WRITTEN BY GREG ATKINSON ILLUSTRATED BY MICHELLE KUMATA

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings' "Cross Creek Cookery" has been one of my favorite cookbooks ever since I discovered it in the mid-1980s. Originally published in 1942, this cook's journal follows the adventures of the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "The Yearling" as she adapts to life in the hinterlands of central Florida. Rawlings counted among her friends Ernest Hemingway and Indira Gandhi. Her recipes for Cream of Peanut Soup, Okra with Hollandaise and Orange Cake are as delectable as her prose.
 

Mrs. Appleyard's Spring Salad with Chopped Bacon and French Dressing Recent recipes in Pacific Northwest Hummus Chris Morris' Traditional Mint Julep

I came into "Mrs. Appleyard's Kitchen," also published in 1942, when a fellow collector decided to liberate some space in her home by giving me about a hundred of her cookbooks, this one among them. The book endeared itself to me as soon as I cracked the pages and heard the distinctive voice of its author, Louise Andrews Kent, sounding almost audibly off the page like one of those "Howler" letters in the Harry Potter stories. A newspaper columnist and author of children's books, Kent wrote in the voice of her fictional alter-ego, a certain Vermonter named "Mrs. Appleyard," whose impeccable taste in food — Lobster Soup, Country Style Asparagus, Steamed Blueberry Pudding — is matched only by her Yankee wit.

The third gem from 1942, "How to Cook a Wolf," was composed by the Californian M.F.K. Fisher, whose name eventually became synonymous with both culinary and literary excellence. Forced to leave Europe by political turmoil that preceded World War II, Fisher was quick upon her return to the U.S. to dismiss a lot of doggerel about eating. "One of the stupidest things in an earnest and stupid school of culinary thought," she wrote, "is that each of the three daily meals should be balanced. Balance the day," she implored, "not each meal in the day." Her treatise on how to survive rationing included a substitute for vodka, a Roast Beef with Prunes and a Sweet Potato Pudding.

Mulling over what these books and their authors had in common, it dawned on me that all of them stood in the face of an ominous mega-trend that must have been revving up all around them. Ever since the earliest years of the 20th century, marketing experts had been trying to persuade American cooks to use more packaged foods. And the trend was about to get a big boost from the machinery of war.

The American food industry was gearing up to feed our "boys" overseas. After the war, the machinery set up to feed them had to keep going. In order to keep it going, food producers had to convince American homemakers in particular that packaged food was fun and good. Books like these constituted the resistance.

Laura Shapiro, who lived in Seattle in the early 1980s, won kudos for her book "Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century." Her latest book, "Something From the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America" (Viking, $24.95) details how our culture responded to a vast marketing campaign designed to convince us that cooking was obsolete. I called her to see what she thought of these old books.

"Oh!" she cried. "Those are good books. They represent what the food industry was up against. 'Cooking is so laborious,' we were being told, 'so tedious, so old fashioned, why cook at all?' But American women weren't buying it. They didn't want the packaged food. They knew how to cook, and they liked to cook."

Books like these were reminders of another truth entirely. "I'm not saying that women actually had those books open on the kitchen counter, but they represented a popular mindset that homemade food is better."

When you read books like these, you understand that cooking is not drudgery or a thing of the past. Rather, it is creative and fun. More than that, you discover how incredibly delicious food can be.