Something from the Oven Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America

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.

Laura Shapiro was an award-winning writer at Newsweek for more than fifteen years. The author of Perfection Salad, she has written for many publications, including The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Granta, and Gourmet.

Introduction: Do Women Like to Cook? For many years I have been thinking about the conjunction between women and cooking, an association so deeply rooted that over the centuries it has turned cooking into something tantamount to a sex-linked characteristic, less definitive than pregnancy but often just as cumbersome to deflect. Biology and anthropology tell us pretty much what we need to know about how this relationship came about: Women have the babies, women feed the babies, women feed everyone else while they?re at it; hence, women cook. Men cook, too, of course, especially now; but, traditionally, they went to the stove as a job or a profession, to show off for an admiring crowd, or simply for the pleasure of it. Women cook because they?re expected to and because the people around them have to eat; happy is she who also enjoys the work. What interests me most about women and cooking isn?t so much why they have been entwined all these years, but how that intimacy has affected both parties: the cooks and the food.In an earlier book, Perfection Salad, I looked at what happened when science showed up in the late-nineteenth-century American kitchen with all the charisma of a new religion. Generations of women accustomed to cooking with their senses at the forefront, tasting and touching and remembering, gave way to brides who were learning to maintain a practical distance between themselves and the food. Nutrients and calories bid for attention; standardized equipment and measurements took the place of impressionistic cupfuls; and sanitation became the most demanding deity in the nation?s culinary pantheon. Changes like these, which contributed a certain amount of objectivity to the task of cooking, didn?t get in the way of talented home cooks. They could absorb the new imperatives or ignore them. And the other home cooks, women who weren?t born with the instincts to make food taste good and who struggled to acquire the skills, now had help in getting an acceptable meal on the table. If they followed the written rules, they had a fighting chance. But, inevitably, such changes helped hammer into place a singularly American approach to raw food that was more akin to conquering it than welcoming it home. Nuances of flavor and texture were irrelevant in the scientific kitchen, and pleasure was sent off to wait in the parlor. To cook without exercising the senses, indeed barely exercising the mind, was going to have a considerable effect on how and what we eat. What gave scientific cookery its staying power, long after the term itself disappeared, was its partnership with the food industry, which was becoming an ambitious new player in the American kitchen. During the last decades of the nineteenth century, factory-made foods began forging their way into homes across the country as rapidly as transportation and income levels permitted. Canned meats, soups, fruits, and vegetables, along with ketchup, pancake mix, granulated gelatin, and baking powder, were among the earliest products to become familiar and then indispensable. As pantry shelves filled up, the food industry began leaving unmistakable fingerprints on the meals and the recipes that characterized home cooking. The ginger ale salad, the canned soup gravy, the pale, puffy bread, and the omnipresent bottle of ketchup became culinary icons that would forever be identified with the American table. But not until the end of World War II did the food industry take aim at home cooking per se, rapturously envisioning a day when virtually all contact between the cook and the raw makings of dinner would be obsolete. By the 1950s, magazines and newspapers were conjuring scenes in which traditional, kitchen-centered home life was being carried out in perfectly delightful fashion without a trace of traditional, kitchen-centered home cooking. The table was set, the smiling family was gathered, the mother wore a pretty apron, and the food was frozen.