Planning and Preparing Meals

Margaret Winnifred Campion, Byrta Carson, and MaRue Carson Ramee - 1964

Anthropometric approaches to health and nutrition thrived in the twentieth century. Cookbooks and home economics manuals, including this volume (used as a high school textbook from 1964 to 1978 [“Alberta School”]), contained graphs highlighting ideal heights and weights for growing children, as well as caloric intakes and nutritional breakdowns. Similarly, standardization in food grading, which in Canada began in the first decades of the twentieth century, is evident here in the explanation of egg quality. This book also highlights the practice of breaking down and restructuring work patterns to optimize efficiency, a technique borrowed from the industrial “scientific management” and applied to the household by home economists such as Christine Frederick and Lillian Gilbreth (wife of industrialist Frank Gilbreth) in the United States. The section on “looking attractive in the kitchen” stressed that young women could not forget the importance of appearance, too: cooking, even at home, is a performance.