Food as Female Labor
I’m really good at saying no to things I think I need or want at thrift stores, but even I have a very hard line in the sand about what is (and what isn’t) a non-negotiable purchase.
Vintage cookbooks in general, and community/church cookbooks in particular, are my own personal fabled finds. This past week was particularly fruitful for me at the Brattleboro Goodwill and I now find myself the proud owner of a vintage James Beard’s American Cookery book (1969-ish, great shape) as well as three or four comb-bound, hyper-local beauties from not just my region, but as far as Texarkana and even one from West Virginia that promises a “Vinegar Pie Recipe Inside!” on the cover.
These little books, with those maddening flaps that come unbound with too much use, are sometimes my favorite bedtime reading (a weird habit I picked up from my mom, I think). I am nosy by nature and I love to know what strangers like to eat and cook. I love the old names, the old recipe titles, the few and far between that get a sentence or two to orient the reader to the dish’s supposed history or popularity within the little community publishing the cookbooks.
These books are full of dishes made with tuna and margarine, casseroles with condensed soup, and dreams suspended in gelatin.
Traditionally, they also include the recipe submitter’s name, but rarely a full name.
Instead, I’m greeted by “Mrs. Robert Fields,” “Mrs. Arthur Bennett,” “Mrs. Charles Greene.”
Page after page, a woman’s contribution—her best pie crust, her Sunday stew, her family’s secret cookie—is filed not under her name, but her husband’s. Time fades and the cookbook gets donated, perhaps travelling thousands of miles from one side of the country to another, landing in Southern Vermont.The woman disappears, even as her labor remains.
At first, I just noticed the pattern. Then I started to feel its weight. What does it mean when a woman’s name doesn’t survive, but her recipe does? What does it say about how we’ve valued her work—not just in the kitchen, but in the community, in her family, in the culture she helped to feed?
The first of these community cookbooks, A Poetical Cookbook from 1864, was published to raise funds for Union soldiers injured in the Civil War—a time when both the Union and Confederacy struggled to feed and care for their troops. What began as a practical effort to support a cause soon became a national phenomenon: more than 3,000 community cookbooks were published between 1864 and 1922.
These slim volumes, often held together with twine or metal binding, were more than just fundraising tools—they became repositories of women's work, knowledge, and creativity. Today, they endure as a record of both the "old ways" of cooking and the deeply gendered labor that shaped everyday life.
Largely compiled by women for other women, these books occupy a strange in-between space in the historical record. They were unofficial, often homespun, and rarely recognized by serious food writers or historians at the time. Yet they captured what more polished publications left out: the dishes actually being made in different regions, the substitutions cooks used when ingredients were scarce, and the small improvisations that gave local food its flavor. While mainstream women’s magazines aimed for mass appeal—flattening regional quirks into tidy, universal recipes—community cookbooks kept the messy, specific, and practical knowledge alive.
When I read these cookbooks, I don’t just see recipes—I can also see echoes of my own family. My maternal grandmother’s recipe box is crammed with cards in her careful script, some smudged with decades-old grease, others rewritten from friends (especially charming is a collection of “Weight Watchers” recipes shared amongst friends in the Florida camper parks my grandparents frequented in the 1990s) as well as random recipes clipped from magazines, butter packaging, and boxes of brown sugar.
She never published a cookbook, but she cooked three squares a day for the majority of her life--first for a family of 11 in the 50s and 60s and then for herself and my grandfather as they drove their fifth-wheel camper across the country and back during retirement.
No one asked her to. No one needed to. It was simply expected.
And yet, my grandmother’s name appears on nothing official. There is no published acknowledgment of her contributions. No plaque, no headline. Only those cards, tucked in a worn tin, and the memories of those who ate her food.
There’s a strange, heavy silence around this kind of work. Of course she made it. Of course she brought the casserole, or the bundt cake, or the ambrosia salad in the Tupperware bowl with the cracked lid. That’s just what women did.
But why don’t we talk about them more?
Why don’t we say their names?
There’s an unspoken agreement in so many families and communities: this kind of labor is expected, even revered in its way—but it’s not supposed to take up too much space.
It’s not to be professionalized, spotlighted, or treated as capital-W Work. It’s the kind of labor that is always noticed when it’s missing, but rarely celebrated when it’s present.
It’s the labor that I, personally, struggle most with at the end of the day when I’m all out of gas and the expectation that I will miracle something to eat out of limited ingredients, zero ambition, and even less desire to do so.
And yet, these women were doing far more than just feeding people. They were managing logistics, stretching budgets, creating menus, remembering dietary needs, planning for the weather, anticipating feelings. This was emotional labor. Social labor. Cultural labor. And it was often carried out invisibly, as a “natural” extension of being a woman.
We’ve inherited the meals, but not the recognition.
Today, when I flip through these community cookbooks—pages yellowed with age, dotted with grease, stapled or spiral-bound like handmade archives—I see more than nostalgia. I see resistance. I see documentation. I see women leaving behind what they could, in the only way they were allowed.
To preserve these recipes is not just an act of culinary interest—it’s a feminist act. To say her name, even if it was once hidden behind “Mrs. Robert Fields,” is to reclaim a piece of history. These women fed more than bodies. They fed relationships, churches, neighborhoods, and movements. They kept culture alive during times of scarcity and change. And though their work may have been undervalued, it was never unimportant.
Even if the recipe is for tuna surprise, honoring it—and the woman behind it—is a way of saying: we see you now. You mattered then. You still do.