Word: joys
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...mess with success? Maria Guarnaschelli, the editor who carried out the herculean labor of assembling the new Joy, provides a candid answer: "The company would like the book to sell more than 100,000 copies a year. They would like to sell at least a million or two the first year and anywhere from 200,000 to 500,000 annually [after that...
During that period, through six revisions, the Joy of Cooking became the most authoritative and influential guide to the evolving sociology of U.S. kitchens. If how people prepare and consume food reveals anything valuable about their culture--and surely it does--then the dog-eared, gravy-stained pages of the old Joys are an invaluable resource for future historians. With 14 million copies in print, it is not cookbookery's commercial champion; that title belongs to the Betty Crocker basic cookbook, which has moved roughly 60 million copies. But Joy earned pride of place as the one indispensable kitchen reference...
That money, and the desire for more of it, figured in the decision should startle few people. But the profit motive does not fully explain the reasoning behind the new Joy. A number of experts feel that the 1975 version, published when Gerald Ford was in the White House, has been overtaken and outdated by contemporary events. "That was the era of Linus Pauling and vitamin C and the common cold," says Marion Nestle, chairman of the department of nutrition at New York University and a Joy contributor. "Frances Moore Lappe's book Diet for a Small Planet had just...
Among other things that are not, or only dimly, reflected in the 1975 Joy: the mounting ubiquity of microwave ovens and such once obscure utensils as the Cuisinart and the wok; the explosion of ethnic restaurants and cuisines; and the widespread disappearance of housewives into workplaces, making more and more weekday suppers a matter of heating up whatever someone in the family had the foresight to bring home from the take...
...Updating Joy may prove monstrously profitable, as well as an idea whose time has come. Actually doing so proved monstrously tricky. For aside from its encyclopedic thoroughness, much of the cookbook's perennial appeal has stemmed from the distinctive, comforting, we're-all-in-this-together voices of two women: Irma Rombauer, who wrote and self-published the original Joy in 1931, and her daughter Marion Rombauer Becker, who first served as her mother's helper and later assumed full custodianship of the ongoing endeavor. Dying of cancer, Marion concluded her acknowledgments to the 1975 edition in a valedictory manner...