Customer Reviews

Fashionable Food: Seven Decades of Food Fads

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

"Fashionable Food" serves up the most entertaining overview of mealtime in America since Jane and Michael Stern's "Square Meals." From tasty to trendy to just plain oddball, if it was embraced by the guardians of hearth and home, you'll find it here.

Relive the era of Prohibition with "Flapper Pudding", explore new frontiers of soup with a 1930s "Mystery Cake" courtesy of Campbell's, endure the restrictions of the 40s war years - and celebrate the glory of the "goodbye to rations" post-war era. Go swank with a 50s Cocktail Party or sophisticated as you explore 60s gourmet cuisine. Get back to earth with 70s health food and expand your palate with the regional foods of the 80s.

Sprinkled throughout are tantalizing tidbits from re-visiting old friends like The Mystery Chef and Sheila Hibben to rediscovering the wonders of Chinese and Hawaiian cuisine when they were new and exotic. From crockpots to fondues; from Betty Crocker to Alice Waters; from Trader Vic's to Elmer Fudpucker's; if it's part of our gastronomical history, it's part of this entertaining hodgepodge of American food.

The reviewer (below) who faulted this book for its inconsistencies has a point. I've noticed the same flaws in passing, but, for me, the pleasures of this book easily outweigh them. I ran across it by chance, have owned it for years, and return to it again and again--sampling favorite bits or random bits as a "I'm too tired to start a new novel--let's just read something familiar" bedtime read. I've often wanted to write the author to tell her how much satisfaction her book has given me; only the hassles and uncertainty of trying to mail something via a publisher deterred me.

It offers so many fascinating details. Her account of the rise of the '70s salad bar, or the economical toast-based suppers of the '30s. Marshmallow madness in the 20s, the "lie" of American "Chinese" food, etc. I'm in no way a "foodie"--a creepy word that suggests a minor character on that old HR Pufinstuf show--but this book is, in many ways, also a valuable social and pop-cultural history. So glad to see it's been reprinted.

`Fashionable Food, Seven Decades of Food Fads' by culinary historian and food writer, Sylvia Lovegren is a great addition to the social history of American culinary folkways, especially with its concentration on actual, tested recipes from each of the seven subject decades from the 1920s to the 1980s. It is an interesting contrast in approach to `Something from the Oven' by Laura Shapiro that deals more with narrative and less with recipes. The ideal book would have been a combination of the two techniques.

The most important thing to remember is that Ms. Lovegren is talking about things that were `fashionable', not with the demographics of food habits. As Ms. Shapiro points out in her book, the advent of the convenience foods after World War II did not permeate American cooking. They, along with their most vocal proponent, Poppy Cannon, got a lot of attention, but were always viewed as shortcuts and not necessarily a tectonic shift in American cooking habits.

Reading a version of this book revised and republished in 2005 makes me wonder why the author did not update the material in this book to cover the last 15 years, where the playing out of so many trends, and the origin of so many new ones would have added so much interesting material to the book. The advent of the Food Network alone may have warranted a chapter. In all, the coverage of food journalism, especially TV food journalism is just a little thin. Dione Lucas and Jeff Smith (the Frugal Gourmet) are mentioned briefly and Julia Child is given her due for her truly incredible influence on American eating, but there is no mention of, for example Martin Yan, the Galloping Gourmet, and local TV cooking shows. While I take the book at its word since my interest in culinary writing is no more than three years old, I get the sense that virtually everything the author says about the 1980s is still true today. There is little that was popular in 1985 that is not a hot item on today's cooking shows or in today's cookbooks.

On the other hand, I applaud the attention the author gives to M.F.K. Fisher's statements and writings. Ms. Fisher is too easily forgotten in the towering shadow of Julia Child and the leading current distaff celebs, Alice Waters and Deborah Madison. That doesn't mean Ms. Waters and Ms. Madison are not given their due. I especially like the fact that Ms. Lovegren has not taken sides on the issue of who originated the `California Cuisine'. The primary contenders are Alice Waters and Jeremiah Tower, Chez Panisse and Waters' first major chef who helped set the course for Chez Panisse along the lines laid out by Richard Olney's writings on `simple French food'.

Like all good social and cultural history, the book does its share of explaining interesting facts, such as why the Chinese ended up in so many tailor, laundry, and cooking jobs. It was, according to Ms. Lovegren, simply because these were women's occupations and therefore virtually the only ones open to former Chinese railroad workers.

In addition to the seven main chapters on the decades, there are two interludes, one covering early Chinese food and the other covering other oriental foods in America. Here again, we seem to miss any coverage of the increase of popularity in Thai and Vietnamese food. The focus on the `other oriental foods' highlights `Trader Vic' restaurants and their founder, Victor Bergeron.

The thing I like the best about this book is that it does not equate `fads' with `poor quality'. In fact, several `fads' later in the author's decades are the `foodie' movement toward more interesting food, the health food agenda which improved the quality of its regimen over the decades, and the still growing interest in locally grown foods. This is why it is so important for the book to include good working recipes.

The absence of a lot of analysis ties into another weakness with this book in that so many food trends did not recognize decade boundaries. Conventional wisdom, for example, commonly defines `the sixties' as being roughly between the assassination of President Kennedy / Arrival of the Beatles and the resignation of President Nixon closing out the Watergate scandal. I think it would have been more interesting and more accurate to follow individual food trends through the years rather than to chop up the trends into arbitrary decades.

