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Digest: a Journal of Foodways and Culture 6: 72. © American Folklore Society 2018

Review of:

American Home Cooking: A Popular History
Tim Miller. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Studies in Food 
and Gastronomy, 2017. Pp. vii + 199, acknowledgments, index, 
bibliography, note on author.

By: Charles Camp

American Home Cooking is the latest of a growing number of books that 
provide an introduction to the scholarship of American foodways, and a 
good starting place for students and scholars relatively unfamiliar with the 
subject area. Its specifics will be apparent to anyone reading American Home 
Cooking for that purpose: the author begins his story abruptly with the year 
1800 and ends with a brief and somewhat mysterious chapter devoted to “The 
Future of Home Cooking.” The bounds set by the author may recommend it 
to newcomers, but readers will note that excising the “Future” chapter from 
this history book leaves a text 172 pages long—considerably less than might be 
expected for a work with so broad a title.

In fact, American Home Cooking is a kind of bibliographic essay that 
will perform the valuable function of introducing readers to some of the 
American sources that foodways scholars employ. With just 97 citations 
in the bibliography, it is clear that American Home Cooking is at best an 
introduction to the “Popular History” of the recent past in its subtitle rather 
than a structured survey or guide to basic sources. Unfortunately, among the 
research and published scholarship that the author overlooks is everything that 
has contributed to foodways scholarship from the social sciences and folklife 
studies. It might be fair to say, no sleight intended to the academic study of 
history, that American Home Cooking is an introduction to American foodways 
of primary value to students enrolled in courses offered by history departments.

My objective here is not to place the foodways research and publication of 
folklorists atop a pyramid of scholarship, nor to suggest divisions where 
alliances have been recently wrought with an ever-expanding range of 
disciplines. Rather, I read American Home Cooking with an eagerness to 



Camp, Charles. 2017. Review of American Home Cooking: A Popular History. 
Digest: a Journal of Foodways and Culture 6: 73. © American Folklore Society 2018

discover what a new generation of historians had to offer to existing historical 
thinking about foodways and opportunities for future collaboration. But despite 
the fact that a little less than half of the book is devoted to the years from 1945 
to the present, no living home cook is present. Instead, the sources for the 
author’s narrative are as bibliographically indebted to the living as the dead. 
What occurs in the second half of the book essentially aligns with the first three 
chapters, which are based upon what historians have said about the foodways 
of the past. I can respect the consistency of this approach, but I am puzzled by 
the author’s seeming indifference to the tens of millions of home cooks in their 
kitchens, stretching from his front door and reaching out coast-to-coast.
 
The fact is that what is absent in American Home Cooking is “Home” and 
“Cooking,” a method for stitching the present and the future to the past, and 
an invitation for students to develop a degree of attentiveness that bridges 
scholarship and first-hand observation. Such a recalculation does not require 
a new generation of fieldwork guides, just some encouragement. I won’t 
quibble with the author’s claim that increasing numbers of kitchens have come 
to be deployed to warm up leftovers and/or transform carry-out food into a 
momentary buffet. But these occurrences have not displaced home cooks, nor 
should they deflect attention from them. Here’s the irony: the phrase “home 
cook” may have become an odd mutation of “home cooking:” i.e., a home 
cook is a person engaged in home cooking. And I don’t know what sort of 
census standard we might employ if we wanted to know whether home cooks 
are waxing or waning in the 21st century. But I would be reluctant to make 
characterizations of such people, or worse, projections that forecast their 
numbers or vitality in the future without speaking to a few of them.

I’m not sure why American Home Cooking seems to lack the human touch 
that so many scholars and students from the varied disciplines drawn to this 
culture area have found essential to the study of American foodways. From the 
perspective of folklorists in the past half century who have come to incorporate 
cooks and cooking in their research, foodways has meant many things, 
including an escape from the esoterica of less common cultural practices. But 
foodways also offers a way back to those and myriad other expressive forms.

But before I conclude, let me give credit to Tim Miller’s work. He shows 
considerable skill in tracing the changes wrought in American society during 
World War I and, especially, World War II. I don’t know a better telling 
of difficult stories, made all the more important by the dwindling ranks of 
Americans who fought those wars on the battlefront and the home front. We 



Camp, Charles. 2017. Review of American Home Cooking: A Popular History. 
Digest: a Journal of Foodways and Culture 6: 74. © American Folklore Society 2018

all need to work harder to make sure the kitchen stories of those generations 
nourish the present, and the future.


