1997 Edition

Seventh Edition
By Irma Rombauer, Marion Rombauer Becker and Ethan Becker
Illustrated by Laura Hartman Maestro
Published by Scribner 

From Anne Mendelson's foreward to the 2006:

Marion died at the end of 1976, leaving JOY in the hands of Ethan and Mark. After some years of joint revision efforts, Ethan took over sole responsibility. The next decades saw large publishing-industry shifts—including the demise of Bobbs-Merrill—that impeded further progress for a long while, until at last JOY came under the Scribner imprint of Simon & Schuster. In 1997, Scribner published an edition that, unlike earlier ones, included commissioned recipes and other material from dozens of professional food writers. The new edition also broke with the past in deemphasizing the first-person comments and whimsical asides that had been crucial to Irma and Marion’s approach. Yet they would have been the first to hail the valuable services that it performed: correcting past errors of fact in the light of more recent research; acknowledging the importance of appliances like food processors, microwave ovens (which Marion had had reservations about), and bread machines in contemporary American cooking; and—the most important change of all—taking account of exciting foods from other cultures, Cuban and Thai, Indian and Japanese. At the same time, the new version paid necessary attention to now indispensable ingredients or preparations (balsamic vinegar, Asian noodles, many chile pepper varieties, basmati rice, garam masala) and brought into the JOY fold such welcome recipe additions as grilled vegetables, gravlax, Mexican salsas, and Vietnamese phó.

In 1997, the year of that edition, Ethan married writer and artist Susan Cope. In the family tradition of looking toward future JOYs as soon as an updated version was completed, Ethan and Susan at once began working on a new revision for 2006.