Thinking back on the stereotype of the young midcentury husband either angrily berating or reassuringly indulging his wife for burning dinner.

But, famously, the aftermath of WWII saw a lot of new modern home appliances. Before, especially outside town limits, a home hot meal was more likely a stew, soup, casserole, shank of meat for collective slicing, or at least made in large batches; often heated with manually fueled fire in cast-iron stoves or even fireplace cauldrons with high thermal mass that smoothed things out

Meanwhile, if your tastes (which is to say “class”) ran past “worker” or “struggling farmer” you quite possibly had home meals prepared by domestic workers (and unmarried men tended towards collective settings like pubs, boarding houses, mess halls, clubs, and cafeterias)

So I guess I’m saying to make sense of the trope I don’t have to attribute it all to period women being uniquely incompetent, or period men being uniquely critical and condescending (though there’s still room for that!), but consider that cooking individual personal cuts of meat in a sheet-metal gas or electric oven such that “ideal” and “inedible” could be separated by such a narrow time or heat level was still a fairly novel practice for much of the country