Aunt Sammy's Radio Recipes: The Original 1927 Cookbook and Housekeeper's Chat
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About this ebook
From the 1920s through the 1940s, American kitchens had a welcome guest in “Aunt Sammy,” a creation of the US Department of Agriculture and its Bureau of Home Economics. Through the radio program Housekeeper’s Chat, Aunt Sammy gave lively advice on food preparation, household chores, parenting and children, and gender dynamics as she encouraged women to embrace the radio and a host of modern consumer household products. The recipes she shared were gathered, in 1927, into a cookbook that became a valuable household manual for tens of thousands of Americans.
Aunt Sammy’s Radio Recipes revives the famous cookbook and joins it with extensive excerpts from the accompanying radio broadcasts, providing a fascinating study of how a witty and charming fictionalized personae became one of the early celebrity chefs of the radio age.
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Aunt Sammy's Radio Recipes - Justin Nordstrom
heart.
Introduction
FOOD AND IDENTITY
In her fascinating novel The Golem and the Jinni, author Helene Wecker imagines a clay statue infused with mystical powers who arrives amidst waves of immigrants in New York City in 1899. Although she outwardly appears like a young woman, this golem of clay and stone is unable to adjust to life in a city bustling with people. Isolated and solitary, she is finally approached by a kindhearted rabbi who presents her with a cookbook (specifically the famous 1896 Boston Cooking School Cookbook by Fannie Farmer) and asks her to prepare meals in his kitchen. Learning to cook, the golem is able to care for the aging rabbi and eventually broaden her connections with the human world around her.¹
The story of the golem’s cooking apprenticeship presents three important messages that will prove useful for understanding the cookbook you’re currently reading. First, cooking fosters human identity (both by enriching the identity of an individual, as in the case of the golem taking on a human personality, and by introducing a home cook to a broader community, as in the golem’s embrace of the Jewish Lower East Side in turn-of-the-century New York). As noted food historian Hasia Diner observes, the word companion
literally translates as someone you share bread with,
indicating the inextricable link between food and human relationships.² A second, related, point is that the cookbook presents a crucial guide, both to preparing meals and, in turn, caring for others. The golem does not become humanized by clumsily parading through the kitchen unaided — she learns to cook and more fully joins a human community by accessing the expertise of talented specialists willing to share their knowledge. Third, there is a specific link in this story between food and transformation. Combining raw ingredients to form a finished meal is transformative, dynamic, even magical — akin to the process of making simple clay into a human form.
While Americans in the late 1920s certainly did not witness clay statues springing to life, many surely remarked on the scientific marvels that were transforming everyday routines. The radio, in particular, transformed possibilities for mass communication, allowing a single script written in Washington DC to be read by dozens of different broadcasters and heard by millions of listeners every weekday at the exact same time, as was the case with the radio program that resulted in the cookbook Aunt Sammy’s Radio Recipes. This book was a product of the specific technological advancements of 1920s radio broadcasting combined with the home cook’s more universal need to seek out culinary advice while struggling to feed a busy family. More importantly, providing recipes to radio listeners in far-flung locations in an ever-expanding nation meant that people would be discussing, preparing, and eating food in similar ways despite never meeting one another directly. This idea of creating an imagined community through food and radio was the heart of this book’s appeal to Americans in the 1920s and beyond.
