A Brief History of Lady Bakers to Soothe Isolation Anxiety
Marguerite Patten in the BBC show “Can You Cook?'“ in 1950. Image courtesy of BBC.
Why do so many people turn to baking during stressful times? Spoiler alert: I don’t have answers for you. I will, however, confess to stress baking. I know I’m not alone for two key reasons:
1) I haven’t seen all-purpose flour in-stock in the grocery store since early March; and
2) More than one of my friends has recently observed that their baking habits are far outstripping their quarantine exercise routines.
My mom and grandma both baked from scratch, so maybe it’s the weighted-blanket comfort of tradition that drives me to the pantry during tough times. It’s a nice outlet for converting frantic energy into tangible results, with the added bonus of a sweet treat when it’s all over. It’s equally possible that stress baking is born of something primal about the human body’s natural craving for fat and sugar.
It’s impossible to know how many generations of women have taken comfort in, and comforted loved ones with, baking, but now seems as good a time as any to pay homage to the creators of some of the most beloved classics.
I still remember the day I read the New York Times obituary for Ruth Wakefield, inventor of the chocolate chip cookie. I’m not sure if I was more shocked that I’d never considered the possibility of a chocolate chip cookie being invented (such a timeless classic—surely it was a recipe gifted from the gods to mankind when the world was first formed), or that the person who invented the recipe was a woman (shame on me).
Ruth co-owned the Toll House Inn with her husband, and the chocolate chip cookie was born as a riff off a butterscotch dessert. She was interviewed on a food radio show hosted by Marjorie Husted, who you may know as Betty Crocker (also a real person and not just a boxed cake brand! Who knew?), before selling Nestle the rights to reprint the recipe on their packaging for just $1.
Instead of talking about pay inequality, let’s talk about pound cake.
The first known pound cake recipe, according to The Smithsonian, appeared in a 1795 cookbook by Amelia Simmons called American Cookery. This was actually the first American cookbook published in the United States, about a decade after the conclusion of the Revolutionary War. The modern explanation that all of the ingredients, weighed together, equal one pound is actually a fallacy: our girl Amelia used a pound each of flour, sugar, butter, and eggs.
We don’t know much about Amelia. Her remarks in the preface of the first and second editions of the cookbook suggest that she was an orphan and illiterate, so she hired someone to transcribe her recipes. Her cookbook puts native North American ingredients like squash and cranberries to use, and she includes clever tips on how to dry peaches and preserve green peas until Christmas, whatever that means.
Like Amelia, Marguerite Patten knew a thing or two about getting crafty with ingredients. She worked for the Ministry of Food during World War II, creating no-fuss recipes for satisfying meals out of the rationed supplies available to British families. Over the course of her career, she authored 170 cookbooks, one of which was (no joke) a collection of her top 1,000 favorite recipes.
I haven’t tried it yet, but I’m excited about this recipe for carrot scones, which were popular in part thanks to British wartime propaganda about the humble vegetable’s ability to improve eyesight.
If chocolate chip cookies are more your speed, try the original Toll House version or this Handle the Heat recipe that’s become my personal favorite since Nathalia sent it to me a few years back.
For pound cakes, which are sensitive to altitude, temperature, humidity, and flights of fancy, you might have to experiment, but Alton Brown’s is a good starting point.
P.S. We know this list leans heavily white and Western, but those are the cookbook authors Google gave us. Did we miss someone? Email us at madelinelooksback (at) gmail.com.