Stand Facing the Stove

When St. Louis housewife Irma von Starkloff Rombauer (1877-1962) self-published The Joy of Cooking in 1931, she was, at age 54, a total amateur in the kitchen. Indianapolis publisher Bobbs-Merrill helped make her cookbook a huge bestseller in its subsequent editions. Whereas Rombauer brought a homespun, spontaneous style to her recipes, her daughter, Maron Rombauer Becker (1903-1976), who collaborated on Joy starting with the 1948 revision, transformed it into an all-purpose learning tool and also imbued it with health-food consciousness. By following Joy's successive incarnations as well as rival manuals, Mendelson, a culinary historian and freelance writer, serves up a delightful social history of Americans' changing cooking and eating habits. She sets Rombauer's German-American roots in the context of a thriving Midwestern immigrant community and also unravels both her and her daughter's tangled, acrimonious relationship with Bobbs-Merrill. Mendelson's narrative is enlivened by numerous personal stories: the suicide in 1930 of Rombauer's manic-depressive husband, Edgar, a civil rights lawyer; Becker's championing of modernist art and her crusading for affordable housing in Cincinnati; her often tense relationship with her mother, who criticized her plain looks; and her steadfast, loving care for her mother, who suffered repeated strokes, even as she herself fought the cancer to which she eventually succumbed. Photos. (Nov.)