February marked the 50th anniversary of the publication of Betty Friedan’s landmark book, The Feminine Mystique, which examined the role of college-educated middle-class wives and pondered if they wanted more out of their lives than what was found in the home. After five decades, there was debate about whether the book still has relevance. I think from the sexism of the Oscars ceremony to the continual stories about women making less than men, discussions of feminism remain important.

Friedan’s book has been cited as the catalyst that got women out of the kitchen. There is no doubt that her book is significant. Her papers at the Schlesinger Library include piles of letters from women who felt the book changed their lives. (For a great assessment of the book when it was first published, read A Strange Stirring.)

Three years before Friedan’s book, it was cookbook author Peg Bracken who had a similar message. She wrote the I Hate to Cook Book. In it, she allowed women to admit that they would rather have a drink with the men than toil over the stove.

As her New York Times obituary noted: “Three years before Betty Friedan touched off the modern women’s movement with The Feminine Mystique, Ms. Bracken offered at least a taste of liberation — from the oven, the broiler and the stove.”

Bracken explained: “This book is for those of us who want to fold our big dishwater hands around a dry Martini instead of a wet flounder, come the end of the day.” It went on to be published in various editions and sold more than three million copies.

Her humor-tinged message resonated with women who longed to leave the kitchen and join a bigger conversation. In fact, it was a lunchtime chat with professional friends that led to the book. The busy women complained of the task of making meals and the idea for a new cookbook was born.

Her recipes were easy and her writing witty. Consider Bracken’s recipe for Cheesy Rice: three cups of hot cooked rice, a third cup of grated Parmesan, three tablespoons of melted butter and a dash of pepper. The instruction: “Just toss these items together.”

Just as Friedan’s book still has its place, so has Bracken’s book in our history of modern feminism. An updated version of the I Hate to Cook Book was republished on its 50th anniversary with a forward by Bracken’s daughter, Jo Bracken. She wrote: “My mother was the one person you would absolutely want at a dinner party. Mom was at her social best when seated at the dinner table.”

The women’s liberation movement was not about just one book; it was a collection of books and voices that recognized inequity when they saw it. And, those women were going to do something about it.

She’ll likely be celebrating the day quietly with my parents in Aurora, the Missouri town in which she has lived for more than 60 of her 83 years.

Because I spent most of my childhood in Aurora, I’ve always been close with Gaga, but in recent years, as I’ve had my own children and started thinking beyond just the span of years that I will enjoy on this planet, she and I have grown even closer. As the matriarch of our family, she is the keeper of many family stories that she inherited from her own relatives, and I’ve been trying to get her to tell me as many of them as we can squeeze in during each of our visits. (That’s her with Avery in June 2011.)

Last Mother’s Day, I wrote this post about how the community cookbook I was working on for the Austin Food Blogger Alliance aligned with my feminist and genealogical interests.

Fast forward a year to this Mother’s Day weekend. Not only do we have an actual cookbook to show for our efforts, at 4 p.m. today, I will be talking about the book with my fellow contributors at BookPeople, Austin’s premiere bookstore.

It’s a happy coincidence that our event today is on my grandmother’s birthday, a fact that I forgot to mention in an interview I did last weekend with Cecilia Nasti, who produces a food segment on the local NPR stations called Field and Feast. Nasti and I spent Sunday morning making Gaga’s coffeecake, one of my two recipes in the Austin Food Blogger Alliance Cookbook and one that embodies the kind of storytelling through food that I have come to appreciate as my love of family, history, food and journalism have converged in the last few years.

Gaga and I had a cathartic cry over the phone a few weeks ago when she finally got her copy of the book and read the story about our family coming to the U.S. from Sweden in the late 1800s that introduces the coffeecake recipe. I feel so lucky to get to share these moments with her and to have her support as I continue this very personal journey.

But there’s a lingering sadness in my heart when it comes time to celebrate her birthday each year.

This is Troy.

He would have turned 30 today.

Long before I was a mom, a blogger, a cookbook editor or a food writer, I was a simply a journalism student at Mizzou who was interested in storytelling.

So was Troy.

