New Exhibit | Faster and More Fun: American Home Cooking in the 1920s

The Special Collections Research Center is pleased to announce the opening of a new exhibit in the Hatcher Gallery Exhibit Room on Monday, September 21st! Faster and More Fun: American Home Cooking in the 1920s explores women's changing relationship with food, cooking, and technology during the heady decade of the 1920s, sandwiched between World War I and the Great Depression. This exhibit draws on materials from the Janice Bluestein Longone Culinary Archive, as well as select items from the Art, Architecture, and Engineering Library Special Collections and the Transportation History Collection.

Three book illustrations side by side: Left: A cover of the magazine "Woman's World" depicting a woman in a checked apron reading a book with a feather duster on her knee. Center: an illustration from a catalog of kitchen plans, showing a woman in a long black dress and white apron sitting on a stool while doing dishes. Right: The cover of a book titled "Cook and Be Cool" illustrated by a woman dressed in a fashionable 1920s-style sleeveless gown and looking down at a table.

Left: Woman's World (March 1928); Center: Hoosier Kitchen Plan book (circa 1923); Right: Cook and Be Cool (1928)

Please join us for the exhibit opening at 4:00pm on Monday, September 21st for a conversation about social and culinary trends of the early twentieth century with Food Studies scholars Margot Finn, Mark Johnson, and Helen Veit. 

Headshots of three individuals. On the left, Margot Finn (a smiling woman with long dark hair with blue streaks in a blue shirt); in the middle, Helen Veit (a smiling woman with shoulder-length blonde hair in front of leafy tree branches); and on the right, Mark Johnson (a smiling man with short hair in front of a bookcase).

Margot Finn teaches courses on food and the liberal arts as a lecturer at the University of Michigan, and authored Discriminating Taste: How Class Anxiety Created the American Food Revolution.

Mark A. Johnson teaches at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and is the author of American Bacon: The History of a Food Phenomenon.

Helen Zoe Veit is a history professor at MSU specializing in American food. Her most recent book is Picky: How American Children Became the Fussiest Eaters in History.

Light refreshments will be served, including a special chocolate cake inspired by the Wellesley Fudge Cake featured in one of the books on display. Books by the panelists will be available for purchase, courtesy of the Fine Print Bookshop of Saline, Michigan.

We hope to see you there!


Faster and More Fun will be on view in the Hatcher Gallery Exhibit Room from September 21 to December 16!