,” a byproduct of the brewing process that was used as a starter. At the time of its release, most women who were doing the household cooking were domestics and not literate—Simmons could not read or write (she dictated her recipes). If American Cookery and other early volumes seem crude and imprecise next to today’s recipe collections, they still open important windows into America’s culinary history. They were earnest transmittals of kitchen wisdom among women, and they paved the way for more recipes to be recorded as the country developed a cuisine of its own.
The 19th century saw a rush of cookbooks, many written as manuals for the running of affluent households. The Virginia House-Wife by Mary Randolph (1824) and Boston Cooking-School Cookbook by Fannie Merritt Farmer (1896) are considered seminal works in cookbook history; the latter introduced the precision of a level measure. Malinda Russell and Abby Fisher, both career cooks, are credited as being the first Black cookbook authors in America, their volumes published in 1866 and 1881, respectively. The wide-ranging content of Russell’s Domestic Cookbook: Containing a Careful Selection of Useful Receipts for the Kitchen and Fisher’s What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking, refutes the outdated notion that early African American cooking consisted exclusively of soul food or poverty cuisine. Like Russell and Fisher, many of America’s cooks by trade were Black women who didn’t receive the credit they deserve for shaping the country’s emerging foodways. More cookbooks flooded the market in the 20th century, becoming specialized as the cuisines of distinct regions and cultures were recognized, and dietary trends came and went. Again, most were female-authored, though there are a few early 20th century works penned by forgotten men. The second half of the 20th century ushered in such cookbook celebrities as Julia Child and Edna Lewis, with men like James Beard and Craig Claiborne joining their ranks and becoming indelible figures in the food world.
Food writing’s lyricists
Ernest Hemingway wooed us with descriptions of briny oysters and crisp white wine, but M.F.K. Fisher was one of the earliest American writers—certainly the first female one—to show that food could take center stage in a kind of writing that was both sensual and cerebral. Take her 1941 piece “Three Swiss Inns,” in which she poignantly recalls simple meals in a Europe on the brink of World War II, showing the comfort a perfectly cooked trout and human connection can offer. Her words themselves are exquisitely evocative of place and taste, and often darkly humorous, but below the surface churns so much more. W.H. Auden hailed her as “America’s greatest writer” in 1963.
Fisher and others of her genre were initially writing for something of an elite audience, before eating for sheer pleasure was considered a more democratic pursuit. Fine food and leisure travel were something few could afford when she wrote during World War II, but her writing was both refined and accessible and foreshadowed a time when vicariously consuming other people’s feasts would become a national sport. Later, more 20th century female wordsmiths put food at the center, including Alice B. Toklas and Molly O’Neill. Food imagery in 20th century poems by Maya Angelou, Elizabeth Bishop, and Rita Dove expresses themes of identity and longing.
“Women’s section” newspaper columnists
For much of the 20th century, papers both regional and national had a female food editor like Mimi, though you don’t hear about them now. Commonly relegated to the “women’s pages,” they wrote for communities of devoted readers who relied on them not just for the latest recipes, but for nutrition information, ways to budget during a recession, and profiles of local cooks. Mimi, who was fairly clueless in the kitchen when she started, mined “experts” as a workaround. She interviewed a biology professor for a how-to article on foraging for backyard mushrooms and testing their edibility. She crowdsourced old Virginia recipes for a column that became wildly popular, judging by the hundreds of yellowed reader letters that I eventually inherited.
If today’s home cooks scroll their Instagram feeds for dinner ideas and leave questions in comments sections, mid-20th century readers phoned their local food editor directly with time-sensitive queries. Letters, too, were common. One, which reached Mimi in 1952, reads: “Will you please send me a recipe for Green Tomatoe Chow Chow using cabage, and also a recipe for Green Tomatoe Pickle (sic). I am enclosing self addressed envelope for same. I would appreciate this as soon as possible as it will soon frost and ruin my tomatoes.”
By the 1970’s, as my grandmother neared retirement, feminists were denouncing women’s sections for trapping women in domestic roles; Gloria Steinem called for their end. Indeed, the idea of explicitly gendered sections had become outdated, but something else was happening, too: food was becoming a thing everyone talked about, men included. My father, who worked as an ad man in his weekday life, spent weekends simmering stock on the stove and torching crème brûlées for dinner parties. Mimi, and the shifting culture, had taught him well.
The women’s sections never really died, they just reinvented themselves as style pages or dedicated food sections (in some cases full magazine supplements) in newspapers and were joined by a rich variety of other media. And the type of writing found inside didn’t go away but rather evolved in tone and content to keep up with the times; it was no longer writing for and by women—and thank goodness for that. Though we still have a long way to go in this evolution, a more diverse chorus of voices has increasingly enriched food writing. It wasn’t until 1991 that a BIPOC woman, Toni Tipton-Martin, became food editor for a major newspaper, The Cleveland Plain Dealer. A notable food journalist and culinary historian, Tipton-Martin was recently named editor-in-chief of Cook’s Country, a publication of America’s Test Kitchen.
Leafing through the collection of columns and letters Mimi left behind, I’m struck by the sense of community she fostered and the breadth of topics she covered throughout her career, a time span during which the world and women’s places within it went through dramatic changes. Anyone stumbling upon these—or other—women’s section clippings from mid-20th century America might find the voices there quaint, the recipes suspended in another era as though in a gelatin mold. But look closely at today’s internet food content, glossies, and even longer think pieces, and you’ll be able to make out the inky fingerprints of food writing’s grandmothers all over them.
This essay is a part of Comestible Issue 9, a special online edition devoted to the wisdom, knowledge, and inspiration from the women who came before us.
Papercut illustration by Anna Brones
Comestible is 100% ad-free and reader supported. Consider becoming a Comestible supporter on Patreon.
