Profs and Pints Online presents: “Gender Stereotypes on the Menu,” a look at how Americans came to see foods as either feminine or masculine, with Paul Freedman, professor of history at Yale University and author of American Cuisine: And How It Got This Way.

[ This talk will remain available in recorded form at the link given here for ticket and access.]

Many Americans assume that women have a weakness for chocolate and otherwise prefer light foods, such as salads, while men are partial to meats, especially if grilled outdoors.

This wasn’t always the case, however. Menus from ladies’ restaurants in the mid-nineteenth century featured “Calf’s Head with Brain Sauce,” “Grilled Kidneys Fines Herbes,” and other seemingly unfeminine choices.

What caused certain foods to be associated with one sex or the other Join Paul Freedman, a historian who has researched long-term changes in American cuisine and eating habits, for a fascinating journey through time to look at how male and female palates became stereotyped.

We’ll start in the late 19th century, when ice cream and then light foods first became associated with female tastes. Popular restaurant chains from that time, such as Schrafft’s or Child’s, offered sandwiches and salads followed up by ice-cream sundaes. Home economists, advertisers and women’s magazines began warning that married women should not let their “dainty” tastes interfere with their obligation to please their husbands whose meat-and-potatoes tastes might not run to salads or colorful Jell-O creations.

As of the early twentieth century, popular cookbooks were printing recipes billed as “the way to a man’s heart.” Some typical titles were A Thousand Ways to Please a Husband (from 1917) and Feed the Brute! (from 1924). Magazine articles warned that husbands would stray from their marriage if their culinary preferences were ignored.

The period after World War II brought a flourishing of cookbooks marketed toward men. Many flattered their prospective readers by telling men that, when it comes to food, they are more creative, less stuck in routines, and endowed with more gusto and daring that translates into a willingness to experiment. The Playboy Cookbook of 1972 was a prime example of this genre.

Where are we now, in the age of #MeToo and a period in which we cautiously anticipate a post-Covid world? Will male and female tastes come to no longer be regarded as different? Might the multiplicity of sexual roles and identities blur, or render irrelevant, the distinctions that had been drawn between male and female food preferences?

If nothing else, this talk will give you food for thought the next time you watch a restaurant commercial, open a menu, or head off to the grocery store.

Profs & Pints Online: Gender Stereotypes on the Menu