Customer Reviews

Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century, With a New Afterword (California Studies in Food and Culture)

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Foodies and feminists alike should read this book. As part of the Modern Food Library reprints, chosen by Ruth Reichl (who is known for her good taste and her own laudable literary contributions - "Tender at the Bone" and "Comfort Me with Apples"), "Perfection Salad" describes all the elements present at the turn of the century that combined to forever change the way Americans view food. Food, its preparation and presentation became a female obsession in an time where the kitchen was really the only arena in which a woman could rule. The female nutritionists and cooks from that era seemed bent upon exerting control on SOMETHING, and that something turned out to be food - with sometimes terrible consequences. After reading "Perfection Salad", I understood the recipes that my grandmother (born in 1898) and my mother after her learned and served. Don't be frightened by the scholarly look of "Perfection Salad" - there are hilarious nuggets in the text - like color-themed menus (everything green and white, for example), putting everything into gelatin for the sake of "daintiness" (no messy lettuce leaves hanging out of your mouth) and covering absolutely anything and everything with "white sauce". For more laughs, peruse "The Gallery of Regrettable Food" by James Lileks in which he has gathered some of the most revolting-looking photos of the consequences of "Perfection Salad".

It's a rare book that brings you into the subject deftly, can explain details without getting lost in them, and reserves most judgment until the end, and then provides insightful and thought-provoking commentary. This book is a fascinating exploration of how, in the interests of preserving American cuisine, the home, and women's place in it, home economists came into vogue in the early part of the 20th century, and damn near came close to wrecking everything they set out to save.

I love to cook, but among other working moms I'm friends with, I'm the exception. Women either hate cooking, don't mind cooking but don't know what to fix, or just flat out don't know how to cook. An awful lot of my friends rely heavily on fast food or packaged meals on a regular basis to feed their kids. I have long thought that there was a place in the schools for a revival of home economics, done better than what I and my classmates got in 7th grade - one year divided into a semester of sewing (let me tell you, that didn't take - almost no one I can think of sews), 1/2 a semester of cooking, and 1/2 a semester of a combination "household economy" (budgeting, nutrition, etc.) and sex education unit. Our cooking teacher freely admitted she hated cooking (she also wasn't exactly informative in the sex ed component either - her advice was "wait until marriage" and she showed her own childbirth video in class, if you can believe that) and her own distaste for cooking certainly didn't help us learn. By the time I got to high school, home ec was the "easy A" class you only took if you weren't in the college prep track (we had three coursework tracks - college prep, A and B, and home-ec was in the "B", or lowest, track). That meant that myself and my fellow students got through 8th-12th grade, four years of college, and possibly grad school, our 7th grade home ec year was far behind us. I always felt like there had to be a better way to teach people about the necessary life skills of cooking, household management and nutrition - something that would be more practical and stick with people a little better.

Now, after reading Perfection Salad, I understand why my home-economics class was so worthless and I've changed my mind about reinstituting home ec into high schools - I think it would be a throwback to some very bad traditions that are better off left in the past.

Home economists were responsible for basically enslaving women in their homes - convincing women that the home and the kitchen was the only place they would find moral, religious, or emotional fulfillment; that they had no place in man's world, and that the ills of society (poverty, disease, alcoholism, malnutrition, truancy, delinquency, infidelity, etc.) were due to women's failings to fully embrace their moral duty to keep a clean house and cook "scientific" meals for their family. If you want to know why women got so fed up with being at home - fed up enough that they left their homes for the workplace in the 60s and 70s - it's all here. And it turns out that the decline in home cooking - that so many conservatives have blamed on the women's movement, and held up as the reason for the obesity epidemic - actually began in the 1950s, when home economists put a full-court press on women to give up the "old ways" of preparing food and to use "convenient and hygenic" prepackaged foods. It turns out that in the 1950s, women were told cooking wasn't as important as being sexually attractive to their husbands. So much for the "feminists are to blame for all the world's ills" theory.

This is an absolutely wonderful and amazing book. I can't speak highly enough about it. It explains so much about why we have the attitudes towards food that we do, and how we might be able to find our way back to a healthier way of eating. Back in the timeframe the book discusses, it was actually seen as a good thing that women would buy prepackaged meals from the market rather than cook "unscientific" food in "unhygenic" kitchens. Now, women are doing just that and we've found out it's bad for us. I have a particular aversion to people like Christopher Kimball from Cook's Illustrated, who purports to have the "best" recipe and method for cooking anything, regardless of culinary traditions, cultural differences, and personal taste, and is extremely strident in his promotion of his own product over others (recently writing with obvious disgust in the New York Times about user-contributed recipes on the web, which aren't as scrupulously developed as his own). Now I realize there have been New Englanders like this for over a century, trying to tell women they know better and that women should put their own instincts about how to feed their families aside in favor of "researched" methods. I honestly believe that a huge part of why women don't cook more now is that they're intimidated by culinary perfectionism and mixed messages from people like Kimball - put dinner on the table, but do it our way, which may require more time or skill than you have, but that shouldn't matter, if you want to do the "right" thing.

