Washington Post article on recipe testing

The Washington Post has published an article about food sections and recipe testing. It is available here.

The writer did not include anything about the Milwaukee Journal’s food section – which had a testing kitchen for decades. Here is the brief history included in the Washington Post article which excluded the long history of women’s pages:

“Perhaps surprising, many of the editors contacted for this story said their recipe-testing budgets have not been targeted for reduction or elimination — at least to their knowledge. What might be more surprising, however, is that some of them had to persuade their bosses to institute recipe testing in the first place. It would seem that the era of recipe testing at newspapers is a more recent invention; old timers recall when food editors in the 1980s published recipes straight from publicists and major food manufacturers, no questions asked.”

This explanation is seriously flawed – which I have proved and will continue to document. Most food writers did not simply publish the work of food publicists.

I plan to research more about food sections and recipe testing as a way of writing women into newspaper history.

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