Christina Ward, "American Advertising Cookbooks: How Corporations Taught Us to Love Bananas, Spam, and Jell-O" (Process, 2018)

New Books in American Studies · May 10, 2021 · 58m

Christina Ward’s newest book American Advertising Cookbooks: How Corporations Taught Us to Love Spam, Bananas, and Jell-O (Process Media, 2019) examines a familiar but understudied sub-genre of commercially published cookbooks. Advertising cookbooks were most popular in the middle decades of the 20th century. They are usually published by a company or industry interest group rather than an individual chef or writer, and they serve as instructions for consumers to use the products of that company or industry. As Ward explains, advertising cookbooks introduced American consumers to new…