Eye Appeal: The Aesthetics of Garnish and Gender

 

Collenne Wider Strichartz, cmw249@cornell.edu

Master of Regional Planning

 

Introduction

 

Garnishes, often regarded as superfluous culinary embellishments, transform dishes, drinks, and meals by adding previously missing elements. Garnishes serve two functions, one explicit and one implied. Practically, garnishes add features otherwise absent from a dish: flavors necessary for completing the dish, missing colors and textures, or other indefinable qualities. Garnishes supplement. Related to the acts of serving and entertaining, garnishes contain the intentions of the preparer. The presence of a garnish, elaborate or otherwise, suggests quality, care, and time in preparation.

 

Furthermore, garnishes are tactile—they must be touched or somehow interacted with to remove, to use, or to eat them, which creates engagement with the dish. Garnishes may be playful, such as with the swirling of a swizzle stick to mix together a cocktail or the opening of a miniature, paper umbrella, itself a toy. Diners are often forced to interact with garnishes in more intimate ways than with utensils—using their hands to remove an errant frill of herb or to extract a Maraschino cherry from a cocktail glass. Tracing garnishes as the accoutrement of an unexpected group of female figures—Polynesian nudes gracing restaurant menus, Playboy Bunnies on paper and in the flesh, Betty Crocker and her sorority of product spokeswomen, Martha Stewart and other domestic goddesses—reveals cultural attitudes and anxieties about gender, augmented by corporate promotion.

 

American Tiki Style: Exoticism and Eroticism

 

Tiki style evolved in the United States throughout the first half of the twentieth century, a loose appropriation of Polynesian culture resulting in an entirely American phenomenon. Reaching its peak in the 1950s, the infatuation with the South Pacific possibly stemmed from the problematic (due to its connotations of racial and sexual dominance) fantasy of reclaiming paradise—Eden found on the enchanting shores of foreign lands, where the “fair climate, natural beauty, passionate natives, and abundant resources of exotic foods seemed to promise an existence free of the restraints and stresses” of western society.[1] Polynesian primitivism began with artists and writers such as Paul Gauguin, Jack London, Pablo Picasso, and Robert Louis Stevenson. Their discovery, often through travel, and subsequent integration of Tiki and other primitive motifs into their work, later influenced the popular adoption of Polynesian culture.

 

The Tiki figure held multiple meanings in Polynesian mythology. He was the personification of the first man—the Adam character in the fall from grace myth, responsible for the creation of the first woman. Tiki was also a phallic symbol, the name for the sexual organs of the creator god Tane. Lastly, Tiki was the patron god of artists, an apt protector and muse. [2] American Tiki style imported the god’s full range of sexual meanings, appropriated as symbols of postwar, middle-class affluence and leisure. Applying the Tiki imagery to spatial environments such as bars, restaurants, motels, and entertainment spaces (Walt Disney opened the Enchanted Tiki Room at Disneyland in 1963) [3] and to furniture and home décor, provided a visual contrast to modernism—a kitschy alterative to modernism’s rigid, geometric forms, possibly accounting for Tiki’s popular appeal.

 

