One day the recently wed Pete Campbell gets a call at the office from Trudy, his eager-to-please new bride, who asks what he’d like for dinner. “Rib eye, in the pan, with butter,” he replies. “Ice cream.” When he hangs up he turns to Harry Crane as if he’s had a revelation about the benefits of married life: “There’s going to be dinner waiting for me when I get home,” he says, sounding deeply satisfied. It’s as if someone has just shown him the latest marvel from a clever inventor.
Pete is an ambitious go-getter with more than his fair share of chutzpah; he yearns to make his mark in the dog-eat-dog world of Madison Avenue. Pete’s job at Sterling Cooper (and later Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce) is to make rain—to bring in the accounts that Don and his creative team will service.
“In a large Madison Avenue advertising agency,” wrote Alan Koehler in The Madison Avenue Cookbook (1962), “it is impossible for one man to know very much about all, or conceivably about any, of these accounts. And even a top notch agency man gets just two or three good ideas a year, not enough to go around.” Pete’s rib eye in the pan sounded like one of his good ideas to us.
Still, his request that Trudy prepare the simple steak is a bit surprising. He apparently isn’t familiar with Life magazine’s Picture Cook Book (Time Incorporated, 1958). According to the good people at Life, Trudy shouldn’t be anywhere near a steak until it’s time to eat it: “Whenever a menu calls for a delicate dish or a fancy pie, most men are more than happy to let their wives take care of the cooking. When it’s a matter of steak, this tolerant attitude is replaced by an unassailable belief in masculine know-how. Steak is a man’s job.”
Heloise Bowles—the über-popular newspaper columnist who shared countless household tricks with American homemakers (see Pat Nixon’s Date Nut Bread)—suggested a “grand way to tenderize your meat. Get out your husband’s hammer. Wash it with hot water and a piece of steel wool and pound that meat.”
Regardless of who cooked it, there’s no debating the popularity of the simple steak in the early 1960s; it was a red meat and potatoes time. “Not only do we serve more beef in the United States than in any other country except perhaps Argentine, but the pieces we use are larger,” declared the Ladies’ Home Journal Cookbook (Doubleday, 1963). “Sirloins and Porterhouses of our type simply do not exist elsewhere. In France, filet mignon is tiny compared with ours. In China, and all of the Orient the meat is cut into bite-sized pieces.” Steakhouses dominated the New York restaurant scene and beef ruled the kitchens of women like Trudy, who were eager to please their hard-working, ambitious husbands.
Americans preferred their steak “super-sized” and cooked them differently than their international counterparts. “Two things that an American (as opposed to a French) cook usually won’t do are: pan fry, rather than broil, a steak, and cover it with enough pepper to make Steak ‘Schpeppervescence,’” wrote Alan Koehler in The Madison Avenue Cookbook. So Pete and Trudy are showing some continental flair, perhaps inspired by Julia Child who was at the time just introducing Americans of the era to the wonders of the French kitchen (see page 162). This recipe for Trudy’s Rib Eye in the Pan is adapted from Koehler’s book. The original calls for a sirloin or a porterhouse, but a rib eye will also do the trick.
ADAPTED FROM STEAK SCHPEPPERVESCENCE, THE MADISON AVENUE COOKBOOK BY ALAN KOEHLER (HOLT, RINEHART AND WINSTON, 1962)
Steak (rib eye, porterhouse, or sirloin at least 11⁄4 inches thick, approximately 3⁄4 pound) at room temperature
Canola oil
Freshly ground black pepper
1 ounce cognac
2 tablespoons butter
YIELD: 1–2 SERVINGS
On a sunny weekend afternoon, Pete Campbell grills steak and corn on his apartment balcony for his wife Trudy, his brother Bud, and Bud’s wife Judy (season 2, episode 6; “Maidenform”). We don’t often see men cooking in Mad Men; that’s women’s work. But in the 1960s, grilling, especially meat, was considered a man’s domain.
For those old enough to remember the early 1960s, it’s hard to fathom that Mad Men is set half a century ago. A lot changes in fifty years and to a twenty-first-century audience, especially those who recall a world in which women cooked and cleaned and men went to the office and came home to be waited on, there are countless cringe-worthy moments in Mad Men. We suspect very few women watching the show think to themselves, “I wish I had lived back then.”
Men and women had distinct roles when it came to preparing and consuming food in the early 1960s. Women may have sautéed the sole and steamed the asparagus but, grilling meat was a man’s job. A woman had to consider her husband’s temperament even when preparing food for the grill. In a 1964 Life article on preparing Chinese barbecued spareribs, the author recommended separating the ribs before grilling because the ribs need to be turned and basted on the grill. But, the author added, “If your husband does not have much patience, keep the racks of ribs intact and slice them apart after they are cooked.” A 1965 Life article on preparing lamb chop shish kebab instructed, “An hour before dinner get your husband to light the barbeque fire—and make sure his fire is big enough to spread all the way across the grill.” While women no doubt welcomed this “share the work” philosophy, lighting a fire was deemed men’s work, too.
Grilling wasn’t a man’s only food-related job. Consider that a chapter in The New Good Housekeeping Cookbook (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963) is titled, “When He Carves.” A woman may have prepared and cooked the turkey, the roast, or the duck, but the man of the house did the carving. If goose, which is less meaty than turkey, was on the menu, a 1965 article in Life advised, “your husband should be warned that he may have to get all the meat there is off the bones.” Not only was it assumed that men did the carving, but that only women read articles like this one.
By the same token, wives may have shopped, diced, sliced, and cooked in preparation for a cocktail party, but husbands typically mixed the drinks, unless they had daughters like Sally Draper around. A 1964 article in Life even suggested bartending was a matter of masculine dignity when it rendered this advice on throwing a dinner party: “And if you can manage it without hurting his pride this is surely the moment to move your husband out from behind the bar and install a professional.” Ouch.
Because women in the 1960s were expected to shop for and prepare meals—when they weren’t cleaning, ironing, sewing, or taking care of children—advertisers of food products took aim squarely at the fairer sex, as Sterling Cooper no doubt would have advised. A 1960 ad for Armour brand corned beef hash assured women it was “like the fresh-made hash that men order for lunch,” and was “made the way men like it, with lots of meat.” Pleasing her man was a woman’s number one job, even when it came to purchasing canned goods.
As for cocktails? To a large extent they, too, were divided along gender lines. “Cocktails in the mid-twentieth century were gendered,” according to Alcohol in Popular Culture: An Encyclopedia by Rachel Black (Greenwood, 2010). “Women’s cocktails were frothy, colorful, exotic, and sweet, whereas men stuck to martinis, brown drinks, and straight spirits. The martini was a man’s drink in its pure form, dry and bracing…Women’s drinks might contain a plastic sword full of fruit slices, a tiny umbrella, or elaborate glass swizzle sticks.” One need look no further for proof of this claim than the Mai Tai Rachel Menken sips as Don Draper enjoys a whiskey neat (season 1, episode 1; “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes”).