The Warmest Room in the House: How the Kitchen Became the Heart of the Twentieth-Century American Home [Hardcover]

Steven Gdula (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 26, 2007

The first book that puts the hearth of the American home—its many unique challenges and innovations—in its proper place in contemporary history.

Thomas Jefferson once wrote that if you really want to understand the workings of a society, you have to “look into their pots” and “eat their bread.” Steven Gdula gives us a view of American culture from the most popular room in the house: the kitchen. Examining the relationship between trends and innovations in the kitchen and the cultural attitudes beyond its four walls, Gdula creates a lively portrait of the last hundred years of American domestic life. The Warmest Room in the House explores food trends and technology, kitchen design, appliances and furniture, china and flatware, cookery bookery, food lit, and much more.
Gdula traces the evolution of the kitchen from the back room where the work of the home happened to its place at the center of family life and entertainment today. Filled with fun facts about food trends, from Hamburger Helper to The Moosewood Cookbook, and food personalities, from Julia Child to Rachael Ray, The Warmest Room in the House is the perfect addition to any well-rounded kitchen larder.

 

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Freelance writer Gdula begins his story of the kitchen when women were wives and mothers, sanitation a primary concern and most modern industries in their infancy. Decade by decade America's domestic kitchen history unfolds, rapidly modernizing from a candlelit, well water–supplied pantry to a streamlined, lifestyle-supporting laboratory where sliced whole-grain bread toasts in seconds and hot-and-cold running water is forsaken for imported bottles from foreign springs. Even large social and economic forces like the Depression and WWII contributed to making our kitchens more efficient. Innovations now taken for granted, like frozen vegetables and the microwave, came from unexpected places: a field naturalist on assignment in the subzero Arctic; a defense-industry engineer's melted candy bar coming too close to a magnetron. While the book is well researched and entertaining, the narrative advances at such a rapid pace that entire decades (such as the chapter on the 1910s) are compressed into a handful of pages. Gdula successfully personifies the American kitchen, but he has to fight the evidence piling up on the other side of his argument, which continually and just as plausibly suggests that the real heart of the American home may be the television and the automobile. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

“A worthy candidate for the kitchen shelf.”   —Star Tribune

“A wealth of information on how the kitchen, and the food Americans prepared there, has changed since 1900..Gdula's scholarly approach will have you amazed at just how far we have come in easing the drudgery of cooking...a worthy candidate for the kitchen shelf.”  —Chicago Tribune

“Steven Gdula's The Warmest Room in the House will warm you right up. This whirlwind tour of the past hundred years or so sheds light on how the kitchen was often a reflection of our society at any given time...You'll emerge armed with a wealth of kitchen-related tidbits..From Typhoid Mary to Martha Stewart, Gdula paints a portrait of America's culinary characters and how they fit into our changing sense of how to cook and eat.”  —Gothamist

“Forget heart and hearth, argues the author of this inviting study of domiciliary evolution - home is where the stove is. Tracing the American kitchen's century-long rise from lowly back room to glowing center of domestic life, Gdula scours the historical pantry, illuminating the development of food preparation, scullery technology, gastronomic design, and culinary celebrity. The decade-by- decade survey he serves up is a delight, rich but restrained.”   —Atlantic Monthly

“[Gdula] demonstrates in ample and fascinating detail. ''The Warmest Room'' traces the evolution of the kitchen decade by decade through the 20th century.”   —New York Times

“Yes, of course, you are what you eat, but you may well have to cook whatever it is you are eating, and the tools and techniques for doing so can say as much about you as the food itself...[Gdula] is interesting when he outlines the rise of Julia Child, the abiding tension between diet books and cookbooks, and the appearance of appliances as faddish as the fondue pot and as durable as the microwave...[He] does an especially good job on the food-related double consciousness of Americans in recent decades.”   —Wall Street Journal

“In a more than 100-year odyssey, writer Gdula documents more than 10 decades of progress (or not) by American manufacturers, food producers, food experts, the government, and, yes, the consumer in the effort to transform the kitchen into the heart of the home...Gdula makes a strong case for the constant and continuing role of food and its associated topics…Fascinating.”   —Booklist

“Well-researched and entertaining...Gdula successfully personifies the American kitchen.”  —Publishers Weekly

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA; First Edition edition (December 26, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1582343551
• ISBN-13: 978-1582343556
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 5.9 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,322,747 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Bio
Steven Gdula was born in Johnstown, Pennsylvania in 1963. He grew up eating gobs and great Hungarian food in a house that was always filled with music. He's written a lot of magazine and web articles over the last 20 odd years. Many of those were about food, but most of them were about music. He's also written three books. Two of those were about eating, cooking, baking, and kitchen history. And one of them included 52 recipes and tales from selling gobs on the street. The other book was about a collection of T shirts he found archived away in a museum. He currently lives in San Francisco where he eats, drinks, bakes, blogs and occasionally plays bass for both Gunfighter Nation and Rau Ram.

