Laura Shapiro > Quotes

“Toward the end of February 1954, James Beard was at work in his Greenwich Village kitchen doing what he most loved to do: cooking delicious meals.”
― Laura Shapiro, Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America

“At Cornell she had discovered that domesticity had a brain; here, in the beloved, safe home that was entirely hers, she was learning that it had a heart.”
― Laura Shapiro, What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food That Tells Their Stories

“Tell me what you ate when you were a child, and whether the memory cheers you up or not.”
― Laura Shapiro, What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food That Tells Their Stories

“To be a wife was to cook. Not to eat—that was a different matter entirely—but to cook.”
― Laura Shapiro, What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food That Tells Their Stories

“It was the early 1960s, and the best-known names in home cooking—Fannie Farmer, Betty Crocker, Irma Rombauer, Dione Lucas—projected a warm and cozy domestic image that was the opposite of what she and David were after.”
― Laura Shapiro, What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food That Tells Their Stories

“Culinary historians looking back at the first decades of the twenty-first century will be blessed with vast quantities of material to study, thanks to blogs and social media, but all that material will still reflect only the lives of a certain swathe of active and self-promoting food lovers.”
― Laura Shapiro, What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food That Tells Their Stories

“These new friends had fought for suffrage, they had won, and now they were determined to use the vote to advance women’s interests. They did not define themselves by their achievements as wives. Their zeal, their brains, their integrity, the inspiring vision they brought to politics—all of it was thrilling to Eleanor. The activists she met in the 1920s became her tribe. •   •   • They were also her teachers—indeed, it’s possible to say they invented her.”
― Laura Shapiro, What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food That Tells Their Stories

“I had erected someone outside myself who was the President’s wife. I was lost somewhere deep down inside myself. That is the way I felt and worked until I left the White House.” It was “the President’s wife” who took charge of White House cuisine, and “the President’s wife” who allowed Mrs. Nesbitt to strip the food of character and pound it into submission. But it was Eleanor, away from FDR and ensconced with the people she cherished, who discovered the delights of appetite; and it was Eleanor, “deep down inside myself,” who learned what food could mean when love did the cooking.”
― Laura Shapiro, What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food That Tells Their Stories

“But what struck me as I followed the paper trail through each life was that while extraordinary circumstances produce extraordinary women, food makes them recognizable.”
― Laura Shapiro, What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food That Tells Their Stories

“We’re meant to read the lives of important people as if they never bothered with breakfast, lunch, or dinner, or took a coffee break, or stopped for a hot dog on the street, or wandered downstairs for a few spoonfuls of chocolate pudding in the middle of the night.”
― Laura Shapiro, What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food That Tells Their Stories

“Compounds like wedding cake, suet plum-puddings, and rich turtle soup, are masses of indigestible material, which should never find their way to any Christian table (Shapiro citing Mary Peabody Mann, Christianity in the Kitchen).”
― Laura Shapiro, Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century

“Julia’s attitude toward British food—that it was inedible, that it had little relevant history apart from being inedible, and that a more sensible population would simply take its meals in France—had been locked into place for a long time, and no respectable gourmand would have contradicted her.”
― Laura Shapiro, What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food That Tells Their Stories

“she quickly hired a housekeeper and a kitchen staff for the White House and then threw herself into what mattered far more to her—civil rights, women’s equality, poverty, housing, employment, and the war. She was the busiest, most public, most productive First Lady in history, and complaints about dinner just didn’t register. But”
― Laura Shapiro, What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food That Tells Their Stories

“After all, academic reputations were at stake. Home cooking was associated with women, which was bad enough, and housework, which was fatal. Luckily”
― Laura Shapiro, What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food That Tells Their Stories

“Any morsel that wasn’t low-calorie was “sinful,” “naughty,” “gobble gobble gobble,” “heavy sinning,” or “a cruel but devastating lover.” Just”
― Laura Shapiro, What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food That Tells Their Stories

“No self-respecting gastronome was going to look back on the 1950s with anything except pity. •”
― Laura Shapiro, What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food That Tells Their Stories

“She was the rare feminist, possibly the only feminist, with an unabashed commitment to male supremacy.”
― Laura Shapiro, What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food That Tells Their Stories

“Today, of course, popular culture is on a culinary binge; and so much personal writing is now devoted to gazing back upon the kitchen and the table that we’ve had to invent a new literary genre, the food memoir, to contain all of it.”
― Laura Shapiro, What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food That Tells Their Stories

“The characteristic sweetness of much American cooking was also established during these years, as cooks relied more and more on the blandness and general acceptability of sugar as a flavoring.”
― Laura Shapiro, Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century

“In recent years women have been moving into the realm of professional cooking in significant numbers, but at its highest levels the world of great cookery is probably more staunchly masculine than the armed forces.”
― Laura Shapiro, Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century

“Many dinners emerging from the scientific kitchen were entirely white…”
― Laura Shapiro, Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century

“Hitler’s aide, used to see her sitting with Hitler in his study at night, wearing a dressing gown, having champagne while he drank tea.”
― Laura Shapiro, What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food That Tells Their Stories

“Those innovations in American eating habits that began in a manufacturer’s laboratory, passed into the hands of home economists, and then met the public by way of the advertising industry took root with a speed and sureness that gratified the most forward-looking cooks. The campaign to place Crisco in every kitchen was a model of the process, and Crisco itself was in many ways a model food of the twentieth century. "An Absolutely New Product," announced one of the introductory advertisements. "A Scientific Discovery Which Will Affect Every Kitchen in America." Crisco had been tested extensively in the laboratory ever since its discovery, the copy explained, and "chefs and domestic science teachers" had been using it experimentally as well. Now it was ready for the public: "Dip out a spoonful and look at it. You will like its very appearance, for it is a pure cream white, with a fresh, pleasant aroma." ... "Crisco never varies," the copy stressed. "Crisco is never sold in bulk, but is put up in immaculate packages, perfectly protected from dust and store odors. No hands ever touch it…”
― Laura Shapiro, Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century

“Like the food experts of the last century, today’s enthusiasts are fully convinced they have rescued food from the barbarous prisons of the past.”
― Laura Shapiro, Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century

“The food could climb the social ladder but sometimes the cook was left behind.”
― Laura Shapiro, What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food That Tells Their Stories

“The important function of an American white sauce was not to enhance but to blanket.”
― Laura Shapiro, Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century

“Cooking — that is, the actual mixing, measuring, boiling, and baking — was taught under the heading Laboratory Practice.”
― Laura Shapiro, Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century

“Her favorite place to watch human behavior was a restaurant, for there she could sit quietly in the background while people interacted with food. Each glimpse of the intimate relationship between the person and the plate cried out to her. Cafeterias, tea shops, cafés, pubs, dining cars, a park at noon—anywhere people were eating was fertile ground. To be in the presence of food—appetizing, appalling, it hardly mattered—was to start creating.”
― Laura Shapiro, What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food That Tells Their Stories