"Maizie" and The Joy of Cooking
The goal of The Gastronomer is to take readers on a series of journeys to discover the origins of what and how we eat in America today. We begin that journey by examining American cookbook writers, starting with the irrepressible Irma Rombauer, creator of the Joy of Cooking, which is the best selling American cookbook ever published.
In 1930, Irma Starkloff Rombauer of St. Louis, Missouri was a socially prominent, 52 year old woman whose lawyer husband Edgar Rombauer had just succumbed to his final bout of recurring depression by killing himself with shotgun. With very few options available to her, the emotionally shattered but energetic Irma (who interestingly had never been a great homemaker) made the improbable decision to write a cookbook to try to stave off her pending financial destitution. With just $6,000 in savings, she worked frantically to gather recipes from her family and friends, and paid from her own pocket to have the first 3,000 copies of The Joy of Cooking privately printed by the A.C. Clayton Company in 1931. By 1935, a manuscript for the second edition of The Joy of Cooking had been accepted by the Bobs-Merrill Company, who would become the long term publisher of the title that would become the best selling trade-publication cookbook ever, with over 20 million copies sold.
However, The Joy of Cooking might never have come to fruition if not for the assistance of Edgar Rombauer’s secretary, Mary (“Maizie”) Whyte Hartrich. Maizie was the niece of one of Edgar’s best friends, and when Maizie’s father died leaving his family's finances in a wreck, Edgar paid to have Maizie trained as a legal secretary and brought her into his law practice. After Edgar’s death, Maize volunteered to help Irma with the cookbook project, without pay, and it was Maizie’s series of hand-typed notebooks of The Joy of Cooking that were provided to the A.C. Clayton Company in 1931. Maize continued to assist with various editions of Joy through 1951, as well as with Irma’s other two cookbooks: Streamlined Cooking (1939) and A Cookbook for Girls and Boys (1946).
A Cookbook for Girls and Boys grew out of a series of articles written for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and even though the book never approached the bestseller status of The Joy of Cooking, it was a respectable entry into the limited field of cookbooks written for children. It was designed to be a serious instruction manual, not merely a collection of recipes, and is notable for its emphasis on a balanced diet and nutrition. For example, the chapter on vegetables advises that they should be cooked as soon as possible after they are picked, and Irma counsels against over-salting. The book includes chapters for virtually every category of food, from souffles and timbales, to ice creams and sherbets, as well as providing instructions for how to filet a fish and how to pluck a chicken! The two-column format of the book is elegant, and features large san-serif type, a simple but helpful use of bold type for the ingredients list, and wide margins, all of which are enhanced by artful chapter heading illustrations from Irma’s daughter, Marion Rombauer Becker.
This copy shown below is especially important by virtue of the inscription from the grateful Irma Rombauer to her friend Maizie, without whom The Joy of Cooking might never have become a part of Modern American Gastronomy:
In 1930, Irma Starkloff Rombauer of St. Louis, Missouri was a socially prominent, 52 year old woman whose lawyer husband Edgar Rombauer had just succumbed to his final bout of recurring depression by killing himself with shotgun. With very few options available to her, the emotionally shattered but energetic Irma (who interestingly had never been a great homemaker) made the improbable decision to write a cookbook to try to stave off her pending financial destitution. With just $6,000 in savings, she worked frantically to gather recipes from her family and friends, and paid from her own pocket to have the first 3,000 copies of The Joy of Cooking privately printed by the A.C. Clayton Company in 1931. By 1935, a manuscript for the second edition of The Joy of Cooking had been accepted by the Bobs-Merrill Company, who would become the long term publisher of the title that would become the best selling trade-publication cookbook ever, with over 20 million copies sold.
However, The Joy of Cooking might never have come to fruition if not for the assistance of Edgar Rombauer’s secretary, Mary (“Maizie”) Whyte Hartrich. Maizie was the niece of one of Edgar’s best friends, and when Maizie’s father died leaving his family's finances in a wreck, Edgar paid to have Maizie trained as a legal secretary and brought her into his law practice. After Edgar’s death, Maize volunteered to help Irma with the cookbook project, without pay, and it was Maizie’s series of hand-typed notebooks of The Joy of Cooking that were provided to the A.C. Clayton Company in 1931. Maize continued to assist with various editions of Joy through 1951, as well as with Irma’s other two cookbooks: Streamlined Cooking (1939) and A Cookbook for Girls and Boys (1946).
A Cookbook for Girls and Boys grew out of a series of articles written for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and even though the book never approached the bestseller status of The Joy of Cooking, it was a respectable entry into the limited field of cookbooks written for children. It was designed to be a serious instruction manual, not merely a collection of recipes, and is notable for its emphasis on a balanced diet and nutrition. For example, the chapter on vegetables advises that they should be cooked as soon as possible after they are picked, and Irma counsels against over-salting. The book includes chapters for virtually every category of food, from souffles and timbales, to ice creams and sherbets, as well as providing instructions for how to filet a fish and how to pluck a chicken! The two-column format of the book is elegant, and features large san-serif type, a simple but helpful use of bold type for the ingredients list, and wide margins, all of which are enhanced by artful chapter heading illustrations from Irma’s daughter, Marion Rombauer Becker.
This copy shown below is especially important by virtue of the inscription from the grateful Irma Rombauer to her friend Maizie, without whom The Joy of Cooking might never have become a part of Modern American Gastronomy:
“To Maizie -
In whose good company
I have weathered many
a storm -
Gratefully and affectionately,
Irma S. Rombauer”
Excellent and a "joy" to read and learn about this background to iconic cookbooks.....
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