I am struck, for example, by the fact that three major food trends important today had their origins in the sixties. The first and most obvious is the foodie movement with Julia Child as its fountainhead. The second is the health foods / organic food movement spearheaded by Adele Davis' writings plus the great influence of Rachel Carson's `Silent Spring'. I will go out on a limb here and say that the third major movement is in the influence of regional / cultural cuisines growing out of the `soul food' movement. As the author so accurately points out, people have been eating collards, okra, and black eyed peas for centuries, but it took the civil rights / black pride movement to make an icon of this aspect of black culture.

As befitting a book published by the University of Chicago press, this book has good scholarly accouterments, including careful references to the sources of all recipes plus proper cautions on recipes which were not tested by the author or her colleagues. I must give the copy editor a slap on the hand for missing the misspelling Jeremiah Tower's first name in the Preface, especially since Monsieur Tower's name is properly spelled later in the book.

This is an excellent, highly enjoyable book to read and an interesting source of `historical' recipes. It would be great to see it brought up to date.

Funny, entertaining, and educational. A great read if you are a foodie. Lots of recipes you may have heard of as a child. Examples: Kraft Music Hall Clam Appetizer Dip, Wacky Cake or Crazy Cake, Mystery Cake (that's the one with the tomato soup in it). Have you heard of the "Mystery Chef" (pg. 51)? He's from the 1930's. There was "Marshmallow Madness" in the Thirties. Do you know what a Wedgie Pie is? How about Bomb Shelter Chocolate-Cherry Delight Cake or Baked Beans Au Glow-Glow. I'm sure you heard of Jell-O Cake or Tang Pie. Remember Trader Vic? His Chinese food and tropical drinks. The book takes you all the way to the fusion cooking of the Nineties, only a couple of recipes in this section. Otherwise, loads a really good recipes. There are even a few crazy crazy recipes that you are told not to make. A fun book to read.

"Fashionable Food: Seven Decades of Food Fads," by Sylvia Lovegren is a fun, opinionated, eyebrow-raising history of the changing fashions in food in the United States over much of the twentieth century. Well-researched and dryly witty, it starts with the salads and "dainty" foods of the 1920s and wends its way through middle-Americanization, the influence of home economists, the passion for Chinese-ish food, wartime food rationing, postwar beefocentric barbecues, canned food cooking, international gourmet style, health food, fondue, sticky desserts, nouvelle cuisine and more, ending on the cusp of the 1990s.

Not only does the author explain the social currents that pushed food fashions this way and that, she also includes recipes, and some of them are humdingers. While most of them sound pretty good (gingerbread waffles!), she does not skimp on the awful, what-were-they-thinking recipes which swirl, misbegotten, out of fads and crazes and then are justly forgotten (lobster in pineapple boats flambe, urk). And if she warns that a recipe has not been tested, be assured it's pretty revolting (1924 "Italian" spaghetti, a mess of overcooked pasta, American cheese, and flour-thickened sauce).

To sum up: interesting social history, lots of good recipes, some dreadful recipes.

?Fashionable Foods" comprises a recounting of food fads from the 1920's to the 1990's. Author Sylvia Lovegren discusses the trends and includes recipes from each decade. I rather enjoyed this book; however, I find myself unable to award more than 3 stars. The idea is intriguing as is much of the content, but the book is rather inconsistently developed.

The overarching theme of the book is (seemingly) "how America cooks." However, the author swerves from highlighting absurd recipes (Banana and Popcorn Salad in the 1920's) to typical at-home foods (meatloaf in the 1980's) to haute cuisine served in fine restaurants (Ciopino in the 1970's). Covering a wide array of food trends is fine, but it feels jumbled. The formatting adds to the confusion: finding the breaks between recipes and text is very difficult ? everything simply runs together.

The inclusion of recipes is also somewhat haphazard and seems dictated primarily by the author?s ability to easily procure reprint permission. Thus, some of the food trends that are discussed do not include representative recipes. By and large, recipes are presented as they would have been made during the time period, with minor adjustments for out-of-date products. Nevertheless, some of the recipes are randomly updated to decrease fat and sugar content for a ?90?s taste.? That would seem to defeat the purpose of the book ? i.e., to serve as a historical document of sorts. Also, some of the recipes haven't been tested by the author ? so she recommends that they not be used.

Overall, the book is rather confusing because of these inconsistencies. I really wanted to like ?Fashionable Foods? more than I do. Recommended with reservations for readers looking for an entertaining read about foods, not a cookbook.

Some of the other reviews give more about this book itself. This author has clearly done her research. I often pick this book up and start reading, as every page offers entertaining tidbits about food fads and trends of the last century. I only wish it could be updated!

It seems that in order to highlight all the differences from every decade, the authors have just focused on the most radically different recipes they could -- which means the least edible. I am talking about things like peanut butter, ketchup & pickle sandwiches. Not interesting the way, say, a cream cheese, bacon & pickle sandwich is (which is a recipe from a different book I have, from 1895), but just useless and disgusting.

What is the purpose of a book that just informs you of some of the worst recipes from each decade?