Restaurants and bars especially adopted Polynesian forms, infusing dining experiences with foreign exoticism and making its suggestions of glamour widely attainable by middle-class Americans. Don the Beachcomber opened in Hollywood, California, in 1934—an ode to the end of Prohibition. Founded by Ernest Beaumont-Gantt, a restaurateur from New Orleans, the restaurant pioneered the staple of all Tiki restaurants to follow: potent rum cocktails “presented as Technicolor fantasies that meant as much for the eye as for the tongue and served with elaborate garnishes in even more elaborate vessels.” [4] Moderation was nowhere on the menu. (Figure 1a)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The imagery of the Polynesian restaurant represented the relaxation of sexual mores—a temporary escape for the typical, suburban couple yearning for a “night out in acceptably exotic circumstances.” [5] As publically tolerated nude forms, likenesses of bare-breasted, native women graced menus and other ephemera of Polynesian restaurants from the mid-1930s onward. (Figure 1b) Unfolding the menu, a culinary centerfold, revealed not only expansive options of exotic cuisine and vibrant cocktails but also erotically posed cartoon women, “the first and foremost icon of Polynesian pop, embodying the promise of unconditional love.” [6] Don the Beachcomber served the “Vicious Virgin,” a signature cocktail of Virgin Islands rum and West Indian spiced liqueurs. While the name surely referred to the locale of its sourced ingredients, the nude woman perched across the rim of a cocktail glass, herself garnished in only a lei with a flower tucked behind her ear, reinforced other connotations—an entendre already on the diner’s mind. Brightly colored cocktails were garnished with succulent fruit, paper umbrellas, swizzle sticks emblazoned with names such as Don the Beachcomber, Trader Vic’s, and Kon-Tiki, and the nude depictions from the menus. In the midst of the Tiki craze of the 1950s, however, a cultural institution emerged that not only utilized the exotic motif but furthered the social acceptance of sex and nudity, inventing an entirely new form of visual consumption.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Playboy’s Garnishless Kitchen

 

The erotically charged Tiki easily found its place in the amorous world of Hugh Hefner and Playboy Magazine—two nearly synonymous entities. A photograph of Hefner taken in the Chicago Playboy Mansion in 1966 depicts the magazine’s founder—fully dressed in black slacks and shirtsleeves, his signature pipe in hand—surrounded by five bikinied Bunnies in the mansion’s indoor swimming pool. Fittingly, the room is decorated in a Polynesian theme: lush, tropical foliage, bamboo wall coverings, and three wooden Tiki masks from designer William Westenhaver’s “Contemporary Idol” collection [7] adorn the room. The Bunnies complete the scene, mere garnishes to the sexual fantasy.

 

In his debut editorial for the magazine, “Manifesto for an Indoor Man,” Hefner urged men to reclaim the domestic sphere by creating male-only spaces within the home. Playboy wished to restructure the “spatial divisions that governed social life in the United States during the Cold War…[creating] a new space that would be radically unlike the ‘habitat’ of the American nuclear family.” [8] Playboy sought to achieve this by attacking the kitchen, the most evidently feminine domain in the home.

 

While Playboy’s bachelor penthouse physically erased women from the kitchen, replacing her with electric gadgets, Thomas Mario’s food and drink columns obliterated her traces from the food itself. Published in 1961, The Playboy Gourmet: A Food and Drink Handbook for the Host at Home assembled a compilation of Mario’s columns from the first eight years of his tenure as Playboy’s Food and Drink Editor. Hefner provided the introduction to the collection, calling Playboy the first magazine to “feature food and drink tastefully attuned to the masculine palate.” [9] According to Hefner, in the “increasingly womanized society, the domain of the chef—male since time immemorial—has been invaded en masse by chintz-aproned housewives. But today’s well-rounded urban male, safe in his bachelor bastion with The Playboy Gourmet in hand, can still wield the spatula and twirl the swizzle stick with style and dash.” [10] Asserting that the realm of the chef, generally portrayed as male, is the domestic kitchen, Hefner called potential playboys to arm themselves with culinary know-how and Playboy recipes to reclaim their rightful space.

 

Although the columns in The Playboy Gourmet appear in an edited format, the magazine’s original recipes, photographs, and innuendos remain. There is, however, nary a pin-up or Bunny to be found within the collection. The only representations of the female form in the cookbook are LeRoy Neiman’s “femlins”—the term a portmanteau of “female” and “gremlin” coined by Hefner to describe the ink illustrations of the nymph-like characters he commissioned Neiman to create for the magazine in 1955. The mischievous femlins, wearing only black stockings, high heels, and, occasionally, opera-length gloves, lounge in cocktail glasses, emerge from beer steins, recline on dinner plates, and, in one instance, even garnish a martini with an olive from a jar nearly as tall as she is. The femlins draw from the depictions of nude women on Polynesian menus—amusing inclusions injecting a dash of whimsy and eroticism to the accompanying object. While Playboy is not responsible for eroticizing primitivism, it nevertheless capitalized on the existing association.

