Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America

by Laura Shapiro

In this delightfully surprising history, Laura Shapiro—author of the classic Perfection Salad—recounts the prepackaged dreams that bombarded American kitchens during the fifties. Faced with convincing homemakers that foxhole food could make it in the dining room, the food industry put forth the marketing notion that cooking was hard; opening cans, on the other hand, wasn’t. But women weren’t so easily convinced by the canned and plastic-wrapped concoctions and a battle for both the kitchen and the true definition of homemaker ensued. Beautifully written and full of wry observation, this is a fun, illuminating, and definitely easy-to-digest look back at a crossroads in American cooking.

Genres: Food, Nonfiction, History, Food History, Book Club, Cooking, Historical

334 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Laura Shapiro is an award winning author who worked at Newsweek for over 15 years.

Reviews

[Bob Redmond · Rating 3 out of 5]

Shapiro writes a fairly engrossing book about domestic food culture in the 50's. Her prose alternates between breezy and academic--with uneven results--but her nose for a good story and compelling information wins out in the end.

She describes (to this reader's horror) how manufacturers of Army rations in WWII would, despite absolutely no demand, eventually win their way into the American kitchen with products like SPAM and vienna sausages. Even more disturbing, they changed public perceptions of the kitchen with an Orwellian advertising campaign about how women had no time to cook and required new "convenience" foods. In reality, women (and some men) liked to cook and resisted the new foods. The manufacturers parried by helping re-configure grocery stores with new freezer sections, burying staples and bedazzling shoppers with sensory overload and false social pressure.

James Beard and Poppy Cannon waged a public debate around food preparation and menus, with Beard (Hors d'Oeuvres and Canapés) arguing for the epicures , and Cannon (The Can Opener Cookbook) leading the populists. Shapiro devotes a whole chapter to Cannon, whose story should be a major motion picture: much more than a pop-culture food columnist, she led a complex and intriguing life. For instance, she befriended Alice B. Toklas, a serious cook as well as Gertrude Stein's life partner and muse, and published a cookbook with Toklas--an effort that wrecked their friendship. The central event of Cannon's life was a nine-year affair with William White, the head of the NAACP. White--a black man married to a black woman--would leave his wife for Cannon--who was white--scandalizing blacks and whites alike. Despite such public adventures and misadventures, Cannon found herself ignored and killed herself by jumping off her balcony in 1975.

Shapiro also writes good sections on M.F.K. Fisher, Julia Child, the Pillsbury Bake-Off, TV dinners, and refrigerators, covering a lot of ground in under 300 pages and tracing a critical sub-plot of the role of women in culinary history. If the book were a meal, it came out a bit burnt, but it was an ambitious recipe all the same, and admirable for that.

*

WHY I READ THIS BOOK: I read a review in the NY Times Book Review citing this book, specifically the industrialization of domestic cooking post-WWII. The book being reviewed seemed less interesting than the citation (in fact, I've forgotten what book that was); I looked up the citation though and tracked down the book. It helped that I was also in the middle of watching early seasons of MAD MEN and was intrigued by the culture of the 50's and early 60's. My book group had also finished a project on sugar, and food was on my mind. This book proved to be an irresistible find.

[Al Price · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have read a lot about changing culture in this era of the US, so I realize the content here is probably less revolutionary to me than someone taking up the book for the first time. Still, I like reading other authors' takes on this familiar subject area, because invariably there is something new mixed into the familiar for me. That's true of this book, but even though the perspective was interesting, I couldn't get drawn in. I felt the book lacked a clear organization; we seemed to jump around a lot from one thing to another, and the chapter titles did very little to orient me as I read. One chapter felt like the next, and in a book like this - where the author makes it clear that several things are happening all at once - clear delineation is essential.

I also felt that what the title said we'd be exploring and what the book's content actually was were two different things. The subtitle, "Reinventing dinner in 1950s America" made me expect a book devoted entirely to culinary shifts. While the author does spend most of her time on this (discussing ready-made foods' appearance on the market, visionaries like "betty crocker" and Julia Child) I think what she's ultimately trying to illustrate is how culinary shifts mirrored, and sometimes caused, shifts in femininity as a whole in that time frame. It wasn't ABOUT dinner - dinner is merely a lens through which to view the American cultural landscape as it relates to women, and I think the author really misses the mark there.

