A Flash in the Pan: Generating Exposure, Contesting Authority, and Claiming Ownership of Public Culinary Pedagogy in Twentieth-Century America

Abstract

Abstract: This dissertation explores the establishment of a public discourse around the knowledge of home cooking in the twentieth century. Using a blend of methodologies from the fields of cultural history, media history, and public history, the work chronicles the trajectory of home cooking discourse from the public lecture halls, cooking schools, and international expositions of the late nineteenth century, through the media spaces and government initiatives of the interwar period, to the radio, television, and magazine outlets that kept apace with the good food revolution from the 1960s through the early 2000s. The dissertation concludes with a look at public history initiatives around food history in museums in the early 2010s, and digital food platforms in the present-day, arguing that the public and established scholars and food experts have now become co-authors in what constitutes “good cooking.”