 

In a brief warning about the content to follow—as if Playboy’s readership needed such—Hefner defined the masculine palate in opposition to the feminized tastes foisted upon men in modern society. “For those inured to the curlicue-carrot…this book may come as something of a shock.” [11] Hefner derided the curlicue-carrot—the ultimate expression of the superfluity of female cookery—a sentiment made earlier by the food and drink editor himself. In 1956 Mario cautioned readers against “radish roses...cheese roses, tomato roses, orange roses, grapefruit roses and apple roses…all designed to make flimflam out of good natural food.” [12] For these culinary atrocities, Mario placed the paring knife in the hand of a woman and advised readers not to make such a mistake. As a dining companion, the Playmate accompanying the meal provided the only garnish the playboy required—the Martina to his martini. (Figure 2) Playboy’s rhetoric even extended beyond their pages to those of other popular magazines. Harper’s editor Bernard De Voto, husband of Julia Child’s lifelong cookery correspondent and collaborator Avis De Voto, mockingly called the aesthetic creations featured in the pages of women’s magazines “fancy compositions,” unfit for men.[13]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Playboy eradicated fanciful food creations and accompaniments, fully expelling women from the kitchen—a radical success for the magazine, which had finally “broken the last taboo, smashed the last icon of the suburban house: it had made the woman disappear from the kitchen.” [14] Garnishes and elaborate presentations served as symbols of wifely and motherly care, reflecting her selfless labor and familial devotion. “Decorative cooking,” which dated to the late nineteenth century as part of the home economics movement, “aimed to elevate the feminine work of the kitchen to a science—or a fine art,” simultaneously ennobling the homemaker while allowing her to assert control over her environment. [15] As advocated by The Art of Serving Food Attractively (1951), among other culinary texts, decorative cooking provided an avenue for the homemaker to fulfill another of her many obligations as hostess-housewife: Whether the modern hostess is preparing a meal for her family or a luncheon for the afternoon bridge club, she knows that an attractive serving should be the rule and not the special exception. Food appeal depends upon its presentation. Colorful food imaginatively served will improve everybody’s appetite, whereas a drab presentation of the same food may spoil the whole meal. [16]

 

Cookbooks instructed women to present food in imaginative displays—appearance a critical aspect of making food appealing. Furthermore, the adoption of convenience foods—frozen, canned, and processed—in the 1950s likely increased the pressure for women to present their families with intricate assemblages of ingredients intended to visually convey love and care. With the “appropriate seasoning and embellishment,” [17] a prepackaged dinner became an acceptable substitute for a made-from-scratch meal, family members and guests none the wiser.

 

Betty and Bunnies: Creating Corporate Images

 

During the postwar years, corporate spokeswomen largely pedaled the newly available convenience foods. “Live trademarks” [18] appeared in print and television advertisements, lent their voices to radio programming and their likenesses to cookbooks, pamphlets, and other materials, educating and encouraging homemakers in the proper methods of household consumption. Laura Shapiro describes these women as “both ubiquitous and elusive, flourishing in a surreal universe that left purely optional the distinction between fiction and reality.” [19] General Mills developed Betty Crocker in 1921, the most famous and enduring character from the sorority of corporate spokeswomen. Like a garnish denoting personal touch, Betty Crocker lent a gentle, unintimidating visage to the corporation, softening the “impersonal transaction between the homemaker-customer and General Mills.” Carefully crafted and shaped through extensive market research, Betty Crocker reflected American’s desire for individualism in “an age of corporate monoliths.” [20]

 

Relying on such research, corporations such as General Mills created characters that were “interested in the consumer but not involved with her.” [21] Homemakers needed to trust the opinions of spokeswomen without feeling threatened. Theirs was a strictly professional exchange, woman to woman. “Interested but not involved” could equally apply to the relationship between Playboy Bunnies—waitresses at their namesake clubs—and their patrons. Bunnies, like home economic spokeswomen, inhabited both the public and private realms, spanning fiction and reality. Keith Hefner, brother of Hugh, delivering his rehearsed remarks that began every Bunny training course, called the Bunny, “the American romanticized myth…what gives the Club its glamour. We stress that Bunnies should not get too familiar with customers for just that reason.” [22]