This is perhaps best exemplified in the last chapter, which focuses rather strangly on Julia Child and then Betty Friedan, the latter of which has rather nothing to do with "dinner" per se and thus is a strange discovery in a book that is supposed to be about that topic. The first line of the epilogue explains her presence: "In the end, it took both a cook and a feminist to liberate the American kitchen." WHAT?!?!?! So if those two women are really what changed food culture, why did I spend my time reading those previous 5 chapters which had nothing to do with what ultimately "reinvented" dinner? I really think Shapiro could have made either a stronger thesis from the start - about how some food changes did impact the food culture and others did not - or she should have written the book all about Child and Friedan, and how several cultural factors paved the way for each of them, and that together their ideas caused a revolution in the kitchen. If she had chosen the latter, I would have bought that book.

[Beth · Rating 3 out of 5]

My intentions coming into Something from the Oven were, I confess, more humorous than serious: where, exactly, did the awful food of the '50s come from? That hideous mix of savory and dessert-sweet that people in that era loved or even thrived on, if social media and articles like this are to be believed.

I did get my answer to that question, and more. Current generations can only be grateful that the food industry's plan to draw people away from real cooking through ads and promotions didn't quite work.

Most interesting to me were the introductions to food writers of the period, from the execrable (in my opinion) Poppy Cannon, to Peg Bracken, to Julia Child. Each of these women fit their love of food--sometimes with an essential lack of natural talent or desire for cooking--into a successful career in books and/or TV. M.F.K. Fisher, in particular, caught my attention, and I've added a collection of her books to my wish list.

This book is written in a nice breezy style and was quick to read. It comes across like a summary of huge amounts of research, with a few of the author's own opinions about what various media meant on a larger societal level. Articles in women's magazines and newspaper columns, various cookbooks, "domestic chaos" books, and Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, all get some of Shapiro's attention. It is, perhaps, a little basic, more of an incentive to seek out deeper sources than a good source on its own.

The mentions of black women's work in this area were appreciated, since when '50s domesticity is brought up, white suburban women so often tend to overwhelm the narrative. I would appreciate an entire book of their perspectives even more.

I enjoyed Something from the Oven, but generally feel it would be better as a public library check-out than a book for a home library.

I wonder what researchers will conclude about America's Test Kitchen, the Food Network, and meal kit services like Blue Apron sixty years from now. Or how accurate those conclusions will be.

[Kristen Northrup · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is basically about the classic 1950s+ convenience meals and how what was marketed (and thus what we remember) doesn't entirely match what really happened. Women kept making things from scratch (and enjoying it) at a higher rate than pop culture history has you believe.

She does a ton of research. One really interesting contrast, as an example, are the articles and recipes in major newspaper food supplements (or magazines) compared to the reader recipe requests and submissions in the same publications.

Although the social history was really interesting, the best part was the food itself. The really weird recipes and products they tried to foist on consumers.

Vichysoise : Frozen mashed potatoes stirred into Campbell's cream of chicken. A Harvest Luncheon: Vienna sausages broiled with canned peaches. Sprinkle cheese on tomatoes, top them with banana slices and mayo, and brown in the oven. Half a doughnut topped with a slice of cranberry sauce and a scoop of cottage cheese. A "sophisticated" dessert from Nestle: spread Saltines with cream cheese and top each with a sliced strawberry. Garden club salad: elbow macaroni, pineapple chunks, chopped cabbage, marshmallows, olives, Italian dressing.

The frozen and canned food industries did a lot of retooling after the war. The products that failed were sometimes really interesting, especially when they were really similar to the products that were smash hits. Everyone loved frozen concentrated orange juice but no one bought frozen concentrated tomato juice (people preferred the canned to even fresh, and still do). Frozen coffee didn't work either. Ditto powdered just-add-water wine. Canned cooked hamburgers. Frozen baked beans. Frozen concentrated mineral water! Fish sticks were insanely popular, but no one then bought breaded sticks of chicken, veal, eggplant, or lima beans.

