The Joy of Cooking

The Joy of Cooking is one of the world's most-published cookbooks, having been in print continuously since 1936. It was privately published in 1931 by Irma Rombauer, a homemaker and widow in Saint Louis, Missouri. It was illustrated by her daughter Marion Rombauer Becker, an art teacher at local private school John Burroughs School. The Rombauers self-published early editions of the book; it was picked up by a commercial printing house, the Bobbs-Merrill Company, in 1936. Joy has, over the years, become one of the "bibles" of the American kitchen, and although it is considered a bit daunting for beginning cooks, it is the backbone of a number of home cooks' libraries.

Related Topics:
Cookbook - Irma Rombauer - Saint Louis, Missouri - Marion Rombauer - John Burroughs School - Bobbs-Merrill Company

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The book has been updated a number of times over the years, though the last update by Marion Becker was in 1976, and the project lay unchanged for about twenty years. In the mid-1990s, Simon and Schuster (owner of the Joy copyrights) hired influential cookbook editor Maria Guarnaschelli, who recruited Rombauer's grandson Ethan Becker to oversee the creation of the controversial 1997 edition. Though it kept the concise style of its predecessors, much of the book was ghostwritten by teams of expert chefs instead of the dedicated amateur that Irma Rombauer had been when she created the book. The 1997 version is fairly comprehensive, covering a great deal of detail that is not traditionally part of American cooking. Both editions still remain in print, as does a facsimile of the original edition; the 1964 edition is also still widely available in used bookstores.

Related Topics:
Simon and Schuster - Maria Guarnaschelli

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ISBN 0026045702

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