Stand Facing the Stove

by Anne Mendelson

In this richly detailed biographical portrait, Anne Mendelson not only brings to life the vividly differing personalities of two remarkable women but traces their culinary roots and the course of American cooking from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1970s. Irma Rombauer, a child of genteel, cultured German circles in old St. Louis, was a woman of grand presence and rare charm who came to cookbook writing as a complete amateur after her husband's sudden death in 1930. Soon she was bending all her considerable energies to turn her first little effort, published at her own expense in 1931, into a general cookbook (distinguished by an ingenious new recipe format) that would be a personable, free-spirited alternative to the weighty cooking manuals of the day. Commercial publication in 1936 and national success in 1943 followed, but only at the cost of bitter enmity with Irma's publisher, the Bobbs-Merrill Company. The other half of a loving but difficult relationship, Irma's daughter, Mar