And for those of you who hadn't already heard of candle salad: half a banana, standing upright in a pineapple ring, with a cherry on top.

Campbell's marketed soup for breakfast and there were ads recommending chocolate bars get stirred into oatmeal and 7-up into milk. Betty Crocker pushed a late-night "fourth meal" fifty years before Taco Bell.

Fun stuff.

[Laura · Rating 2 out of 5]

Shapiro's book is at its most interesting when she is discussing the cultural trends that created the packaged food industry and such icons as Betty Crocker. I was less interested in the section of mini-biographies of "big names" in the food industry such as Poppy Cannon. I also found myself disagreeing with a few of the conclusions that the author comes to, namely that the combination of Julia Child and Betty Friedan together "liberate[d:] the American kitchen ... from the grip of the food industry and the constraints of gender." I don't disagree that Childs and Friedan were both hugely influential, but I'm not sure that the American kitchen has ever been "liberated" from the food industry and the constraints of gender as Shapiro claims. Shapiro also believes that "convenience products...show up on many a dinner table, but they haven't redefined what we know as cooking". All it takes is a comparison of the work involved in sorting, snapping and washing a bowl full of green beans with the opening of a bag of Green Giant brand frozen vegetables to understand that that conclusion is wrong.

[Dolly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderfully readable, informative, and entertaining, this is a terrific history on the 'progress' of food science from post-WWII through the mid-1960s.

The narrative is filled with interesting anecdotes, statistics and really gives the reader a holistic view of how home cooking evolved.

I was most fascinated by the fact that family income and women working outside of the home influenced the push toward convenience foods. Whereas now even people living at or below the poverty level are heavily reliant on processed and 'fast' foods.

interesting quotes:

"'The best of the experts agree on one simple, cardinal rule,' instructed Life. 'If a wine tastes good, it is good.'" (p. 30)

"When Marjorie Child Husted, an executive at General Mills, surveyed housewives right after World War II, one of the questions she asked them was 'What do you think women need most to make homemaking a full and satisfying career?' The answer that came back again and again was appreciation." (p. 39)

"As one Ph.D. student in home economics pointed out, women in the surveys tended to begrudge the time spent on domestic tasks they hated but apparently didn't mind spending time on work they liked." (p. 46)

"No matter how appealing the prospect of doing something as utterly labor-free as opening a can of macaroni and cheese, spooning the contents into a pan, heating it up, and serving it, very few women were able to convince themselves that they had produced a meal. The moral obligation to cook simply was not satisfied. Where was the personal dimension, the hospitality, the sense of a gift from heart and hands that had characterized the notion of home cooking for millenia?" (p. 52)

new word: slatternly

[Karyl · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found myself hardly able to put this book down! Something From the Oven is a fascinating look at what it meant to be a 1950s housewife and therefore the preparer of meals for most households. From reading this book, I have learned that just about everything we have been taught about 1950s housewives is utterly inaccurate. By looking at advertisements from that era, we can surmise that most women were using all kinds of convenience foods to help streamline their time in the kitchen, when in reality, women were simply looking for useful shortcuts to help them with fresh, made-from-scratch food. Women felt it was almost cheating to use convenience foods, so advertisers had to come up with ways to make housewives believe it was "okay" to use their products. Also, women of this era tended to enjoy cooking; it ranked much higher than any other chore or housework, and they took great pride in their culinary abilities. So how did we become a nation of people who see baking a cake from a mix as cooking from scratch?

The section on Julia Child was quite amazing, though I tended to have scenes from "Julie & Julia," with Meryl Streep as Julia Child, running through my head. But that's just an oddity on my part.

Anyone who is interested in food and cooking in general, and in the 1950s as an era, should seriously read this book.

[Maryalice · Rating 5 out of 5]

How did the food manufacturers and Madison Avenue convince the American public that convenient food = desirable food? How did they get housewives -- who prided their cake-making expertise as an important work skill -- to accept cake mixes? What food (and foodstuff - gotta love that word) took off, and what fell like a home ec student's first souffle? And WHY? This book tackles these questions and more, in a very entertaining way.

