Introduction We are told that a hard-boiled professional cook, when asked what she regarded as primary briefing for a beginner, tersely replied: "Stand facing the stove."-- 1975Joy of CookingMost people who have heard ofThe Joy of Cookinghave a vague idea that it was written by a mother and daughter. More remember the name of the former than the latter, which is as both would have wanted it; Irma Rombauer, who began the work, loved stardom as much as Marion Rombauer Becker, her eventual collaborator and successor, loved privacy. When I began investigating the story of authors and cookbook, I discovered a strange phenomenon among many cooks who had first usedJoyin older, pre-Becker editions: an active partisanship in some mother-daughter contest that they perceived in the pages of the book. Their loyalty was invariably to the mother, and they believed that Marion Becker had either performed a kind of sabotage on the RombauerJoy of Cookingor at least imposed her own inferior taste on it.This view ofThe Joy of Cookingdidn't make much sense to me for some years, and still strikes me as fairly misguided. Yet the sheer frequency of the claim at last told me something. So many lay and professional observers from drastically varied backgrounds seem to have discerned an emotional and culinary tug-of-war in the book itself as to give any would-be historian pause.

After a time it dawned on me that the very impulse to choose sides -- or even think that there are sides to be chosen -- is a clue to an important quality of the work: its authors inhabit it more genuinely, more personally, than most cookbook authors inhabit their creations. To the end of their lives, both of the Rombauers put themselves intoThe Joy of Cookingin a way rare among commercially published manuals of any sort but very common among what are called "vanity books."The Joy of Cookingdid in fact start life as a vanity book: a brainchild for which the author pays the publisher, not vice versa. Thousands of such books appear each year, parading their begetters' assaults on the sonnet form, agendas for saving the world, or favorite recipes. In 1931 this one cost Irma Rombauer some $3,000 of the modest legacy her husband had left her on blowing his brains out -- an amount equivalent to a year's low-level white-collar wages in the second year of the Great Depression. She was fifty-four years old when the volume appeared, an utter amateur with no known qualifications for publishing a cookbook.Her forlorn gamble paid off. Eventually it would inspire among a sizable coterie of users a love and loyalty surpassing the common attachment of cooks to cookbooks.

A major reason for the affection in which its particular public held it is that somehow it never entirely lost the inner being of a vanity book. Its authors persisted in the amateurs' belief that those who might cook from their manual were as good as personal friends. What is more, they were right. It is true that there are plenty of cooks who don't much likeJoyor find themselves more annoyed than enthralled by its assumption of a confidential friendship. But people on a certain wavelength tend to be habitues, cheerleaders, partisans. It was in fact Irma and Marion's well-placed faith in a sure author-reader bond that enabled them to put across such an unlikely slogan as "the joy of cooking."What on earth is joyous about cooking? People who do not know its capacity to bore, weary, and frustrate are people who have never cooked. When Marion Becker came to publish a brief memoir of the book's first thirty-odd years, one of the mementos of its success that she chose to reprint was a 1944New York Times Book Reviewcartoon in which a well-upholstered dowager lies propped on a sofa gracefully perusingThe Joy of Cookingwhile her harassed maid glares from a steaming kitchen.

Marion and her mother.