Customer Reviews

Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

If Laura Shapiro does nothing more (and she does much, much more) it will have been a very valuable service to rescue Poppy Cannon and her Can-Opener Cookbook from the infamy of '50s dreck. The author, in Something From the Oven, does a superb job of taking the idea of a '50s dinner and making it a more complex and multi-layered idea than is usually represented. She peels away all the stereotypes the decade has been dragging behind it and shows the truth. Canned and frozen foods(including my mother's favourite, the TV dinner) make appearances but the author show how women did not blindly follow every marketing scheme tossed at them. And Poppy, along with such luminaries as Betty Crocker and Julia Child, help populate this rich tale with great personalities, in addition to the many anonymous readers and letter writers to women's magazines and food columns. This is a well researched, enjoyable book that makes the 1950s come alive.

`Something from the Oven' by Laura Shapiro is subtitled `Reinventing Dinner in 1950's America', referring to the conventional wisdom that home cooking in the 1950's was all about cooking with packaged, canned, frozen, and other commercially prepared foods. Oddly, the most interesting message I get from this book is that in spite of the great expansion of such preparations, home cooks, primarily housewives, did not embrace this trend and generally considered cooking with frozen foods and baking with cake mixes to be a second rate expedient to true home cooking. American home cooks in the 1950s still based much of their cooking on fresh meats, vegetables, and fruits.

One of the other more interesting topics in this book is the fact that the packaged food marketing trend of the 50's was based to a great extent on the efforts the food packagers made to prepare instant food preparations for the American army during World War II. The most famous of these preparations was Spam, which survives to this day, although in the 1950's the book recounts a good half dozen similar brands. Another great impetus to the prepared food movement was the introduction of frozen foods before the war, which reached its apotheosis with Swanson's creation of the TV dinner, created as a solution to the company's being stuck with an especially large shipment of frozen turkeys. As I recall only too well, frozen food simply did not take off as well as we may believe from the vantage point of 50 years later. Most homes simply did not have large freezers and the technology to successfully freeze a lot of foods was simply not there yet. As someone whose father tried to make his fortune by getting into the frozen food distribution business, and wisely getting out of it almost as quickly, I can testify to the fact that the market for frozen food grew a lot more slowly than it's boosters had hoped.

Another interesting perspective is the fact that canned fruits and vegetables date back to the beginning of the twentieth century and while they simply do not and cannot duplicate the flavor of fresh products, they, like Bisquik and Spam today, were simply accepted as a distinct product. Canned pears, pineapple, and fruit salad had their own niches, different from the fresh ingredients.

Packaged cake mixes have not fared nearly as well as canned goods. In the 50's, they were the perfect products for flour companies to replace falling sales of plain white flour, but they were never accepted as a complete substitute for cakes made from scratch. There is no question that these products have improved over the years, but they never reached the point where they transcended their role as a less than perfect short cut, suspicious for their pharmacopoeia of additives.

Aside from setting the record straight on trends in the 50's, the author gives several profiles of the major real and imagined trendsetters of the period. One of the most interesting by far is the story of Poppy Cannon who is probably just barely remembered by older Women's magazine readers and culinary journalists. In the mid-1950s, she broadly endorsed the use of convenience foods, modern appliances, and quick simulations of classic dishes. In writing recipes, she invented words with abandon which would make modern Jamie Oliver's `glugs' of olive oil look positively pedestrian. It is only just that Cannon is not remembered today since her doctrine was based on a basic inconsistency between gourmet dishes and convenience. Unlike James Beard who based good cooking on fresh foods and regional cuisines and whose reputation survives to this day, Cannon's key to gourmet cuisine was fancy preparation. One of the greatest ironies of her career was her association with Alice B. Toklas, whose basic French home cooking was about as different from Cannon's doctrine as you can get. Their friendship was strong, embracing even the gift of a mixmaster to Toklas, until Cannon started pushing Toklas celebrity, which offended Alice's reverence for the memory of her dead companion Gertrude Stein, as Toklas lived primarily to promote Stein's life and works.

Another theme in the book is the dichotomy between home cooking, the world of women in the home, and gourmet cooking, the world of men in the professional kitchen and in gourmet food clubs. One of the oddest comments I have ever seen about a cookbook was a quote from someone who praised `The Joy of Cooking' for having no `womens' cooking recipes. The trend went so far at this time that the great American culinary essayist M.F.K. Fisher used her initials as her byline because it disguised the fact that she was a woman. As she ate her way through Europe, she constantly encountered the opinion that she had a man's taste for food.