If you are captivated by the idea of Cold War-era domesticity -- or if you are just captivated by food, you might want to check this out.

It is not a perfect book -- my attention waned at certain points -- but it is delicious, nonetheless.

[Alice · Rating 1 out of 5]

So I ask myself, why write a review only when I DISLIKE the book (for I have not written any others)? Perhaps the review would be helpful to other readers, although it is not my intent to dissuade others from reading this book. With that being said, Some of the information was interesting, but it read more like a research paper. 20-25 pages would have been enough for me. Also, I could have done without the feminist filter that Shapiro wrote through. If I had the option of 1 1/2 stars, I would have given that rating.

[N.N. Heaven · Rating 4 out of 5]

Something From the Oven, while a little dry, provided me with plenty of historical facts about how food was marketed and created in 1950's America. Everything from SPAM to tv dinners is talked about here. What I found fascinating was the whole marketing aspect. How food manufactures used in-depth research to appeal to the modern housewife.

Overall, this is a solid book. Some parts were overdone while others were underdone. To each his/her own, I guess.

Reviewed by: Mrs. N

My Rating: 4 stars

[Paula · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating history of the food industry's determination to make women want packaged food. Manipulation at it's cleverest. Apparently even working women preferred homemade dinners until they were convinced otherwise. Shapiro is especialy good discussing food writers like Peg Bracken and M.F. K. Fisher. The section on the Julia Child phenomenon is great.

[Kristen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book. I had a vague idea of what was going on in home kitchens in the 1950s, but this book really gave me the context and social history to understand more of what was happening, and why. Shapiro really does her homework and has an impressive bibliography and references. Reviewing the book in a paragraph is tough, but I'd describe the content as a social history where women and their relationship with food/home cooking take center stage. Shapiro examines how the food industry struggled to get women to accept their sometimes super strange packaged, processed, frozen foods, and how deep the advertising industry went in studying the psychology and cemented gender roles and expectations/guilt of the day, to get an approach that would result in women fundamentally redefining what it meant to "cook."

I had never understood why women made such awful, disgusting things, particularly when gathering in the name of femininity---charity events, fundraisers, church gatherings, etc. "A hospital group dredged up a salad of elbow macaroni, pineapple chunks, Spanish peanuts, chopped cabbage, chopped marshmallows, ripe olives and salad dressing....I don't know what is happening to the women of America but it ought to be stopped." (journalist comment)

Shapiro helped me understand that this was partly due to a legacy dating back to the turn of the century---"the appropriate food for women was still considered nonfood. Women could vote by the 1950s and they could drive cars and work for wages, but they weren't supposed to eat like men, much less look as though they did. Canned and frozen products, food that had been stripped, sanitized, and rendered lifeless, was perfectly suited to the kind of women shown in the ads for refrigerators and ranges, all smiles in their aprons and heels. Their personal touch, the element that made the meal visibly feminine, came in dollops of pure sentimentality that had long been associated with ladies at table. Whipped cream, maraschino cherries, quivering gelatin salads--by midcentury, the link between femalesness and weird, gaudy dishes of no recognizable provenance was a culinary assumption as inevitable as the pairing of salt and pepper." (Shapiro 174)

The late 1940s and entire decade of the 50s gets the most spotlight, and at the end, (Feb 1963) Julia Child and Betty Friedan end up being a dynamic duo that "freed, or at least notably loosened, the grip of the food industry and the constraints of gender on cooking."

Exceptionally well done book for anyone interested in social history of food/eating, and the evolution of feminisim in this era.

[amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fantastic book about the relationship between food and feminism in 1950s America. The actual period covered includes wartime and postwar habits of American home cooks, and ends with the nearly simultaneous and similarly explosive debuts of Julia Child's The French Cook and Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, in 1963.

Shapiro takes a multi-pronged (can I get away with this word?) look at the 1950s housewife: as a woman with a veritable laundry list of a job description; as the target audience of the food industry’s advertising heavy artillery; as a deeply conflicted individual torn between mutually incompatible obligations yet eternally hopeful for reconciliation between work and family, or kitchen shortcuts and personal creativity, etc; as an imaginary figure constructed by (again) the food industry or by women writers whose “harried housewife” tales enjoyed a certain vogue in the late '50s.