He’d grown up in a small town in Southwest Missouri not far from my small town, but we didn’t meet until we moved to Columbia to go to school.

After our first meeting sometime that freshman year (I think it was a Maneater party, if I remember correctly), we were inseparable, connected by a love of magazines, music, road trips, new experiences, foreign languages and big cities. We traveled to New York, Madison, Austin, San Diego, England, Spain and Italy together, and as we progressed in J-school, took class after class together, sharing our hopes and dreams of what we might accomplish with the stories we’d one day tell.

After graduation, he moved to Florida for a job he loved at a newspaper in Sarasota, and in June 2006, when I was two months pregnant with Julian and didn’t know it yet, he was killed in a freak car accident.

I was so fraught with grief that I didn’t realize I was carrying a child for another two months.

Becoming a mom and losing my best friend in the same year remains the hardest experience I’ve ever gone through, and not a day goes by that I don’t think about the connection of the two. And with every new experience or growth in my personal and professional life, I mourn the loss of those same experiences for my dearest friend.

It’s a sadness that I know I will carry with me until my last day, but in the past seven years, I’ve tried to honor that grief by thinking about Troy on days like today, when I’m doing something that I know he’d be so incredibly proud of.

Telling stories — and helping other people tell their stories — is something for which so many of us feel a calling, no matter if we recognize it and turn it into a career or if we unknowingly honor that calling by sharing stories over something as simple as a slice of coffeecake and a cup of coffee.

We often like to tell the stories that fill us with pride and joy, but when you really start digging and getting to know a person, stories that aren’t so happy inevitably emerge. These are the stories that can put a crack in our voices and an unspeakable pain in our hearts, but they are the stories that also define who we are.

Being a storyteller means embracing all the stories, not just the ones with happy endings.

Although I wasn’t sure what else I could possibly learn about the famed cookbook author and television host, Spitz is an incredible storyteller and researcher and reading Julia’s story through his eyes is making me feel like I’m hearing it for the first time.

Spitz addresses feminism — and Julia’s unabashed self-confidence to be no one other than Julia — from the first pages of the book, and I look forward to talking with him about Julia’s role in the evolution of what it means to be a woman and a cook in America.

Would love to see some familiar faces there!

What a sweet surprise from a friend who passed through Visby, Sweden, the Gotland hometown of my ancestors who emigrated to America. My thoughtful friend sent a card to my grandmother, too.

And in case the article didn’t make it clear how shallow and unprofessional women are, the helpful graphics team at the WSJ came up with these lovely cartoons.

I was happy to see the blogosphere erupt when the piece came out, but it was reading the response from Katherine Stone, the woman whose words the writer may or may not have twisted to support the argument she was trying to make with the story, that prompted me to post here.

As a reporter, it is so difficult to take a story idea and, in the course of reporting, ask the right questions, listen very carefully to the answers that you are given and then let that original story idea evolve into what the story actually is. You can never interview every single person whom a certain trend or issue affects, so reporters often have to blindly trust — and gain the trust of — the people they interview, and it is one of any reporter’s biggest fears to misinterpret what someone is saying and then, in turn, misrepresent that person in print.

I’d like to think that this story was all one big misunderstanding, but those graphics — I swear to you I have never eaten food out of a hotel fridge like that — made it clear that this just isn’t the case.

First, at 7 p.m. June 11 at Elaine’s Pork and Pie, we’ll talk about “Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots” by Jessica Soffer, a novel that member Jamie Smith proposed at the last meeting. I don’t know much about Soffer, except that she’s a writing professor, this is her first book and she has a cool website.

In August (oh, dreaded heat of the summer, I can feel you already), we’ll discuss “Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistlestop Cafe” by Fannie Flagg, the book that inspired the movie. (I’d forgotten that the movie was based on a book, but if you haven’t seen the movie OR read the book, please for the love of Jessica Tandy seek it out. You’ll never forget Kathy Bates’ character, either.)

For this get-together, we’ll try meeting on a Saturday — August 10, if you’re marking your calendars — to accommodate some folks who can’t make weeknights. Location, TBD.