It is entirely appropriate that a fair amount of writing appears in the book about Peg Bracken who, unlike Poppy Cannon, is still fondly remembered today and whose book is still used by, for example Karen Duffy, author of `slob in the kitchen'. Shapiro reveals that Bracken really did not hate to cook, she was simply offering ways of easing the demands on housewives to provide tasty meals for their families day after day. So, If cooking was not really your forte, she offered ways to get the job done well without guilt.

It is part of Julia Child's immense legacy that she, and not James Beard or Craig Claiborne or any other male culinary professional changed the face of home cooking in America. She broke down the wall between male and female cooking ethos by demystifying the citadel of gourmet cooking, French cuisine, for the American home cook. She may not have turned American housewives into gourmet cooks, but she indelibly shifted the focus of cooking from cheap and easy flash to good ingredients and basic skills.

This book is highly recommended for anyone interested in American culinary history and its myths.

I'm usually not into this sort of thing. But I causally picked up, " Something From the Oven : Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America by Laura Shapiro, and couldn't put it down. It is cocked full of fascinating and almost forgotten history, as well as being superbly written. Shapiro has read and researched reams of source material and has come up with a treasure trove. Ms.Shapiro's wit is a treasure too! I actually read parts out loud to my husband...who asked for more! Don't miss it

Something From the Oven covers almost everything about American food culture during the post-World War II years until the mid 1960s. There are accounts of the advent of convenience foods, the literature of food, the rise of cooking shows on TV, and the phenomenon of cooking contests such as the Pillsbury Bake-Off.

The topics seem loosely connected, with no particular conclusions drawn. But it's a pop history book, not an academic tome, so sit back and enjoy an entertaining look at food from several historical angles.

Shapiro talks about the post-war need for convenience food. At least, manufacturers wanted there to be a need for convenience foods, whether American cooks agreed or not. There were a lot of experiments in the first days. Successful products included concentrated frozen orange juice and fish sticks. Unsuccessful product proposals included canned deep-fried hamburgers and concentrated distilled water. (I suspect if Shapiro is having us on with that last idea.)

The section on domestic literature was especially fun, although a lot of it had little to do with food. Shapiro discusses Shirley Jackson, Erma Bombeck, Peg Bracken, Bette MacDonald, Jean Kerr, and the Gilbreths of Cheaper By the Dozen fame, among others. She reveals that there was often a big difference between their supposedly non-fiction works and their actual lives. I look forward to rereading these old favorites with this new information in mind, as well as looking up some authors Shapiro mentions that I was not aware of.

The mini-history of Julia Child's career is entertaining, and the extensive bibliography is a treasure trove of further reading ideas. Recommended!

Conventional wisdom about the 1950s is that it was the decade in which everything went bad, and the fear of non-conformity and Communism made everything about American life bland, nowhere more so than in the kitchen, where white bread and TV dinners took over and banned fresh food and gourmet cooking from fashion. Laura Shapiro's new book SOMETHING FROM THE OVEN argues convincingly that this generalization has been absurdly overstated and that none of it is true in the least.

Her previous book PERFECTION SALAD was good-the rise of "white foods" at the turn of the century, the moment when cook books started specifying amounts in their recipes as "science," or an absurd version of it, became desirable in the kitchen.

But SOMETHING improves on PERFECTION, as it were. Shapiro plunges right in with the invention and promulgation of frozen foods, showing how American housewives took to them slowly and with the utmost discrimination, rejecting the ones that didn't taste good. She shows how serious chefs like James Beard and Dione Lucas started out scorning convenience foods but they, too eventually came to approve of some of them, using the same intuitive responses as the mass of US housewives. She then opens up the story by writing a gimlet eyed account of the original Pillsbury Bake-Off, showing how marketing and drive made the Bake-Off a double-edges sword, by promoting Pillsbury's convenience food but also showcasing the creativity and ingenuity of US home cooks.

Shapiro also reminds us that the 1950s was the age in which Alice B. Toklas published her famous cookbook. A sequel was prepared with the collaboration of the food writer Poppy Cannon, although it didn't do too well. Poppy Cannon, one of the enigmatic personalities of the food world, is given the big biographical treatment. Married to Walter White, the light-skinned head of the NAACP, Poppy Cannon led her own kind of double life for many years, and Shapiro really digs in and devours every nuance. Shapiro is also good at discussing the family comedy writers of the 1950s, who balanced home-making with feminism, including often ignored writers like Jean Kerr, Ernestine Gilbreth Carey, Peg Bracken, and the one and only Shirley Jackson. By viewing these women as integral to the story of food and food writing in the 1950s, Shapiro does us all a huge service. It is definitely one of the most intriguing and revisionary books I've read in a long time.

