Women in the Kitchen

Book excerpt: Award-winning culinary historian Anne Willan traces the origins of American cooking through profiles of influential women whose recipes and ideas changed the way we eat. Women in the Kitchen explores the lives and work of twelve cookbook authors, beginning with the early colonial days, through the still-popular works of Fannie Farmer, Irma Rombauer, Julia Child, Edna Lewis, Marcella Hazan, and up to Alice Waters working today Anne Willan offers a brief biography of each influential woman, highlighting her key contributions, seminal books, and representative dishes. Willan also includes fifty original recipes-as well as updated versions she has tested and modernized for the contemporary kitchen. Moving seamlessly through the centuries to help readers understand the ways cookbook writers inspire one another and owe their place in history to those who came before them, Women in the Kitchen is the story of the authors whose essential books forever changed the culinary landscape. Book jacket.