 

The depictions of Bunnies in Playboy’s Southern Comfort® Barmate: Home Bartenders’ Guide to Expert Drink Mixing present a more refined version of the femlin or primitive nude. Rendered in color wearing the standard issue Bunny ensemble—and, unlike the fictional femlin, sent home with a demerit for each article of clothing missing, wrinkled, torn, or otherwise askew—the Bunny tended to the needs of her clientele, rather than (at least deliberately) taunting them. (Figure 3)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Like Betty Crocker, the true identity of the Bunny is concealed behind corporate protocol, not revealed to the client for fear of dropping the veil and destroying the fantasy. Both served merely as intermediaries between the corporations that constructed them and potential customers, fulfilling desires to sell products. Personifying the corporate symbols of American companies created intimacy between the product and the consumer, as the stories and backgrounds of the Playmates did for Playboy’s readers. These corporate images are not haphazardly applied but carefully crafted and affixed to products like garnishes themselves. 

 

With Playboy, a portable device for fulfilling heterosexual, male fantasies, Hugh Hefner invented modern pornography. [23] While not necessarily about portraying obscene content, modern pornography allowed for production, distribution, and consumption of explicit material through contemporary media channels, transforming private acts into public phenomena. The magazine replicated the pleasure of voyeurism within its pages, invading a formerly private space through its mediation: “The fourth wall of the domestic space had been knocked down and replaced by a camera.” [24] General Mills used the same tactic with Betty Crocker, inviting listeners (and later, viewers) into her kitchen, an intimate albeit corporate exchange. In Playboy, readers often caught Playmates in domestic settings—her bedroom, her living room, her bathtub, acting coyly unaware of her audience yet putting on a show all the same.

 

Rather than create a single spokeswoman such as Betty Crocker, Playboy Enterprises cultivated an image for an army of eager spokeswomen to inhabit and proliferate—Bunnies were never off-duty. Reprinted in 50 Years of the Playboy Bunny, excerpts from the Bunny Manual, the official guidelines dictating the behavior and appearance of Bunnies, outline the proper physical positions for Bunnies to assume while on the job. The sanctioned positions allow her to garnish herself throughout the environs of the Club, literally “perched” or “dipped” as an object, one not intended to be touched by patrons. The Clubs codified the persona of the Bunny, every detail of her appearance regulated, every action sanctioned by Playboy. She was at once real, as in ‘in the flesh,’ yet completely falsified, the most realistic live trademark ever conceived.

 

Presentation in the Home: ‘Colorful Food Imaginatively Served’

 

Entertaining, Martha Stewart’s debut cookbook released in 1982, offers themed fêtes for every occasion, ranging from the intimate to the absurd—“light summer dinner for four to six,” “neoclassic dinner for eight to ten,” “tempura party for sixteen,” “clam bake for thirty,” “cocktails for fifty,” “summer omelette brunch outdoors for sixty,” “wedding luncheon for two hundred seventy.” The hardcover cookbook, bound in bright red, features colorful, glossy images of elaborate table settings, complex food presentations, and, of course, Stewart in her by no means modest Westport, Connecticut, farmhouse, Turkey Hill Farm. Stewart poses in her kitchen wearing a conservative, white dress with frilled placket and a necklace of pearls, surrounded by a bounty of hanging copper pots and pans, woven baskets, fresh flowers, dried herbs, pastries, gourds, eggs, crocks, molds—supposedly the September haul from her garden and a portion of her extensive collection of cookery equipment. [25] Later scenes depict Stewart tending to her honeybees (of Italian origin, providing 80 pounds of honey annually for her personal use), feeding her “flock of rare and unusual chickens,” [26] and transferring hundreds of fresh strawberries from her self-proclaimed trademark—her “giant wicker gardening basket brimming [with fruit]”[27]—into plastic pints.

