Something from the oven : reinventing dinner in 1950s America / Laura Shapiro.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Shapiro, Laura.

Contributor:

Chef Fritz Blank Culinary Archive and Library (University of Pennsylvania)

Culinary Collection (University of Pennsylvania)

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Women cooks--United States--History--20th century.

Women cooks.

Cooking, American--History--20th century.

Cooking, American.

Convenience foods--United States--History--20th century.

Convenience foods.

Nineteen fifties.

History.

United States.

Penn Provenance:

Blank, Fritz (bookplate) (donor) (Blank Collection copy)

Physical Description:

xxv, 306 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

New York : Viking, 2004.

Summary:

At the dawn of the 1950s, a woman was expected to be, in the words of Peg Bracken, "business manager, practical nurse, housecleaner, child psychologist, home decorator, chauffeur, laundress, cook, hostess -- all this besides being a gay, well-groomed companion." Something had to give. Big business chose the kitchen and the postwar food industry stood at the ready, promising to minimize a housewife's time at the stove. Hoping to rid themselves of freeze-dried army leftovers and profit from new food technologies, the industry stuck a clumsy hand into American kitchens and tried to take over the cooking. Tasteless "gourmet" horrors -- frozen bouillabaisse and pate de foie gras, dehydrated wine -- failed to convince any woman, no matter how frazzled, for very long. On the other hand, canned peaches, frozen vegetables, frozen orange juice, Spam and other indestructible lunch meats were welcomed and are still popular. No matter how handy some of these ingredients might have been, implicit in the suggestion that instant food was "the housewife's dream" was the debilitating idea that women were, and always had been, mere functionaries in the kitchen, leaving the gourmet arts to male chefs: in other words, cooking was hard, and women were not up to the task.

There was a battle on, and women of all stripes pitched into the fray. Cooks and journalists such as the formidable author and House Beautiful food editor Poppy Cannon -- and the fictional Betty Crocker -- championed the possibilities of instant cooking while others, M.F.K. Fisher, for example, pursued the sublime. Bemused chroniclers of domestic chaos such as Shirley Jackson, Jean Kerr, and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey laughed away any attempt to idealize the postwar family -- or housewife. Then in 1963, just as Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique appeared on the scene, a young, gangly housewife named Julia Child went on TV and changed both the American kitchen and Americans forever. In essence, she said to women, "You don't need to get it from a package. You can take charge. You can stand at the center of your own world and create something very good, from scratch." With sharp insight and good humor, Laura Shapiro turns on its head our whole conception of women's roles in and out of the kitchen in the fifties -- and in doing so, has rewritten not just the history of American cuisine, but that of American life.

Contents:

1 The Housewife's Dream 1

2 Something from the Oven 41

3 Don't Check Your Brains at the Kitchen Door 85

4 I Hate to Cook 129

5 Is She Real? 169

6 Now and Forever 211.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 285-294) and index.

Local Notes:

Blank Collection copy has dust-jacket retained.

Blank Collection copy has bookplate of Chef Fritz Blank.

ISBN:

0670871540

OCLC:

52471805