For
the Woodworker, woodworker's manuals, in their function in the amateur
woodworker's shop, are virtually identical to that role served by
cookbooks in the housewife's kitchen.
In
both cases, these respective operations are almost always conducted in
a home setting. Since, though, eating is something done by every human,
cooking occurs on a larger scale than amateur woodworking. In [ date ? ] it was
estimated that -- out of a total of [total number? ] households -- one million
households in America were woodworking homes.
(The question marks in the preceding sentence are both a sense of puzzlement and irritation. While collected and dutifully published by woodworking magazines, never is the data backed up by documentation, as if the these numbers simply appeared magically. I'll keep looking, though.)
'Prescriptive' Nature of Cookbooks and Woodworker's Manuals
Both cookbooks and
woodworker's manuals have a strong prescriptive
theme, prescriptive meaning that authors "prescribed" to readers how
cooking procedures are conducted. For beginners of both cooking and woodworking, it should be obvious why these "prescriptions" -- without detailed instructions, beginners would be "sunk", so to speak, to put it in colloquial terms -- are necessary. As "prescriptive" texts for virtually illiterate first-generation immigrant Americans seeking guidance for both "how to cook" and "learning table manners", the Fanny Farmer Cookbook -- details below -- was published late in the 19th century. A similar equation befell woodworking. With the virtual collapse of the system of apprenticeship as a means of learning the woodworking trade -- see details here -- a method of guiding beginning woodworkers through the step-by-step procedures required to dimension wood and fashion it into finished productswas desperately needed. This need was initially provided in Boston in the 1880s with the famous Woodworking Tools: How to Use Them
Need for a "Textbook"
In 1874, Boston's Industrial School Association began experimenting with ways of introducing handwork in the schools. Their intent, basically, was to implement the Russian system, but introducing a "rigid" program into a school program was problematical: "... if the Russian system is to have any extended application, everything must be done to make such instruction easy and efficient. emerging out of the deliberations was the conviction that a "textbook" -- "a text which showed every detail essential to the best performance of each manipulation".
To read more, see Chapter 1:8 ch_1_8_D_FRWI.htm
Document 58
--annotated reprint of the book's chapter 12 -- and
Part_D_instruction_sheets.htm
-- an account of how the above woodworker's manual established a standard for manuals that has prevailed from the latter part of the 19th century to the 21st century and probably forever.
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Cultural Role of Cookbooks
"[C]ookbooks
are as much about reading and fantasizing and experiencing how other
people do things in the kitchen as they about cooking per se."
Source: Daisy Maryles and Dick Donahue, "Who's Minding the Stove?" Publishers'
Weekly, July 26, 1999, page 36, as cited by Jessamyn
Neuhaus, page 280.
In
the preceding sentence, instead of a cookbook, to shift from cooking to
woodworking, think of woodworker's manual, change a few words, and --
in my opinion, anyway -- you have a viable concept of a wannabe amateur
woodworker, dreaming about what to produce in the woodshop.
Cookbooks,
perhaps to a greater extent, even, than woodworker's manuals, have been
tools used by individuals responsible for designing and maintaining
kitchens, pantries, dining areas, for acquiring cooking appliances and
utensils, for acquiring raw food, for composing meals, and for creating
individual dishes, (Since all my life I have been simply an onlooker in
such operations, I have probably not included essential ingredients --
pun intended -- in this conceptualization. By examining cookbooks
decade-by-decade, cultural historians definitely could begin to
visualize the impact of technological advances and such matters as
dietary changes impacted given populations.
For this analogy
between cookbooks and woodworker's manuals, the model cookbooks, I have
in mind are Fannie Farmer 1896 Boston Cooking-School
Cook Book and Irma
S. Rombauer's Joy of Cooking.
Considered the one of the
greatest of American
cookbooks, Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book was
acclaimed for a number of innovations. It was the first to use
measurement, now considered standard in American cooking, for example,
a level cupful, teaspoonful and tablespoonful. As well as giving
reader's simple directions, Farmer showed a hitherto neglected concern
for nutrition. Novices and experienced cooks contemporary
to the period
were introduced to a large amount of information, from instructions for
building a fire to how to bone a bird. By 1947, when it was a
half
century old, it had sold two and one half million copies.
The most
popular cookbook in the United States, Joy of
Cooking, was
first published in 1931. Rombauer (1877-1962) simplified many recipes
for American kitchens and modernized recipes for changing tastes. Since
it first appeared in 1931, almost 10 million copies have sold, and it
has never been out of print. It has been updated numerous times, and
each new edition is designed to reflect the changes and innovations in
both technology and dietary practices in the American kitchen.
(For more on the cultural
impact of Rombauer's Joy
of Cooking, checkout this 20-page, online paper by Elaine
Cheong,
a third-year student at the University of Maryland, 2000. Entitling her
paper, "Cooking with Politics, Economics, Science and Technology: Book
History and the Joy of Cooking,
and citing over twenty sources of information, she covers
such topics as "overview
and editions", prohibition, great Depression, World War II, Global
economy, science and food, technology and the kitchen.)
Not
surprisingly, cookbooks in the twentieth century mirror the history of
middle-class life. With their roots firmly in the "scientific" cookery
tradition of the nineteenth century, modern cookbooks reflect both the
wide-spread move away from the hired cooks and servants in the
middle-class home and, after about 1920, the changes in kitchen
technology and food processing.
For social
historian, Ruth Schwartz Cowan, the 1920s constitutes the "industrial
revolution in the home":
kitchens
are as much a locus for industrialized work as factories and coal mines
are, and washing machines and microwave ovens are as much a product of
industrialization as are automobiles and pocket calculators. A woman
who is placing a frozen prepared dinner into a microwave oven is
involved in a work process that is as different from her grandmother's
methods of cooking as building a carriage from scratch differs from
turning bolts on an automobile assembly line; an electric range is as
different from a hearth as a pneumatic drill is from a pick and
shovel...
Source:
Ruth Schwartz Cowan, "Industrial Revolution in the Home: Household Technology and Social
Change in the 20th Century,? in Terry S. Reynolds and Stephen
H.
Cutliffe, eds., Technology
and the West: A Historical Anthology From Technology and
Culture.
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(In
my narrative sections on the 1920s, I show that the revolution in
the home was also reflected in the amateur woodworker's shop.
Electrification, begun in the mid 'teens, was widespread in urban
centers by the 1920s, and had begun to penetrate into rural areas by
the 1930s.
Most important for a "revolution" in
woodworking fractional horse-power induction motors furnished the
"on-the-spot" power that scaled-down woodworker's machines needed.
At
the close of the 1920s -- with manufacturers like J D Wallace, Delta,
Boice-Crane, Walker-Turner -- many small scale power machines circular
saws, jointers, lathes, combination machines, where on the market for
consumers.
On
another matter, the growth of interest in home workshops: To sustain
enrollment in industrial arts classes -- enrollment was declining
because, with mass production of furniture, the old apprenticeship
system was collapsing --
Industrial Arts teachers created the "home workshop movement".
)
