Gloria Goddard

This little cookbook starts with the following paragraph: “This book has two aims: The first is to gather together the more unusual recipes, those recipes that rarely appear in standard cook books, and which are always much more delightful than the more commonly known dishes. The second, and more important aim is to furnish a book which will aid the business woman who keeps house, and the women who are forced to do their cooking in kitchenettes.” Goddard then bemoans the younger women’s disinterest in “the womanly arts”, saying that these women preferred to work in an office, and that their husbands were therefore forced to eat at commercial establishments. But wait! After the generalization, Goddard reverses course and says that many of these female office workers would be happy to cook dinner, but there are several barriers to her doing so:
1. The tiny kitchens in apartments, which might only have room for a two-burner stove or an electric grill;
2. The lack of space for an ice box and the relative inability to store food or leftovers;
3. The elaborate cookery of previous generations that could not be replicated in those tiny kitchens; and
4. The greatly reduced time that was available for cooking.

With that in mind, Goddard herein presents recipes for smaller quantities of food, which can be prepared in 45 minutes or less, and which rely fairly heavily on canned foods. She also lauds the appearance of whole-meal cookers that allowed a whole meal to be cooked simultaneously over one burner. (I assume Goddard is referring to something like Household Institute’s Triplicate Set, which I have described in my entry for the Household Institute Cook Book.)

Recipes are done in prose style, with no list of ingredients. They run the gamut from what I would not call recipes (e.g., a canned tomato soup that has milk and a bit of soda added to it) to simple but worthy preparations (e.g., broiled fish roe).… (mais)