This study explores how a broader sense of citizenship was connected to behavior at home and the act of tasting food. How one should behave at home and how one tastes the food on the table not merely propagated the traditional domestic roles of women and class consciousness, but also defined membership in the New Republic from a deep stratum. Moving beyond the framework of women’s and gender history, this paper examines the role of the cookbook and its link to the controversy over who could be a befitting citizen of the New Republic.
In the early 19th century, during the period of the expansion of civil society, Lydia Maria Child (1802–1880), a famous American female writer and social activist, published The Frugal Housewife: Dedicated to Those Who Are Not Ashamed of Economy([1829] 1830). The Frugal Housewife became a bestseller, but simultaneously, was an unusual recipe book. For the “poor” or “middling class” table, Child provided extremely thrifty recipes using animal heads, brains, organs, and even rotten ingredients. This chap and crude cuisine clearly differed from the recipes in other cooking manuals for wealthy middle-class wives. Not surprisingly, reviewers of the Boston literary society spoke ironically of Child’s book as “information at which a palate of tolerable nicety would revolt.”
This study points out that the process of acquiring status as citizens offers a key to unraveling the essence of this strange recipe book. Focusing on The Frugal Housewife’s whole structure, principles, order, and context, it becomes apparent that it was not just a vulgar volume, but embodied a sensibility of citizenship identity that can be called a “taste of republicanism.” During a period of civil society reformation, Child attempted to redefine civic virtue through her cookbook and recreate civil society through the sense of taste. According to Child, her crude recipes expressed a sense of taste appropriate to citizens: for the 19th-century republican, this meant frugality, simplicity, industry, and self-made character.
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