American Home Cooking - A Popular History

American Home Cooking provides an answer to the question of why, in the face of all the modern technology we have for saving time, Americans still spend time in their kitchens cooking.
Americans eat four to five meals per week in a restaurant and buy millions of dollars' worth of convenience foods. Cooking, especially from scratch, is clearly on its way out. However, if this is true, why do we spend so much money on kitchen appliances both large and small? Why are so many cooking shows and cookbooks published each year if so few people actually cook?
In American Home Cooking, Timothy Miller argues that there are historical reasons behind the reality of American cooking. There are some factors that, over the past two hundred years, have kept us close to our kitchens, while there are other factors that have worked to push us away from our kitchens.
At one end of the cooking and eating continuum is preparing meals from scratch: all ingredients are raw and unprocessed...