Making Modern Meals: How Americans Cook Today (California Studies in Food and Culture) (Volume 66)

Home cooking is crucial to our lives but it is not necessary to our survival. Looking closely at the stories and practices of American home cooks, witnessing them in the kitchen and at the table, reveals our episodic but also engaged relationship to making meals. Over the past century, cooking has become an everyday choice but it is no longer an everyday chore. This is not, however, a story of decline. Rather it is one of transformation.  Making Modern Meals explores the state of American cooking across all its varied practices. For many cooking is chore. For others it is a craft. For some it is a creative process. The author challenges current assumptions about who cooks, who doesn’t cook and what all this means for culture, cuisine and health. While Trubek contends that cooking has changed in the last century, this book attempts to locate, identify, and discuss the myriad ways people do cook in the modern age. In doing so, Trubek argues that changes in making our meals – from shopping to cooking to dining – have created new cooks, new cooking categories and new culinary challenges.