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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 S. Rombauer, a homemaker and widow in St. Louis, Missouri. Her daughter Marion Rombauer Becker, an art teacher at John Burroughs School illustrated the book. Irma Rombauer had 3,000 copies of the earliest edition of her book printed by A.C. Clayton (a company which had never published a book before but printed labels for fancy St. Louis shoe companies and for Listerine); it was then 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 many home cooks' libraries.
The book has been updated 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, under the supervision of Rombauer's grandson Ethan Becker, oversaw 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.
In early 1997, the environmentalist group Sea Turtle Survival League complained that the 1975 edition contained a recipe for cooking Green Sea Turtle, an endangered species. The 1997 edition did not contain the recipe.
In October 2006, a 75th Anniversary edition will be published, returning Rombauer's original voice to the book.
First Edition
In 1931 Irma Rombauer, a recent widow needing a way to support her family, self-published the "The Joy of Cooking: A Compilation of Reliable Recipes with a Casual Culinary Chat". The cover of the book depicted St. Martha of Bethany, the patron saint of cooking, slaying a dragon. This cover was designed by Irma's daughter Marion who also produced the silhouette cutouts that illustrated the rest of the book.
In 1998 a facsimile of the 1931 edition was published. It has been described as "a perfect facsimile of that original 1931 edition".
External links
"The Joy of Cooking"