December 15, 2023

As most genealogists know, women’s lives are more difficult to research than men’s. This is because men’s lives were apt to be lived in the public sphere. Women’s lives tended to unfold in the confines of the home. Due to this, clues to men’s lives are found in records such as deeds, school records, employment records, voting lists, naturalization lists and even obituaries. These records are less common for women.

That’s why many women are represented on their family trees only by a birthdate, marriage date and death date. Luckily, there are ways to add a few more details to women’s lives. They do require searching in some unusual genealogical sources. One of these is old cookbooks.

Cookbooks can tell us a lot about women’s lives. In earlier eras nearly all cooking was done by women. Cookbooks were geared toward them. These cookbooks can help us see what meals were like and how long they took to prepare. This can lend insight into how women spent their time. Recipes show what ingredients and cooking techniques were used at certain times. Often cookbooks contain pages of general household tips and other housekeeping hints.

If you are lucky enough to inherit an ancestor’s cookbook, she may have written notes in the margins. Even splotches and stains on certain pages may indicate which recipes she made most often. This is a good way to learn forgotten details of ancestors’ lives such as which cookie recipe great grandmother favored.

Many of us won’t have inherited our ancestors’ cookbooks, but it is still possible to find old cookbooks from the era of an ancestor. For example, my mother’s go-to cookbook when I was a child was called Betty Crocker’s Picture Cookbook. It was published in 1950, when my mother was still a newlywed. She used it for the next sixty plus years. When Mom passed away, my sister got the cookbook.

I would have liked Mom’s original book, but my siblings and I tried to be fair when we divided things. Instead, I did the next best thing. Mom’s cookbook was long out of print, but there are multiple used book shops online. Abebooks and Amazon are two that I use, but you can Google “used books” and find others. Some even specialize in cookbooks.

There were inexpensive old copies of Mom’s book for sale, but I learned that a reprint had recently been made of the Betty Crocker book. I bought one, and it is amazing how much insight it gave me into the milieu of my mother’s early married life. Expectations for what kind of meals a woman would prepare were high in that period. Many of the recipes are complicated and required hours to make. Ingredients that we never use today, such as lard, were common.

In the post-World War II era, science was seen as the savior of the future, and the cookbook reflected that. Women were encouraged to measure carefully and to follow scientific principles when cooking. I thought I knew a lot about my mother’s life, but the old cookbook showed me how her role as a homemaker was looked upon in the early 1950s. It was meant to be an all-consuming job which would use all the skills of an educated 1950s woman.

Cookbooks from even earlier eras are also available and can provide insight into earlier ancestors’ lives. If you want to know more about the women in your family, this can be one avenue to do so. You might even find a recipe or two that you want to re-create!

Carol Stetser

Researcher