 

Stewart forays into the exotic with a number of her menus—none more elaborate, however, than the “Hawaiian luau for twenty,” a party inspired by Stewart’s “affection for orchids, and her desire to entertain her friends in an unusual and colorful way in late November.”[28] (Figure 4) Stewart hosts the luau in her greenhouse, replicating the dreamlike ambiance of a

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

moonlit shore with the slight humidity and the lush array of homegrown houseplants. Contained within a chapter on buffets, Stewart first dispenses her philosophy on hosting “today’s buffet,” progressing beyond outdated “chicken fricassee or turkey divan, made in huge quantities and kept warm over a tiny candle.” [29] Stewart abandons these chafing dish staples for spreads organized around international cuisines—with the “unusual ingredients and provocative display[s], they are entertainments in themselves.” [30] Stewart utilizes garnishes, here appearing as intricately decorated tablescapes and equally ornate entrées, to please and amuse her guests. In the tradition of the home economists who preceded her, Stewart reestablishes the obligation of hostess and homemaker to please and amuse, subservient to her guests and family. Stewart correctly learned from her domestic foremothers: attractive servings are the rule, not the exception.

 

Stewart’s Hawaiian luau menu does not disappoint, offering roasted suckling pig as the lavish centerpiece of the meal, garnished with a “necklace of star fruit” [31]—an uneasy anthropomorphic description for an item about to be consumed. Fruit salads and dips are served in seashells. Slices of kiwi, orange, and star fruit decorate halved pineapples drizzled with orange liqueur. And no luau would be complete without tropical cocktails. Stewart offers seven variations, the colorful beverages garnished with fresh fruit, flowers, and herbs. Stewart’s presentation evokes the escapism of Tiki while showcasing her care and concern as a hostess, intending to please, delight, and impress her guests. She adeptly imbues the domestic environment with exoticism.

 

 Sarah A. Leavitt positions Stewart as the most recent incarnation in a long lineage of domestic advisors guiding women on the business of the home. [32] Stewart joins Catharine Beecher and Good Housekeeping’s Helen Koues, among many others, famous, unknown, real, and constructed. Like Betty Crocker’s Picture Cook Book (1950), Entertaining utilizes photographic essays depicting a set of disembodied hands—indicated as Stewart’s by the ruffled, white sleeves—to illustrate, step-by-step, the process for rolling out the perfect pie crust, deboning and stuffing Cornish hens, filling pierogi with cabbage and cream cheese, and decorating a four-tiered wedding cake with buttercream frosting. Stewart deploys familiar methods of visual consumption, as common to Betty Crocker as to Playboy, forging intimacy with her audience and establishing hers as a voice of expertise.

 

Since her emergence from the domestic sphere, Stewart’s presence has saturated available media, offering her devoted fans a variety of consumption options—at her height, cable and network television shows (both still running in syndication), her monthly magazine Martha Stewart Living (now expanded to include a quarterly wedding spin-off and special issues dedicated to individual holidays), radio, television, and special event appearances, and innumerable corporate collaborations and product lines—all overseen by Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, Inc. Like Hefner, Stewart mediates her existence, not only erecting her own public image but crafting that of her patron—women striving “to make their lives, or at least their daydreams, more delicious, more unique, more decadent, more inviting…to have homes and families that respect their efforts and that benefit from their supervision.” [33] The devotees of Stewart suffer from the same anxieties as postwar homemakers, the generation of “college girls and peripatetic war workers who moved to Levittown and settled down with ex-G.I.s in the late 1940s and early 1950s—girls who…missed ‘the apprenticeship of the stove.’” [34] Although Martha Stewart breaks with Betty Crocker’s persona of a maternal surrogate, she creates an environment marked by aspirational living. Whether Stewart exacerbates existing domestic insecurities by flaunting an unattainable fantasy or provides pleasure through escapism, just like Playboy before her, she creates a true gastropornographic landscape.  