Said housewife—sure enough, wearing many critical and symbolic as well as occupational hats—and her relationship with the kitchen provide plenty of material that is by turns hilarious, horrifying, exhilirating, and at times almost pathetic.

I really, really enjoyed this book, and by the time Julia Child and Betty Friedan enter the picture as the twin saviors of the American woman, was actually pretty fired up on behalf of the newly liberated "trapped housewives." Trapped, but not necessarily desperate.

[Bookworm · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was intrigued to read more about what was involved with the reinvention of dinner in post-WWII US and the movement of using what was invented, created, manufactured during wartime and how it made it into the households of millions. I was also curious to see how that melded with the change of roles of women, as men returned from the war (or not) and how that caused societal and cultural shifts.

Unfortunately, that's not it. The negative reviews are accurate: the book reads way too much like a too long research paper that was needlessly stretched out into a book. There are bits of interesting pieces of information but it seemed like author Shapiro had an interesting idea but was told to add other elements to it either to sell or to flesh out the book.

I thought we'd be reading more about the shifts in food, manufacturing, how people prepared dinner in the post-war era but instead it does feel like there's just too many things going on at once. The author couldn't quite decide how to proceed or there was a lot of interference from the editor. It's a pity, because it's a fantastic and intriguing topic for exploration and this book just failed to do it.

Bought this as a bargain book but in retrospect I wish I had borrowed it from the library instead.

[Kate · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is partly about food, and partly about the lives of women during the 1940s, 50s and 60s. It uses food and cooking to track the daily lives and expectations of women during those decades -- and also some of the marketing and media driving the status quo. But most entertaingly, it goes a long way towards explaining WHY it is that 50s food was so....weird.

[Take, for instance, "Red Crest Salad" -- chopped tomatoes, pickles, and strawberry Jell-O. Or an "unusual treat" of tomatoes with cheese, banana slices, and mayonnaise, browned in the oven. Or half a donut topped with canned cranberry sauce and cottage cheese. (Which actually doesn't sound that bad to me.) All of these wonders, btw, pgs 57-58.]

Entertaining chapters on the Pillsbury Bake Off and Betty Crocker, as well as trends in writing for women's magazines. In the end, the author wraps it up with an examination of why the seemingly conflicting messages of Betty Friedan and Julia Child were both so popular -- and at the same time. Big fan of this book.

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved Shapiro's Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century and Something from the Oven continues the story, focusing on the 1950s. Equally well-researched and compulsively readable, I am nothing short of a fan.

In this work, she tackles both the larger themes and social trends going on during the 1950s -- such as, the rise of the convenience food industry, the increasing number of women in the workplace, and women's roles more generally -- and mini-biographies of some key figures, including Poppy Cannon, Lillian Gilbreth, Betty Crocker/Marjorie Child Husted, Julia Child, and Betty Friedan.

It certainly doesn't include every detail on cooking during the period, but it does offer an interesting and thought provoking collection of chapters that while at times a bit loosely linked, still create a splendid whole.

[BM · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very readable social history of the American culinary landscape during the 1950's. Despite the increasing prowess of heavily-marketed factory-produced food products many women back then were negotiating the postwar society by trying to figure out how to balance work and household duties such as feeding the family. The iconic imagery of happy housewife proves to be a marketing device that veils the everyday realities of "domestic chaos". Just as we have our baby blogs which details the joys and travails of raising a family, women have always sought solace from knowing they are not alone and finding in others' stories and tales of hilarity something they can absolutely relate to. Domestic labor doesn't result in quarterly reports or adds to the GDP in easily quantifiable measure, but when we consider how much product we push and how heavily marketing designs our "lifestyle" aspirations we have a new way of seeing women as more than just consumers but also producers of "home life".

