History in the Kitchen: Tales of American Cooks

With a subject as vast as food history, there can be a lot of approaches. Barbara Haber is the curator of books at Radcliffe’s Schlesinger Library, and, in “From Hardtack to Home Fries: An Uncommon History of American Cooks and Meals” (The Free Press, $25), she comes at it from the standpoint of feminist scholarship on the history of women’s pursuits.

But the result is not as academic as it might sound. Haber is genuinely fascinated by the interplay of cooking and people’s lives, and she loves a good anecdote.

She’s attracted to the problems of cooking in hardship situations--the Irish potato famine, the hospitals of the Civil War, the camps in which the Japanese interned Americans in the Philippines during World War II--and to non-commercial food businesses, such as a restaurant founded by refugees from Nazism as a charity and the Fred Harvey restaurants of the old West, which were underwritten by a railroad as a way of luring travelers. (The only commercial restaurants in the book are those started by pioneering African American woman restaurateurs such as Cleora Butler and Edna Lewis.)

The story of the waitresses at the Harvey restaurants and their role in bringing a note of refinement to the frontier is the sunniest and most charming part of the book. The refugee restaurant, though, is a relatively dry account of who worked there and when and why they left. It has the air of a local interest story for Cambridge, Mass.

Haber misreads some things--the emphasis on game hunting in the early Gourmet magazine had at least as much to do with Gourmet’s perennial aim at upscale readers as with machismo--but on the whole she’s remarkably generous to her subjects, and even finds kind things to say about Henrietta Nesbitt, whose cooking for the White House of Franklin D. Roosevelt was notoriously dull.