 

Comedienne Amy Sedaris, Stewart’s antithesis, entered the domestic advice realm in 2006 with I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence. Like Entertaining, Sedaris’s guidebook provides more than menus and recipes—it offers guidance to the modern hostess, albeit with a helping of sarcasm and wit. Like Stewart, Sedaris appears in the pages of her cookbook. She is, however, not pictured on a genteel estate in Connecticut surrounded by expensive glassware. Instead, Sedaris impersonates various oddball personas using costumes, makeup, wigs, and prosthetic props. She even dons a number of vintage dresses throughout, masquerading as a housewife in polyester floral. Sedaris also adopts imagery more fitting for a centerfold than a chef, assuming pin-up poses nearly nude and covered in whipped cream or rainbow sprinkles. (Figure 5) Adding texture, height, color, playfulness, and sweetness to dishes, these elements function as garnishes applied to the female form, made grotesque rather than erotic.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The introductory letter to the cookbook, typewritten on single sheet of paper and signed by the author herself, is reminiscent of Hefner at his typewriter, pipe held loosely in the corner of his mouth. Like Hefner setting out the purpose for his magazine, Sedaris lays out her own aspirations: “I’d like to bring entertaining back to [the] essentials. I’m not concerned with proper table settings, seating arrangements, or formal etiquette. Who can have a good time with all those rules? How can you enjoy yourself if you’re worried whether the pumpkin is the bowl or part of the meal?” [35] Sedaris’s manifesto rings in opposition to Stewart and the 1950s tradition of culinary over-presentation. While Hefner condemned garnishes as representations of feminine concern, Sedaris rejects them as representations of feminine oppression, anxiety inducers that ultimately prohibit enjoyment rather than produce it. Sedaris defines what “party” means to her—a simple get-together with friends for conversation, enhanced by food and drink. It is not an affair for “Tiki lights and fruity cocktails served in coconut shells on the patio.” [36] Entertaining need not be complicated.

 

The Playboy empire further weaves itself into Sedaris’s work. Suggesting a menu to celebrate the week’s end, Sedaris includes a recipe for red wine steak butter sauce, an indulgent accompaniment for steak or roast beef made by simmering shallots in butter and reducing with red wine—a fittingly decadent recipe Sedaris’s mother adapted from the pages of Playboy. [37] The reclamation Hefner sought is realized in Sedaris’s childhood kitchen. Playboy penetrates the feminine domain, ironically through the female homemaker. Sedaris’s mother willingly invited Playboy, likely already in the home, into her kitchen.

 

Conclusion

 

More than mere supplements, garnishes are symbols served on plates—tangible evidence of the female presence. Large corporations such as Playboy Enterprises, General Mills, and Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, Inc. cultivate purely falsified personas designed to promote economic exchange, simultaneously dictating what it means to be female. Perhaps when Hugh Hefner invented modern pornography, he solidified the gastropornographic landscape as a commercial one, heavily mediated and intentionally crafted. As ubiquitous figures, Polynesian nudes, Playboy Bunnies, Martha Stewart, and even wholesome Betty Crocker inhabit this liminal zone. These spokeswomen act as conduits to the fantastical realm, just as garnishes—the ubiquitous trappings of culinary presentation—connect diners to fantasies big and small, in the kitchen, in the bedroom, and on faraway shores.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bibliography

 

Kirsten, Sven A. The Book of Tiki: The Cult of Polynesian Pop in Fifties America. Köln, Germany: Taschen, 2003.

 

Leavitt, Sarah A. From Catherine Beecher to Martha Stewart: A Cultural History of Domestic Advice. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2012.

 

Mario, Thomas. The Playboy Gourmet: A Food and Drink Handbook for the Host at Home. Chicago: HMH Publishing Co., Playboy Press, 1961.

 

---. “Playboy at the Salad Bowl,” Playboy 3, no. 7 (July 1956), 32-34, 72. 

 

Marling, Karal Ann. As Seen on TV: The Visual Culture of Everyday Life in the 1950s. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1994.