In October, we’ll talk about one of my favorite bloggers’ new books, “Homeward Bound: Why Women Are Embracing the New Domesticity” by Emily Matchar. This is a non-fiction book that tackles many of the topics that Emily has written about in her freelance articles and on her blog, The New Domesticity. The tentative date for that meeting is October 8.

You’ll notice that I’m spacing these book club meetings once every other month. My goal is to book some happy hours, movie nights and other excuses to hang out in the off months, but a book a month is just a little more than this momma can fit in. :)

I’m cheating on my 1000 Words premise by typing these words, but these two images require a little explaining. Both are hanging on the walls of Elaine’s Pork & Pie, the small restaurant next to Eastside Cafe that is run by Elaine Martin, a longtime leader in the Austin food community. We had a very lovely Feminist Kitchen book club meeting there last week, and Elaine’s friend Dee Kelleher, who suggested the restaurant in the first place, pointed out these photos on the wall. The image at the top of this post is a photo of Elaine’s mother and grandmother, who was only about 16 years old at the time this photo was taken. Both were pie bakers and inspirations for the pie-centric shop on Manor Road.

Right next to the 1916 photo is this one, a 1985 photo that features a cleaver-wielding Elaine surrounded by her fellow (and female, you’ll note) cooks at Moveable Feast, a restaurant venture in Northwest Hills that Kelleher ran in the 1980s.

Sorry for the terrible quality of these pics. If you get a chance to swing by Elaine’s Pork & Pie, take a minute to browse the photos on the wall. You’ll leave with more than a belly full of strawberry and cream cheese pie.

Last week, I went to the Foodways Texas Symposium, which this year had the theme “Our Barbecue, Ourselves.” I couldn’t help but remind folks that this is a play off of “Our Bodies, Ourselves,” the groundbreaking book about women’s health and sexuality. I’m bummed that Southern Foodways Alliance director John T. Edge has deleted his tweet from the conference that said that the taste of a well-mopped pig could trump coitus. I don’t know that I necessarily agree, but it illustrated the thought-provoking connection between sex, meat, intimacy, relationships and pleasure.

Having come full circle in the war against fat — I clearly remember eating fat-free cheese and skim milk during my high school and early college years in a failed effort to shed pounds — I really enjoyed this WSJ story in praise of eating fatty foods. From Ron Rosenbaum:

Fear of fat has become a national sickness, an all-American eating disorder: Call it fatnorexia. Where is Uncle Toby from Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night” lamenting that, under the oncoming reign of Puritan strictures, “there shall be no cakes and ale”?

Something deeper than concern for nutrition and cholesterol is going on here. You don’t have to be a Freudian (I’m not) to see in the antifat crusade a cowering fear of sexuality. The evil of oral pleasure as Satan’s tool of seduction, dating back to Eve, is deeply embedded in American culture. Recall Cotton Mather’s denunciation of the hell-bound wickedness of the pleasures of the flesh and his call for self-mortification (anticipating today’s egg-white omelets).

n+1 has figured out The Atlantic formula for publishing seemingly feminist articles that only exist to challenge our notion of what it means to be one in often ridiculous ways. “These are articles intended to terrorize unmarried women, otherwise known as educated straight women in their twenties and thirties, otherwise known as a valuable market, if not for reliable lovers then at least for advertisers.”

Mary Kay doesn’t peddle food wares a la Pampered Chef, but this Harper’s article from last summer (yay for used magazines from Half Price books!) takes a fascinating look inside what author Virginia Sole-Smith calls the pink pyramid scheme. You have to be a subscriber to read the full article online, but you’ll find a thorough recap on the Pink Truth, a website dedicated to exposing sharing information about “abusive pyramid schemes and predatory multi-level marketing companies like Mary Kay.”

I’m still figuring out exactly what I think about “Girls,” but articles like this one from the New Yorker’s Emily Nussbaum are certainly help inform my opinion.

Some housekeeping notes: Ms. Magazine was kind enough to include the Feminist Kitchen in a Q&A roundup with other food and feminism bloggers, and you’ll notice a new design on the website, a spruced-up blog roll on the right and a new 1000 Words series to facilitate random image-driven posts.

As always, thanks for reading!

From today’s Parade magazine.