Can She Bake a Cherry Pie? [Hardcover]

What a great book! Mcfeely's writing is so effortless and chatty you may not realize how much there is too learn.

She takes you, historically speaking, from the time when women HAD to bake the family bread (and had to remember the correct, locally produced flour that would actually work) to where we are blase about our optional and hands-off bread machines.

She gives mini-bios on people important in cooking history, and also her opinions on them--she cheerfully skewers Irma Rombauer (Joy of Cooking) for being opinionated yet admires Rombauer's personality just the same.

She is strangely taciturn on Martha Stewart--arguably the best known cook today. A criticism here and there on how Martha's _techniques_ are difficult, but nothing like her pleasant gossip on Julia Child and on Rombauer. Is Mcfeely, too, afraid of Martha's wrath?

This is a history book and a social criticism that is also a lot of fun to read.

Mary Drake McFeely's Can She Bake a Cherry Pie? recounts the history of American women and their kitchens in the 20th century. The scope of her book is narrowed to white, middle-class Americans. The aim of the book is to help white women recognize the world, as described by McFeely, that they have inhabited in the past century and do inhabit now. In the introduction, McFeely describes a goal of the book as helping white women to realize they too have a distinct culture that defines them just as much as other ethnic groups are presumed to be defined by their cultures (4). Due to the clear and simple reading of the text, and because there is no theoretical perspective offered by McFeely, the book can be successfully geared toward a general audience.

McFeely's background includes holding the positions of head of the reference department and assistant librarian at Smith College. In addition, she has been a resident scholar at the Bellagio Study and Conference Center in Italy, a visiting scholar at the Schlesinger Library and Radcliffe College. She has also authored Lady Inspectors: The Campaign for a Better Workplace, 1893-1921.

On the topic of McFeely's methodology, it is clear that she uses era-specific cookbooks to frame and describe the lives of the women living during those specific times. Other than that, she does not explain any other type of research she conducted nor does she cite other academic works to support the information in her book.

McFeely concludes with the idea that women have "freed themselves from the sole responsibility for family food," (168). She ends the book with the notions that that cooking can be an act of renewal instead of depletion, it can be expressive of one's personality instead of suppression of identity, and that it can be compared to creative work (169).

One of McFeely's strengths in the book includes her idea that cooking and the women who did it hold a crucial role in American history. From the farm women of the early 1900s, who woke up at four or five am in order to keep house and provide three meals for their families to the 1940s "captains of the kitchen" whose responsibilities included preparing meals that kept the morale of the family high in the difficulties of war, McFeely is able to maintain this idea throughout the book.

On the other hand, one of McFeely's weaknesses is that she implements very few resources to provide evidence supporting her ideas in the book. She does use era-specific cookbooks as references to describe women's lives during those times. However, she limits these to a couple of cookbooks, which may not be conclusive of those specific time periods.

Furthermore, there is no real, sufficient evidence offered for the claims she makes. For example, in her conclusion, McFeely says, "Many women have, in cooperation with their families, freed themselves from the sole responsibility for family food," (168). She does not provide any citation for this statement, nor does she explain where she was able to find statistics or surveys that support this claim.

Since the book is written clearly and is an easy read, I would recommend it to a general audience. It offers rudimentary information on the history of American cooking. However, I do not think scholars in the field of gender studies and food studies, who are already familiar with this basic information, would benefit much from this reading other than for pleasure.

This book review of "Can She Bake a Cherry Pie?" was written for the fall 2008 Food and Culture (E621) class at Indiana University. Dr. Richard Wilk of the Anthropology Department led the course.

In our family we have a funny story about one of my aunts who used undrained cans of cherries in her cherry pie. While we laugh at this story it does show that some recipes don't give enough detailed instructions (like draining the cherries first) because the writer assumed certain things to be known.

"Can She Bake a Cherry Pie?" begins with a similar story about how cookbooks in the 20s gave less directions because women learned most of their cooking techniques from their mothers. This was true for me as a child (my mother taught me to make strawberry jam) and later as an adult my grandmother taught me the basics of making apple pie. For my entire life I collected recipes from friends and family but never realized the origin of these cooking ideas.

Mary Drake Mcfeely has done a great service by creating this book that explains how foods came to be and also highlights important voices of each decade. This is really a short history of cooking from the 1800s to 2000.

It seems impossible that at one time there were not enough turkeys for Thanksgiving dinner. Now that we can get turkey year round we cannot imagine such a time. Ingredients we also take for granted today like sugar were of course at one point rationed so cake was often out of the question. This book also discusses The Depression and how people survived the war years.

Throughout the book there are fascinating little facts like the origin of Graham crackers or how specific cookbooks changed eating habits over the years. The author expresses with some distain how the Joy of Cooking from 1943 has had some major revisions. You may want the original as well as the modern version.

This book brought so many memories to mind. Like the first time I held a boy's hand at a fondue party in Africa. I also fondly remembered my first taste of Boeuf Bourguignon in Africa of all places. Somehow the recipes made it overseas. My mother also brought recipes and cookbooks with her when we moved to Africa in the 70s so I didn't miss out on foods like beef stroganoff. I have however never had a Coca Cola cake but did recently learn to make tuna casserole, something we didn't eat overseas.

"Can She Bake a Cherry Pie?" is probably not the best book to read while on a diet, as I am currently. If you love reading recipes this book will delight you with its decadent descriptions. For me this book was such a pleasure to read because it was like a trip down memory lane. I've rarely enjoyed a book so much.

~The Rebecca Review

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