The « Servant Problem » and American Cookery

In the late 1880's, the rising American middle-class, trying to follow the social lead of the new urban industrial and commercial elite, had to face the difficulty of finding qualified servants, able to meet their employers' requirements and social purposes. Some of them tried to set up servant-training programs, some others to organize cooperative kitchens, or to build blocks of kitchenless apartments with central kitchens. Such experiments failed, most of the time, due to people's concepts of privacy of the home and independence of the individual. But they were showing the way to modern forms of food-habits and take-away meals, that spread gradually to the working-classes...

The « Servant Problem » and American Cookery Journal Articles