Life (and Food) during Wartime

“ATTEN-SHUN”

So opens a 1943 booklet called Look Who’s Cookin’: A Wartime Cooking Course for Young America. An illustration shows three teenagers standing tall, carrying, respectively, a large spoon, fork, and knife instead of weapons. The book is one of nearly 200 cookbooks at the Getty Research Institute (GRI) at it paints a unique picture of life during wartime.

When the U.S. entered World War II in 1941, every aspect of American life was mobilized toward the war effort—including food. Nationwide rationing placed allowances on products like sugar, coffee, meat, oil, butter, cheese, and milk. Every individual was issued ration books filled with tickets that capped how many of these items they could get per month. With these kinds of restrictions, keeping families well fed required planning and creativity.

That’s where this booklet came in. It was published by the Home Service Department of the Southern California Gas Company—yes, the same SoCalGas you pay every month for your hot water. You may be wondering what business a gas company had putting out a cookbook. Well, starting in the 1920s, gas and electrical appliances like stoves, ovens, and refrigerators became increasingly common in American homes. That meant big changes for how Americans cooked. To teach people how to make the most of these modern conveniences, utilities across the country created home service departments. They were staffed by thousands of professional home economists, many of whom were women college graduates, who held classes and demos showing how these appliances helped make life easier.

Cookbooks like this one would have been available at these kinds of demonstrations. But what makes it unique is how it typifies the prevalence of wartime mobilization, even in everyday tasks. First of all, it portrays girls and boys sharing in kitchen duties, speaking to the relative gender parity in the 1940s that came when the U.S. government started actively encouraging women to take jobs in factories, the military, and other industries that had previously excluded them. With traditional homemakers now working outside the household, it was up to everyone else at home to pitch in.

The second thing that makes this book unique is that it is suffused with military lingo. Menus are called “mess plans,” food is “chow,” and if you’re hosting dinner, you’re the “C.O.” (Commanding Officer). This language reflects the messaging used in wartime propaganda to connect folks at home to the troops fighting overseas and encouraged national feelings of solidarity. Particularly for teenagers too young to work or enlist, it was a way of making even domestic tasks feel like part of the war effort.