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By Jennifer Cognard-BlackDuring the early 1940s when American women were asked to help the war effort by driving ambulances or working in the nation’s shipyards, cookbooks and magazine articles underscored how these same women could serve their country by planting victory gardens, cooking healthy meals with rationed foods, and, in the words of Tekla Barclay writing for American Home in 1943, by becoming the “Pinch-Penny Privates of Uncle Sam’s Army.” Indeed, as literary historian Sherrie Inness points out in her study of periodicals from this era, Dinner Roles: American Women and Culinary Culture, “[s]ome cooking literature suggested feeding family members as though they were soldiers…[,and] women’s cooking responsibilities were, at least rhetorically, raised to the level of military endeavors.” The Golden Ladle by Dorothea “Zack” Hanle and Martin Herz, published in 1945 by the Ziff-Davis Publishing Company, with illustrations by Jan Balet.  Author’s Collection. However, once the war was over and it was time for women to return fully to the home, Rosie the Riveter transformed into June Cleaver, that apotheosis of the happy housewife historian Joanne Meyerowitz has called the quintessential white, middle-class woman “who stayed at home to rear children, clean house, and bake cookies.” Within this historical context, Dorothea “Zack” Hanle and Martin Herz’s children’s book from 1945, The Golden Ladle, becomes a potent example of how the culinary discourse of the postwar period circulated images of white, middle-class womanhood as both idealized and sophisticated home cooks rather than members of the kitchen infantry.Even more, though, Hanle and Herz’s book demonstrates how dominant culture appropriated the image of the enslaved mammy to invest middle-class white women with the same “magical” powers attributed to black cooks from the antebellum period onwards. In this way, The Golden Ladle remakes household cookery into a new kind of empowerment: not the double-duty of domestic and industrial work done on behalf of Uncle Sam but, rather, the work of a professional-amateur cook who combines the homespun wisdom of the mammy with a burgeoning culinary cosmopolitanism—one that presages Julia Child and the Americanization of continental cuisine in the early 1960s. And the fact that this white, middle-class woman’s empowerment narrative comes out of a written text is what intellectualizes and professionalizes the new white mammy, thereby distinguishing her from her black female predecessor, who was of either the enslaved or working classes and mostly educated through oral traditions. “Jo-Anne Meets Mrs. Pinafore,” from The Golden Ladle, the Ziff-Davis Publishing Company, 1945. Author’s Collection The main characters of The Golden Ladle are Jo-Anne, a little girl with “long, beautiful curls,” and Mrs. Pinafore, a “plump, pink-cheeked” apparition who materializes in Jo-Anne’s bedroom the night before her birthday party. The book’s premise is simple: Jo-Anne would like to bake something for her party, but she doesn’t know how. As the narrator explains, “How happy she would be if she could say, as her mother often said to her friends, ‘Oh, it’s really nothing at all. I just whipped it up in my spare time!’” As Jo-Anne lies in bed, wishing this wish and unable to sleep, Mrs. Pinafore arrives on a soft, pink cloud of light, wielding a giant golden spoon and introducing herself as “THE MISTRESS OF ALL KITCHENS IN THE WORLD.”The remainder of Hanle and Herz’s book shows Mrs. Pinafore teaching Jo-Anne how to make “dozens of pretty things” for her party, either by whisking her across the Atlantic to visit little European girls cooking up delicacies in their own kitchens or by conjuring the ingredients for easy recipes while the two of them float above the clouds—Mrs. Pinafore’s preferred method of travel. And while such a plot may seem like nothing more than a fluffy mix of food and fairytale, in fact the cultural work that’s being performed in The Golden Ladle is profound, especially in terms of constructions of femininity, class, and whiteness in postwar America. “No Other Cook Could Get that Same Flavor in Pancakes.” The Ladies’ Home Journal, October, 1923: 71. Author’s Collection. Numerousscholars have discussed the problematic popularity of the mammy figure in American culture, beginning beforethe Civil War and extending to