[Robert · Rating 2 out of 5]

Two stars is a gracious rating. Let me sum up the reinvention mentioned in the book, cake mix. And that is it. Otherwise the author waxes eloquent, and at times too damn eloquent, on the sociological and psychological impact of certain women writers driving more women towards French cooking. As far as all of the technological advances in food mix production and sales the author quickly glosses these and other advances over. Only to go in depth into the romantic and turbulent life of yet another woman writing yet another French cookbook. Another pain factor here is the sheer length of the chapters. Enormous chapters with hardly any spot to take a break at all. Almost as if the author wishes to drive her book right into the brain of her readers. Open if you dare however, I would recommend taking a pass on this one.

[Val · Rating 2 out of 5]

Overall it was a disappointment. Less about dinner in 1950's America, and more about the role of women in society. Lots of statistics on the percentage of women working. Also, lots of biographical info on real and imaginary cooking "authorities" - including Poppy Cannon and Betty Crocker. Included a section on women authors - such as Jean Kerr ("Please Don't Eat the Daisies") and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey ("Cheaper By the Dozen") - and how the life they wrote about differed from the life they lived. The last chapter profiles Julia Child and Betty Friedan, then asserts that they were similar forces - bit of a stretch, really. Other than highlighting some of the strangest dishes I have ever heard of - many involving canned pineapple - it really missed the mark for me.

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was great! An interesting cultural history about food in post-war America. Often funny too. Much of the book concerns the way the food industry kept trying to push their products at skeptical housewives. Corporations, in league with women's magazines and newspaper food columnists, kept assuring women they hated to cook, only to have their quarterly earnings plans stymied when those same women refused to fall in line. Of course, some "food products" did prove successful (TV dinners, cake mixes, etc.), but Shapiro is very good at putting their adoption in context, and ultimately sheds some light on exactly why America's at-home cooks were so ready when Julia Child first turned up on their TV sets.

[Susan Rainwater · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a fascinating book on so many levels. If you happened to have lived through the cooking of the 1950s and 1960s, you now know why you ate so many casseroles made out of ground beef, canned soup and elbow macaroni (yetch!). The book covers the birth of the "food industrial complex," at least the part concerned with packaged food, and the consequences for the women whose role in the kitchen was increasingly trivialized by the manufacturers selling these products. There are some unexpected heroines in the end, too.

I also found interesting the birth of market research and branding, mostly how badly the original market research was conceived.

Whether you're a foodie or a feminist, you will find something here to enjoy.

[A. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book on the delta-food in American culture from 1940ish to 1970. Frozen, canned, etc - the way the american table changed was complex and very corporate driven (perhaps this shouldn't be a surprise...) and Shapiro does an excellent job of laying out how it all happened with a focus on the women and men who drove the change and how they were well bought and sold in many cases. Since it's about food, tho, she doesn't just focus on the food but brings it out to encompass American cultural considerations as well. A fine read.

[Nancy Loe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Delightful from start to finish. I especially appreciated her chapter on the "literature of domestic chaos" since Betty MacDonald is one of my favorite authors. I was so glad to learn of others from that period besides MacDonald and Jackson, but eh they were mostly terrible. I was especially disappointed in Ernestine Gilbreth Carey's Rings Around Us, but I'll post elsewhere about that.

[D. · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've always had a weird obsession with the 50s--the food, cocktail culture, the kitchenware--so I was excited to see this book. I found it quite interesting because it explained so much about why we eat the way we do, both on a national level and on a more personal level (my grandmother's ambrosia salad, casseroles, etc). The book is an entertaining mix of food history and feminism.

[Barbara · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well researched but uneven account of the influences and changes in 1950's American food. Since I grew up eating some of the horrors described, I experienced mild interest in the background. I thought much of the book was common knowledge for my generation, but I was interested by the chapter on Poppy Cannon, terrible cook but progressive in the arenas of feminism and race.

[Ellen · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was interesting but reading it I felt manipulated by the food industry. Then annoyed that women's lib-ers seem to think that cooking is a waste of time or somehow not fulfilling for women. It mostly left me wanting to cook a lot and especially from scratch.

[Book Concierge · Rating 1 out of 5]

I couldn't even finish this. It had such promise. It could have been interesting, but it reads more like a sociology text book. I gave up after 90 pages.