Aunt Sammy’s Radio Recipes was originally published in 1927 by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) as a way to make USDA research accessible to a wider audience of American home cooks. Although it was a valuable household manual for tens of the thousands of American housewives in the 1920s and 1930s, Aunt Sammy’s Radio Recipes was not meant as a stand-alone cookbook. Rather, it served as a companion to the equally influential radio program Housekeeper’s Chat, which began syndicated broadcast in 1926. The popularity of these two USDA projects went hand in hand. Conceived as a way to reach American homes through the novel medium of radio, USDA broadcasts began on thirty radio stations nationwide, but that number quickly grew to nearly two hundred, reaching homes across the continent (even to listeners in Hawaii).³ When Aunt Sammy asked her radio listeners to send in questions about preparing meals and cleaning their homes, the USDA received thousands of queries, along with more than twenty-five thousand requests for Aunt Sammy’s on-air recipes in a single month. In response to this demand, the USDA’s Bureau of Home Economics printed Aunt Sammy’s Radio Recipes in 1927, but had difficulty keeping copies in stock — distributing a hundred thousand copies of the cookbook in its first month. A total of half a million copies of the original version of Aunt Sammy’s Radio Recipes were sent to avid listeners, and a later (expanded) edition was issued in 1931.⁴
Several reasons account for Aunt Sammy’s popularity and the success of the USDA cookbook. It’s fair to say that neither the USDA broadcasts nor Aunt Sammy’s Radio Recipes would have achieved such popularity without the other. The Bureau of Home Economics recipes were detailed and specific, containing more information than could easily be remembered or written down verbatim. Busy home cooks simply could not scribble down all of the relevant information in a complicated recipe as broadcasters read them out loud, which made the cookbook essential. Yet, on its own, Aunt Sammy’s Radio Recipes contained none of the stories, details, or dialogue that made Housekeeper’s Chat such an enjoyable program for millions of listeners. Aunt Sammy passed along the advice of food scientists, yet her warmth, humor, wit, and homespun wisdom enlivened the USDA’s dry statistics about food’s vitamin content and disarmed listeners’ anxieties about innovative technologies, especially the radio itself. As one Florida newspaper report of Housekeeper’s Chat put it in 1926, Aunt Sammy was a new radio friend and neighbor. . . . Uncle Sam’s sister, [who] is the official radio representative of the Bureau of Home Economics. . . . She has a sense of humor, is the friendly sort, and knows all the new wrinkles and fine points in housekeeping, and will tell about them in a style all her own.
These diverse factors — the authority of the USDA, the neighborliness of Aunt Sammy’s style, the nationalistic Americana of her patriotic identity (Aunt Sammy was alternately described as Uncle Sam’s wife and sister) and her status on the air (as listeners’ radio friend
) — made her a welcomed presence in kitchens nationwide.⁵
WHAT SHALL WE HAVE FOR DINNER?
On November 2, 1920, Warren G. Harding was elected the twenty-ninth president of the United States — an event that, aside from its political implications, had a tremendous influence on technology, entertainment, and, indirectly, the way Americans came to understand food and cooking. The real significance of this date went beyond the election. That evening, word of Harding’s victory was announced into a microphone at a makeshift radio studio, set up on a rooftop at the Westinghouse Appliances facility in East Pittsburgh, making this event, in effect, the first commercial news broadcast. While radio waves had been discovered in the late nineteenth century, and experiments showed radio’s possibility for point-to-point communication during the First World War, by 1920 Americans were only just beginning to see radio as a form of mass communication, an idea that transformed American popular culture in later decades.⁶
This was especially evident in American foodways. One icon that exemplified America’s fascination with radio broadcasting in the 1920s was Betty Crocker. Although she had initially appeared in cookbooks, the fictionalized Betty first took to the airwaves in 1924 and brought her Cooking School of the Air to American radio listeners in one of the most popular syndicated broadcasts in American history. As historian Susan Marks demonstrates in her excellent analysis, Betty Crocker was not a single person, but a myth created by a mixture of food science and clever marketing at the Washburn-Crosby Company, as a way to promote the sale of its Gold Medal Flour.⁷
In this book, I reintroduce readers to another radio personality welcomed into American kitchens in the 1920s. The role of Aunt Sammy, the invention and personification of the US Department of Agriculture, was similar to that of Betty Crocker in capitalizing on the booming popularity of radio and in reassuring American home cooks struggling with domestic tasks. But, unlike Betty Crocker, Aunt Jemima, or other fictionalized women dreamed up to sell corporate products, Aunt Sammy was the voice of a government agency. She was imagined as a way to advertise USDA publications and to promote its Bureau of Home Economics by providing advice about food preparation. Her homespun and vaguely patriotic persona encouraged women to embrace not only radio but a host of modern consumer household