Media
You can follow Steven on Twitter at @stevengdula. You can also read the latest updates about his cook book by following @gobbagobbahey on Twitter. If you want to read more, you can check out his web sites - www.gobbagobbahey.com and thewarmestroominthehouse.blogspot.com. If you'd like to see more of the work of the excellent photographer, Jun Belen, who took that fantastic photo of the three gobs on a dish posted here (as well as the back jacket cover of the Gobba Gobba Hey cook book) you can go to junbelen.com.

Recents
Recently read: Currently savoring every word of Nigel Slater's "Appetite." Likewise taking my time with Murakami's "1Q84." I never want his books to end.
Recently listened to: "Tin Drum" by Japan, Complete History Volume 9" by Red Die Number Nine, "Days" by Real Estate and "The Love That Whirls" by Bill Nelson.
Recently cooked: Currently have my go-to-Moroccan chicken in the oven, roasting some cauliflower and broccoli to go with it.
Recently drank: Waiting to open up a bottle of Cigare Blanc 2004 from Bonny Doon Vineyards.
Recently craved: The chicken pot pie from Martha Stewart's Comfort Foods cook book.
Recently Ate: Had a swoon-worthy Pork Belly Slider, with red onion and tomato jam, from Chef Dontaye Ball of Good Foods Catering. Equally good was the gumbo and fried chicken. For dessert I had a Snickerdoodle Dulce de Leche Ice Cream Sandwich from those baking magicians over at Sweet Constructions.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars American History - through the kitchen door, January 23, 2008

By 

Just Plain Lucky (Baltimore MD) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Warmest Room in the House: How the Kitchen Became the Heart of the Twentieth-Century American Home (Hardcover)

Considering how much time is spent socializing in people's kitchens, The Warmest Room in the House is an apt title for this book. And that's before the author explores how the room went from being literally hot (open fires, no ventilation) to the center for family interaction, to the design showplace of today. Gdula's easy writing style makes for an enjoyable read as he goes from our kitchen's humble and dangerous beginnings to it's current ultra-modern state. And he brings along great stories of cooking pioneers and legends like Fannie Farmer and Julia Child, as well as innovations like aluminum foil and tv trays. Considering the issues we are having today with food quality and safety, his exploration of our government's earlier efforts at regulation are particularly timely. It's a fun story, an easy read, and well told.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Time for a trip down memory lane, February 28, 2008

By 

Madge "MD" (MD) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Warmest Room in the House: How the Kitchen Became the Heart of the Twentieth-Century American Home (Hardcover)

If you want a 'good feel' read while accidentally learning quite a bit in the process, then this book is for you. Regardless of your age, "The Warmest Room in the House" is written in such a way that it provides you with a colorful and easily grasped perspective of how we got to where we are today in terms of how and what we eat. Being younger than those that truly suffered and sacrificed during the World Wars this country endured, I can only imagine the dedication our not-to-long-ago ancestors put up with in trying to get a meal on the table.

"The Warmest Room in the House" helps paint that picture very clearly.

You will enjoy this book.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A real letdown, July 28, 2008

By 

CTB "60s freak" (Seattle, WA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Warmest Room in the House: How the Kitchen Became the Heart of the Twentieth-Century American Home (Hardcover)

I read the review of this book in the Wall Street Journal and thought this would be an interesting Summer read - a look that American kitchen over the last 100 years.

A very breezy read, the coverage of any topic is about at deep as a sheet of Phylo. I would have been interested to see diagrams of kitchen designs and how they have changed over time, a much more detailed discussion of how various items of kitchen equipment changed the America diet (the book discussed this a little, but just skimmed the surface), much more on the changing role of the kitchen as the center of the home, etc....

I can think of dozens of interesting topics that this book never explored in any worthwhile depth. It would have been fun to see a discussion of kitchen utensils of various types that have gone out of fashion. Heck, it would have been interesting to know whether the percentage of space dedicated to the kitchen has increased over time.

To me, a lost opportunity and a fair waste of time to read (even more than I was looking for). Basically, I just wish the book had delivered what the title promised.