The Map and the Menu

This article considers Bernard DeVoto’s defense of Frederick Jackson Turner’s influential essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” (1893). DeVoto and other western historians championed Turner’s thesis celebrating westward expansion and Manifest Destiny at the same time that Julia Child was living in France, writing Mastering the Art of French Cooking (1961). While a group of heterosexual males were reviving Turner’s account of the US frontier experience in the mid–twentieth century, Child—along with a cohort of female collaborators and several gay men writing back home in the states—were positing a non-isolationist vision of America and a more cosmopolitan imaginary of its relations with other countries. They did so by writing about seemingly apolitical subjects, such as European cuisine and mixed alcoholic concoctions called “cocktails,” during World War II and the Cold War era.