 

Post, Bob. “A Diet of Sex,” Playboy 25, no. 4 (April 1978).

 

Preciado, Beatriz. Pornotopia: An Essay on Playboy’s Architecture & Biopolitics. New York: Zone Books, 2014.

 

Robertson, Josh. 50 Years of the Playboy Bunny. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2010.

 

Sedaris, Amy. I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence. New York: Warner Books, 2006.

 

Shapiro, Laura. Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America. New York: Viking, 2004.

 

---. “‘I Guarantee’: Betty Crocker and the Woman in the Kitchen.” In From Betty Crocker to Feminist Food Studies: Critical Perspectives on Women and Food. Edited by Arlene Voski Avakian and Barbara Haber. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005.

 

Starr, Kevin. Golden Dreams: California in an Age of Abundance, 1950-1963. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

 

Stewart, Martha. Entertaining. Text with Elizabeth Hawes, photographs by Michael Skott. New York: Clarkson N. Potter, Inc., 1982.

 

Wenker, Mary Albert. The Art of Serving Food Attractively. Illustrated by Helen Disbrow. Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1951.

 

 

 

 

1 Sven A. Kirsten, The Book of Tiki: The Cult of Polynesian Pop in Fifties America (Köln, Germany: Taschen, 2003), 34.

2 Kirsten, The Book of Tiki, 22.

3 Kevin Starr, Golden Dreams: California in an Age of Abundance, 1950-1963 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 51.

4 Kirsten, The Book of Tiki, 159.

5 Starr, Golden Dreams, 52.

6 Kirsten, The Book of Tiki, 37.

7 Kirsten, The Book of Tiki, 43.

8 Beatriz Preciado, Pornotopia: An Essay on Playboy’s Architecture & Biopolitics (New York: Zone Books, 2014), 31.

9 Hugh M. Hefner, “Introduction,” in The Playboy Gourmet, Thomas Mario (Chicago: HMH Publishing Co., Playboy Press, 1961), 5.

10 Hefner, “Introduction,” 5.

11 Hefner, “Introduction,” 5.

12 Thomas Mario, “Playboy at the Salad Bowl,” Playboy 3, no. 7 (July 1956), 32.

13 Karal Ann Marling, As Seen on TV: The Visual Culture of Everyday Life in the 1950s (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1994), 312, n27.

14 Preciado, Pornotopia, 94.

15 Marling, As Seen on TV, 222.

16 Mary Albert Wenker, The Art of Serving Food Attractively (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1951), 7.

17 Marling, As Seen on TV, 223.

18 Laura Shapiro, “‘I Guarantee’: Betty Crocker and the Woman in the Kitchen,” in From Betty Crocker to Feminist Food Studies: Critical Perspectives on Women and Food, eds. Arlene Voski Avakian and Barbara Haber (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009), 30.

19 Shapiro, “‘I Guarantee’: Betty Crocker and the Woman in the Kitchen,” 31.

20 Marling, As Seen on TV, 213.

21 Shapiro, “‘I Guarantee’: Betty Crocker and the Woman in the Kitchen,” 30.

22 Josh Robertson, 50 Years of the Playboy Bunny (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2010), 62.

23 Preciado, Pornotopia, 25.

24 Preciado, Pornotopia, 42.

25 Martha Stewart, Entertaining (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, Inc.), 1.

26 Stewart, Entertaining, 9.

27 Stewart, Entertaining, 72.

28 Stewart, Entertaining, 152.

29 Stewart, Entertaining, 126.

30 Stewart, Entertaining, 128.

31 Stewart, Entertaining, 152.

32 Sarah A. Leavitt, From Catherine Beecher to Martha Stewart: A Cultural History of Domestic Advice (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 7. 

33 Leavitt, From Catherine Beecher to Martha Stewart, 3.

34 Marling, As Seen on TV, 208.

35 Amy Sedaris, I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence (New York: Warner Books, 1996), 9.

36 Sedaris, I Like You, 17.

37 Sedaris, I Like You, 45.