If you like food, like cooking, and want to understand a LOT about feminism, food politics, the history of the women's movement, etc., you cannot miss this book. I can't wait to get Something From The Oven, Shapiro's book about cooking in the 1950s.

I found Perfection Salad in a used bookstore in Manhattan ten or twelve years ago. I read it, was fascinated and stirred by its tale of the psychological manipulation of women - particularly, the women who were new immigrants to America at the turn of the century. I loaned the book to someone who never returned it, and have been quoting it -- and longing to re-read it -- ever since. I have just re-ordered the "back in print" edition...Here is what is important about this book: it details an overlooked, but critical, thread in the fabric of family and community life -- a thread that was quietly pulled until the greater tapestry unraveled.

This highly readable, beautifully researched book provides a fascinating look into American "cuisine" circa 1850-1920. The Boston Cooking School and other institutions promoted Americanization through cooking conducted on scientific principles, although immigrants proved reluctant to give up their "coarse and unsavory" meals for triumphs of digestibility such as the following, served to President Wilson on his first day in office: "cream of celery soup, fish with white sauce, roast capon with two white vegetables, a fruit salad,and a dessert made with gelatin, custard, and whipped cream"(212). Other triumphs included a salad made of bananas and pimentos bound together with mayonnaise and whipped cream and, later, grapefruit pieces mixed with dessert mints. Often funny and always interesting, this book
also helps readers to understand the convenience food mania of the 1950s.

This is a "must read" for anyone who fancies themself a chef, professional or home-cook. The writing is fluid and interesting, laid out in a comprehensible and sensible manner, and quite the scholarly document. Even those not intersted in cooking, but enjoy great nostalgia and history will love this book. Highly recommended as a gift where appropriate interest exists.

Great book for foodies & those interested in the history of feminist pursuits. Shapiro gently tells the history of the missionary types who carved out a professional niche in the gastronomic world with an occasional well placed needle at the woolier aberations produced by the drive to tell the rest of us what was good for us. And, for the most part, as a nation, we swallowed it whole.

Amusing and thought provoking. I love reading books about the history of food and cooking, but many of them can be pretty dry. Not this one I found. Anyone interested in cooking, history, and the history of women will find this fascinating. The contradictions and struggles of the home economics movement deserves a place in the history of feminism (and womens' history in general) and the author does a great job of illustrating this journey with all it's failures and lasting effects. Now, how can I get my hands on some of that "domestic fiction" from the last century? Sounds hilarious.

the late 19th century movement for scientific household management is an almost unbelievable amalgam of middle-class protestant social standards and religious impulses, intellectural curiosity and discipline, political thought (compare it with leninism--everything the same for everyone all the time, and the middle class knows better than the proletariat), and naivete. while having less influence on its time than its proponents would acknowledge (even when reporting its failure), the movement led, through corporate exploitation and perversion, to many of the problems with eating, cooking, and "food production" in america today. it also led to many improvements we take completely for granted.

the author seems to be unaware that there was a comparable movement in britain. my british mother could remember horrific results from the school recipes she was forced to produce (one stew was so bad her friend's dogs refused it) and the british government published many educational pamphlets about "proper" methods of cooking, to the same indifference or resentment that met the domestic scientists' efforts.

i was a bit disappointed that the author did not pursue the links to the Transcendental Movement, though she did mention the connection with american protestentism. of course, the attitude of the 19th century cooks (and twentieth century nutritionists) has a long history: a Classical philospher (i'm too lazy to look up his name) wrote: "a man should eat to live, not live to eat" before the christian era. the author does discuss some of the social attitudes towards women and physical pleasure and how the ideal of a woman's being without appetite encouraged the domestic scientists to ignore the actual food in the cooking process.

while there is much to amuse in the domestic scientists' efforts and belief (and horrify--did anyone actually eat this way?), and while the author does acknowledge the dire state of production with reference to, for instance, the stock yards, i don't think she understands the appeal of predictable levening (how many of us want to make baking powder from wood ash?) preditable results (my british mother adored measuring cups and spoons--as a very short woman, she couldn't use the "two handsful of flour" recipes her family used and), and flour and sugar that are actually flour and sugar (the colonial housewife was warned by one contemporary author to make sure the sugar she bought in loaf form [and had to pulverize by hand] was not plaster of paris). the fact that 20th century corporations, especially after the second world war, {influended} their ideals into food which has caloric content without nutrition or taste should not detract from the real benefits the movement bestowed in its heyday.

this is an enjoyable popular history. i wish there had been more analysis of the movement's origins. the book's main strengths are its demonstration of how the movement's ideals were subsumed by industry and the analysis of the attitudes of the movement's founders.

the worst part is the description of the baked bean and celery "salad"--with dressing and whipped cream. that will live in my nightmares for years. and years.