Something from the Oven or Fertility and Pregnancy Cooking

Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950's America

Author: Laura Shapiro

In this captivating blend of culinary history and popular culture, the award-winning author ofPerfection Salad shows us what happened when the food industry elbowed its way into the kitchen after World War II, brandishing canned hamburgers, frozen baked beans, and instant piecrusts. Big Business waged an all-out campaign to win the allegiance of American housewives, but most women were suspicious of the new foods—and the make-believe cooking they entailed. With sharp insight and good humor, Laura Shapiro shows how the ensuing battle helped shape the way we eat today, and how the clash in the kitchen reverberated elsewhere in the house as women struggled with marriage, work, and domesticity. This unconventional history overturns our notions about the '50s and offers new thinking on some of its fascinating figures, including Poppy Cannon, Shirley Jackson, Julia Child, and Betty Friedan.

Author Biography: Laura Shapiro was an award-winning writer at Newsweek for more than fifteen years, and has written for many publications, including The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Granta, and Gourmet.

The New York Times

Shapiro apologizes that her book ''focuses almost exclusively on middle-class women,'' but there's no need for guilt -- the hegemony of Nescafe, Bisquick and Jell-O extended almost immediately to the blue-collar kitchen, and the reaction against it has benefited all classes of society. Shapiro's tale of how America gradually turned from eating TV dinners to using the television to learn how to cook real food cheers up immensely when she leaves behind the Cheez Whiz and sherry (added to pep up broccoli) and, in a chapter called ''Don't Check Your Brains at the Kitchen Door,'' introduces Poppy Cannon, the first of the many engaging heroines of this deliciously readable book. — Paul Levy

The New Yorker

In the fifties, we’re always told, the food industry barged into the American kitchen, waving TV dinners, and destroyed home cooking. Not so fast, Shapiro says. As she reveals, women refused many of the new convenience foods. Fish sticks they accepted, but not ham sticks. Canned peaches, yes; canned hamburgers, no. The industry people hired psychologists to help them combat such resistance; the women’s magazines, fond of their advertisers, told readers how, by splashing some sherry over the frozen peas, they could still make dinner look as though they had cooked it. The book is very funny, and also subtle. The most interesting character is Poppy Cannon, the foremost food columnist of the period, who, though she started her mint-jelly recipe with lime jello, was a serious feminist and had a long affair with—and eventually married—the head of the N.A.A.C.P. After American cooking passed her by, Cannon threw herself off the balcony of her apartment. This chapter reads like a Russian novel.

Library Journal

Shapiro (Perfection Salad) offers a well-researched history of the relationship between the American woman's domestic role as family cook and the American food industry. The book documents the food industry's attempt to reinvent cooking during the 1950s. Its marketing strategy centered on convincing women that purchasing unappetizing packaged food products would free them from the unpleasant chore of cooking. However, to the chagrin of food manufacturers, most American women saw house cleaning as the dreaded chore but enjoyed providing food for their family. Simultaneously, another trend was vying for the attention of the sophisticated homemaker. Julia Child emerged and encouraged women to "take charge of their own world and to cook something very good from scratch." Shapiro argues that this second trend was indicative of women's search for greater independence not only from the food industry but from society's constrained gender roles. Even as someone who sides with the "cooking is a chore" camp, this reviewer found Shapiro's book highly readable. Recommended for public libraries.-Cathy Carpenter, Georgia Inst. of Technology, Atlanta Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Following Perfection Salad (2001), a report on how science, industry, and media changed the American kitchen and women's roles in the first part of the 20th century, Shapiro explores aspects of the same phenomenon in subsequent decades. In her wandering storyline, "1950s America" lasts from the end of WWII until the mid-'60s. The period began with the food industry trying to convince American housewives to embrace new products developed for troops fighting in Europe. Frozen orange juice and fish sticks worked; frozen whale steaks ("Papal approved" for Fridays) did not. Tapping the hope and frustration expressed in contemporary trade journals and letters to local newspapers, the first section serves up tangy social history, flavored by the quirky recipes promoted by industry PR: peanut butter in sweet potatoes, ketchup meringue, oatmeal with a candy bar in it. In later chapters, Shapiro takes a different tack, presenting mini-biographies of women involved in food media: Poppy Cannon, whose breezy food columns get less attention than her controversial marriage to an NAACP leader; Ernestine Gilbreth Carey, coauthor of Cheaper by the Dozen; Peg Bracken, whose I Hate to Cook Book anchored the humorous housewifery genre; M.F.K. Fisher, still our best food writer; and Julia Child, who brought French cooking into the mainstream. This portion of the text presents a deeply felt polemic, but conflicting dialectics make it hard to discern the precise nature of the author's argument. At first, she shows bland, sugary, and bizarre new products assailing the honest foods and integrity of the traditional housewife, but then she depicts that integrity as stolidity in the face of French cuisine.Throughout, Shapiro presents statistical and anecdotal evidence that the picture presented in The Feminine Mystique of housewives trapped and frustrated by their domestic fate was neither an original nor an accurate observation: women were in the workplace all along. Entertaining and well researched, but disjointed. Despite common themes, the parts don't cohere into a consistent whole. Agent: Amanda Urban/ICM

Table of Contents:

	Introduction: Do Women Like to Cook?	xvii
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
	Epilogue	249
	Notes	255
	Bibliography	285
	Permissions and Credits	295
	Index	297

Interesting book: El Salto Radical: una Lección Personal en Mando Extremo

Fertility and Pregnancy Cooking

Author: Katherine Burk

Practical advice for anyone thinking of starting a family, including tips on improving general health and achieving optimum fertilty.