the present moment. To offer one example, themammy is still used to sell AuntJemima’spancake mix, a product and a persona created in 1893 by the R. T. Davis Companyfor the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. As Toni Timpton-Martin explainsin her wide-ranging study of African-American cookbooks, The Jemima Code, this trademarked mammy provides “a shorthandtranslation for a subtle message that went something like this…: ‘Buy thisflour and you’ll cook with the same black magic that Jemima put into herpancakes.’” As represented in this advertisement from 1923, the mammy’s perpetualhappiness and culinary intuition—the codes of her mythology—are appropriated bywhite women who wish to harness her abilities for their own domestic proficiency.Inbody and behavior, Mrs. Pinafore is just such an appropriator—even though shedoesn’t keep a mammy on a box in her cupboard. Rather, Mrs. Pinafore is a new kind of mammy. Wearing aself-referential pinafore and waving her magic ladle, she’s described as the“roundest, fattest lady” Jo-Anne has ever seen, with “twinkling” eyes and a biglaugh. Her cooking is innovative, charming, and foolproof. And while her magicalpowers are intuitive—seemingly innate, beyond explanation—Mrs. Pinafore is alsoa writer, which professionalizes her wondrous abilities. “Fruit Candies in the Land of Good Cooks,” from The Golden Ladle, the Ziff-Davis Publishing Company, 1945. Author’s Collection. Moreover,by broadening Jo-Anne’s palate and cooking skills in taking her to alliedcountries—they visit England to make a Tiffin of crumpets and marmalade,Holland to learn Dutch Cheese Snacks, France to create Fruit Candies, and neutralSwitzerland to cook Apple Delight—Mrs. Pinafore both demonstrates her own cultivatedtastes and also instills them in Jo-Anne. In this postwar environment, Mrs.Pinafore is a worldly woman, which strengthens her bid as a kind ofamateur-professional: exactly the ethos that JuliaChildwould adopt fifteen years later in Masteringthe Art of French Cooking.  Because The Golden Ladle is intended for young girls and includes a recipe in every chapter, this narrative is didactic as well as empowering, meant to raise up white, cosmopolitan mammies for a new generation. In fact, it’s clear that Jo-Anne is a white-mammy-in-training.  When she overeats Apple Delight, she says to her new Swiss friend named Clara, “Oh, my…, I have been a little pig. But it was so good. I hope you can excuse me.” And, of course, she is excused by both Clara and Mrs. Pinafore. Being “piggy”—having enough heft to throw her weight around—is vital to Jo-Anne’s training.In the end, Mrs. Pinafore’s legacy as awhite mammy is handed down by the book itself, so that Jo-Anne—as well as theflesh-and-blood girls reading along—can “grow,” both literally andfiguratively, cooking and (over)eating these stylish dainties. Thus, although thewhite, American female cook of the 1940s does not have the masculine autonomyof her predecessor, Rosie the Riveter, she can still lay claim to a domesticliteracy largely withheld from the black mammy—and, thus, to the dual authorityof kitchen prowess and culinary authorship as proof of her expertise. ReferencesBarclay, Tekla.“Pinch-Penny Privates.” American Home(June 1943): 68.  Deck, Alice A. “‘NowThen—Who Said Biscuits?’ The Black Woman Cook as Fetish in AmericanAdvertising, 1905-1953.” Kitchen Culturein America: Popular Representations of Food, Gender, and Race, edited bySherrie Inness. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001: 69–93.Hanle, Zack andMartin Herz.  The Golden Ladle: How to Be a Cook Without Using Fire.  Chicago and New York: Ziff-Davis PublishingCompany, 1945.Inness, Sherrie.  Dinner Roles: American Women andCulinary Culture.Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2001. Meyerowitz, Joanne.“Introduction: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945-1960.” Not June Cleaver, edited by JoanneMeyerowitz. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994: 1–16.  Tipton-Martin, Toni. The Jemima Code: Two Centuries of AfricanAmerican Cookbooks. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015. Walden, Sarah.“Marketing the Mammy: Revisions of Labor and Middle-Class Identity in SouthernCookbooks, 1880-1930.” Writing in theKitchen: Essays on Southern Literature and Foodways, edited by David A.Davis and Tara Powell. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2014: 50-68. 