Rombauer, Irma von Starkloff

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ROMBAUER, Irma von Starkloff

Born 30 October 1877, St. Louis, Missouri; died 14 October 1962, St. Louis, Missouri

Daughter of H. Max Starkloff and Clara Kuhlmann; married Edgar R. Rombauer, 1899

Irma von Starkloff Rombauer once said of herself, "Although I have been modernized by life and my children, my roots are Victorian." Rombauer was born into the social and cultural milieu of upper-class St. Louis. Her father was a physician and also served for several years as American consul in Bremen, Germany. Travel in Europe with her family during her adolescence formed Rombauer's taste in the traditional values of European society. Rombauer's mother had originally emigrated to St. Louis from Germany in order to found, with others, the first kindergarten there. Ironically, she educated Rombauer in the traditional attributes of being "a lady."

In 1899, when she married a young attorney, Rombauer was surprised to discover her education had not prepared her for housekeeping and cooking. In self-defense, she slowly learned to cook; she became a student of Mrs. Nannie Talbot Johnson of Paris, Kentucky, a well-known teacher and lecturer on cookery. Simultaneously, she acquired recipes from members of her well-connected German family as well as from friends and newspapers in St. Louis. During her married life, Rombauer was actively involved with organizations in the cultural life of St. Louis. When her husband died, Rombauer wrote her bestselling cookbook "chiefly to distract her keen unhappiness."

Privately printed in 1931, in an edition of 3,000 copies, The Joy of Cooking was quickly bought out by St. Louis hostesses. Despite the great number of other cookbooks on the market, increasing requests for a copy of the book prompted Rombauer to work on a greatly enlarged edition, published in 1936. Since then it has gone through five hardcover editions and sold more than six million copies. The format she developed to unite the exact, scientifically measured ingredients with crystal clear procedural instructions was unique for that era. Instead of listing ingredients at the beginning of each recipe or burying them in the text as many "lady" writers did, Rombauer reduced her recipes to a step-by-step method of listing ingredients along with the mixing process. Rombauer's daughter, Marion Rombauer Becker, tested recipes for the first edition and created simple illustrations for subsequent editions; her contributions help enliven the text. She became a full-fledged coauthor in the 1940s. Rombauer published two additional cookbooks: Streamlined Cooking (1939) and Cooking for Girls and Boys (1946).

Rombauer's great accomplishment was to have written the perfect cookbook, a how-to manual at a time when servants were disappearing from middle class homes because of a changing work force at the beginning of World War II. Rombauer's book bridged the gap between the remembered elegance and richness of the 19th century and the more austere life of servantless homes of the 20th century. Her witty style, cultivated taste in multinational cuisines, and firsthand knowledge of the needs of American households provided America with its culinary classic.