This article examines everyday heroism in Blanche Armwood Perkins’s cookbook Food Conservation in the Home (1918) through the lens of food history. Centering on the role of eating and cooking for US society during World War I, it argues that the cookbook constructed homemakers as everyday heroines by using food as a means to implement the heroic into daily American life. Armwood Perkins’s cookbook represents a rare voice of an African American woman in American wartime food literature. Analyzing this source in its historical context, I explore two correlated aspects. First, I show how the cookbook heroized women’s work in the kitchen by stressing their role as nurturers of a nation within the confines of the home. Second, I consider the cookbook as part of African American foodways, demonstrating how Armwood Perkins challenged stereotypical representations of African American women. Everyday heroism served as a strategy to mobilize civilians and strengthen women’s national allegiance in domestic spaces, thereby reinforcing ‘traditional’ gender norms. Ultimately, this article expands understandings of everyday heroism by revealing how seemingly trivial acts like cooking and eating could be considered heroic.