[Katie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an assigned book in college that I've held on to ever since, and it's honestly just as engaging as I remembered. The author takes apart the stereotype of 1950s cooking as all jello salads, instead showing the complicated competing forces that shaped food in that era.

I enjoyed her dive into the food industry's obsession with pushing new convenience products--and the evidence that shows most women weren't radically changing the way they cook, even as food industry journals swore they were. But more than that, the whole book gets into the psychology of American women in the kitchen. They were in the workforce more, their roles were changing and so were the culinary options available to them, but they still felt this deep responsibility for feeding their families well. Not everyone wanted to be a Julia Child, but that doesn't mean they were sold on the food industry's vision of "all TV dinners all the time".

[Stephanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

No review, just some quotes that I loved...
Page 19-"The flavor of Swanson's dinners, entrancingly metallic as if tray and turkey were one clings even now to the palate memory of anyone who encountered these magic meals in childhood."

Page 138-" Men were independent, women needed men. Women simply were not supposed to constitute freestanding entireties with no economic links to father on a husband."

Page 143-" All Chat contributors used pseudonyms, who had taken a part-time job. Three years earlier when her children were six, four and three, I've come to the conclusion that we overindulge and overprotect our own children" she stated firmly "Mine are now more helpful and more resourceful because I work."

[Dave Courtney · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very interesting and well researched if not quite as fun companion piece to Candy: A History, another book I recently picked up about food (if candy qualifies as food). Much of the sentiment here is the same as in Candy, books that use food as a means of examining our social history and understanding our uniquely American context, in this case how the 1950's and a post war world shaped (or tried to shape) our societal norms by taking control of our kitchens. And it is fair to say that in both books gender is a central part of the conversation.

What might be most interesting for a book that follows a number of interesting individuals and companies from the Pillsbury Bake Off to Betty Crocker to Canon and a wonderful closing chapter on Julia Childs, is the insight it offers into every day, common, pedestrian life. It's both humorous and sort of sad to see how pre-packaged foods once created for the convenience of war muscled their way into the kitchen based on a need for post war industrialization. Humorous because when we peek behind the curtain, as this book allows us to do, the promise of the marketing doesn't quite match the reality. From start to finish, and something that is certainly still true today, there is this predictable trend that moves from dedication to food preparation to convenience or ready made foods and back again. Despite the wide spread marketing that made us believe pre-packaged, ready made foods was the way of the future and dominating the landscape, in truth we still wanted to cook and we still "did" cook, even if we needed or became accustomed to the convenience of the industrialized food market over time.

Even today with the growing embrace of farmers markets and farm to table mentalities, this back and forth relationship still exists, just maybe in a different sense than it once did. In the 1950's the push to take over kitchens with pre-packaged ready made meals represented a two fold reality- the desire of companies to earn their spot in our daily living and our homes, and second, a growing embrace of independence for women and the female spirit in particular. And what's interesting about this is that, even as women came to embrace a life that made them more busy, they, and also men to a smaller degree, still enjoyed cooking in general. If anything the issue was the lack of recognition for "work" that was shifting away from mere survival and towards a motivation for creativity and passion. And so we find an existing mix during this time of cooks who interspersed recipes both with ready made ingredients and fresh made ingredients as a reflection of this dual interest, pedestrian and common cooks who used their home kitchens to cook from scratch and experiment with and harness the power of convenience to their benefit and individual expression.

In contrast, today this back and forth has found cooking from scratch to be less about creativity and more about nostalgia, a longing for a simpler time, a move away from the business and back to family, while convenience tends to be relegated more to the realm of necessity and survival. And one of the joys of reading this book is to see how we arrived at this place, how some things have changed and how some things have stayed the same.

Above all, if you are someone who has a grandma or a parent or a relative or any recipe of a much loved, traditional dish passed down a generation or two that contains, for example, campbells soup or jello powder or anything of that ready made sort, this book will give you a great context for where and how and why these recipes were birthed.

And beyond that it will also give you a glimpse into a time when this intermixing of ready made foods led to some really interesting creations.