The passive-aggressive politics of 1970s singles cookbooks
Women “basically want to be conquered — not only on the couch but in the kitchen, too.”
If Ron Burgundy cooked, he would have multiple copies of The Male Chauvinist’s Cookbook. Written by Cory Kilvert in 1974, the book promises to show men how to conquer the kitchen…and the bedroom. By mastering dinner, just like everything else in their lives, they would be able to subjugate women, too.
It takes a certain stomach to move past the book’s cover, which features an illustration of a nude blonde woman on her knees in front of a hairy-chested man. He dangles an apple over her mouth. His manhood hides behind a short apron. Should curiosity or bigotry propel the reader forward, he would find mostly French recipes plucked from heaping portions of ego. “Have you ever stopped to wonder why, with all the millions of practicing housewives in the world, the best kitchens have always been run by men?” Kilvert proposes on the book’s jacket. “Well, it’s simple. Men are better — on the job, in the bedroom, and in the kitchen.”
Though the cookbook was written as a form of comedy, boorish and unsophisticated as it may be, The Male Chauvinist’s Cookbook’s primary intent was to attract an emerging archetype: the empowered single man. According to Disco Divas: Women and Popular Culture in the 1970s (2003), by Sherrie A. Inness, no longer were singles considered antisocial rejects; after the sexual revolution, singledom was an adventurous lifestyle choice. And in the early 1970s, it was sexier than ever. Cookbooks cashed in on the craze. Not only did single people (mostly men) need to learn how to cook on their own, they craved external reassurance for solo living. Books like Kilvert’s were self-help with a side of Chicken Kiev.
Thankfully, not all singles cookbooks were as cloddish. In The Naked Chef: A Survival Plan for the Single Man, Len O’Dell confronts melancholy after separating from his wife. “I wake up one morning to find I’m alone,” he writes. “After having a woman around all my life, first mother, then wife, I realize there is now no one to care for me or minister to my special needs. Without her familiar presence, I suddenly feel naked.” Later, he sustains a metaphor about “hunting” for the right woman. Almost, Len, almost.
O’Dell concedes a touch of male anxiety during a time of tenacious feminism, when women’s liberation demanded a new approach to traditional gender roles. The kitchen was not an anatomical pigeonhole for cornering female domesticity. Women demanded the boardroom, their bodies, and a passport. Too bad if some men went hungry in the process.
The cookbook industry was poised to cash in, by bolstering manhood against women’s outrage. Singles cookbooks used weak narratives to explain why some wives were fed up, and to return the perceived power imbalance to men. “Throw your wife or girlfriend out of the kitchen and pack her off to her mother for the day,” wrote Donald Kilbourn in Pots and Pans (1974). “She’ll probably threaten to go there, anyway, once she realizes that you intend to solve all these womanly mysteries in your own way.” In fact, since women weren’t as intelligent as men, anything they could do men could do better, including cooking. The kitchen wasn’t the realm of women because they were better at it; it’s simply that men never had the time or the inclination. That is, unless it was their profession. “Just go into any French or Italian or Greek or German restaurant — when you step into the kitchen to compliment the chef, whom do you find yourself addressing? A woman? Certainly not,” writes Kilvert. “You find a man, a chef….Cooks, on the other hand, are women, and this title never had — nor will it ever have — the prestige or panache of ‘chef.’” Some women were so unrefined in the ways of gourmet, he argued, they won’t even appreciate your fine cooking. In order to seduce them, men merely need to dazzle them with style: spread a red tablecloth or uncork a bottle of wine.
“The books became a battleground for fighting over which gender was the superior one,” wrote Inness. Women were shrews who never allowed men in the kitchen to express their innate talents. And men could seamlessly achieve master chef status — if they wanted to, and with the right recipe, of course.
Cookbooks for single women weren’t as overt about gender territory — probably because they didn’t feel a need to defend the kitchen in the first place. But they were tools to empower female sexuality, via the single lifestyle. These books sold the art of seduction, with women in the driver’s seat. Amid recipes of shrimp with anchovy butter and strawberry kirsch, Helen Gurley Brown, editor in chief of Cosmopolitan, wrote in the Single Girl’s Cookbook, “You’re drugged, bedazzled, bewitched, and bestirred….Never trust a man who isn’t interested in food. If a man isn’t capable of savoring the thrills of fine food, he can never truly savor all the marvels of a woman.” If you wanted to repel a man, Brown suggested stuffed baked eggplant or Roquefort-wine burgers.
Singles cookbooks haven’t been as widely studied, likely due to other massively popular food trends and changing attitudes during that era. In particular, the health-food movement and food activism meant Westerners were sampling granola, quinoa, rye bread, and other organic fare. The politics of consumption meant that more and more people in the mainstream were making conscious choices about ethically sourced meals with low environmental and societal impact.
That is, until the 1980s. As the economy rebounded, luxurious meals and plush eating establishments meant couples could court each other in public. Microwave sales boomed, and singles cookbooks now flaunted quick-and-easy recipes — this time for working moms, as well.
By then, The Male Chauvinist’s Cookbook would have passed into the realm of laughable. Ron Burgundy would have to rely on his other leather-bound books and an apartment that smelled of rich mahogany. Or just die alone.