Laura Shapiro's book, written in articulate and entertaining style, is a tour de force of post-WW II American cuisine. Those of us who grew up strong and healthy on Chef Boyardee canned spaghetti and lime jello with marshmallows, will find this trip down tastebud-memory lane, a delight. (That does not mean that much of the food of those days was so delightful!)


The baby boom generation mothers were encouraged to leave kitchen drudgery behind, to put together meals by using can openers and taking tv dinners from the freezer. Surprisingly, many women rejected this approach, some more than others. The food industry learned some lessons about merchandising; one of the most famous is that women felt better about the cakes they made from boxes if they were called upon to add a fresh egg of their own to the powdered mix.


When I was a young wife and mother, I and many of my friends staged our own little revolution against "convenience cuisine". The bread we kneaded and baked, the yogurt cultures we nourished, the from-scratch decorated cookies we made at holidays, the fresh vegetables we scrubbed and served...all these foods tasted GOOD, in stark contrast to the boxed and frozen food of our own childhoods.


No one would want to return to the age of the wood stove and all-day cooking chores, when cake making required attacking the eggs laboriously with a hand beater. Shapiro's book is about that transition stage, through the late 40s, and on into the 50s and 60s, when taste and even nutrition were often sacrificed for ease of preparation. Today, with bread machines, Cuisinarts, and a Trader Joe's Market down the street with its sophisticated world cuisine, we are blessed with meals that are easy to make and gloriously delicious to eat.

There isn't much more to add to the other reviewers, but I did want to say that I picked up this book fearing it would be a bit too "academic," but the author did a great job presenting the history and research in a way that was a true pleasure to read. She made me think about issues like women in the workforce, the importance of the kitchen as the center of the home, the creative way cooks have always found shortcuts, and the like. Lots of fun stuff you wouldn't believe, too -- like all the ways to cook with Jell-O. Thumbs up.

My mother had no interest in cooking, and she went back to work full-time when I was a young child. As a result, I grew up on boxed mixes: Bisquick, hamburger helper, and plenty of "just add a pound of hamburger" dinners. (How did I become a foodie after that upbringing?)

So, on one level I enjoyed this book because it brought back all the weird foods of of childhood, "home cookin', box mix style." The author mentions plenty of dishes that would make us curl our noses today, involving peanut butter, Jello, and miniature marshmallows in configurations that MUST be illegal in some states.

However, what I found more interesting was the discussion of how we got from there-to-here. How and why did the food industry shove down the throat of the American housewife all these "convenience foods"? To my surprise, housewives resisted far more strenuously than my mother did. Cake mixes, for example, were roundly ignored until a psychologist realized that women didn't think they were "really cooking" unless they added an egg. (The fact that powdered eggs of the era were pretty awful also had something to do with it.) Also, the food industry was clueless about the products that *worked*: if frozen fish sticks will sell, then why not frozen chicken sticks? or frozen eggplant sticks?

A little less interesting (but still worth 3 stars, on its own) are the biographies of several of the people who had an impact on the food consciousness of the 50s and 60s, such as Poppy Cannon (whom I'd never heard of) and Julia Child.

From reading the reviews here, I rather expected that I'd find a lot of the data in this book interesting, and I wasn't disappointed. To my surprise, I also found the author to have a delightful sense of humor, and unafraid to insert her own opinions.

If you enjoy books about food, history, and how they intersect with people -- such as Uncommon Grounds by Pendergrast, or Kurlansky's Salt -- you'll almost certainly like this book.

This book isn't just about cooking and food - it's as much about living (and mighty interesting living at that). I'm not a cook and just don't understand why some people become consumed with the various ways of food preparation. Don't get me wrong, I want my food to taste good, anyway.......I have had a fascination with another food writer, M.F.K. Fisher, because of her travel adventures not her cooking,and while googling Fisher came upon a reference to Shapiro who talks about her in this book so bought it from Amazon and couldn't put it down from the first paragraph. I know I didn't review this book but just had to put my 2 cents in. Shapiro really has a way with words!

I savored this book, and didn't want it to end. I thought the subtitle did the book a bit of a disservice: "Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America," making it sound too narrow. It is really more of a social history of the rise and fall of the housewife stereotype, seen through the lens of food, the rise of the food industry, and high and low cooking. As some of the other reviewers have stated, a few of the biographies may have gone on a bit long, but I didn't mind as Shapiro managed to make them all fascinating. In a way I really related to Poppy Cannon, an icon who I'd never heard of before and her penchant for both great food and convenience. Isn't that actually the way most home cooks make dinner these days, even those who care about tasty, healthy food? We may not be making gross jello salads any longer, but we think nothing of opening a jar of good satay sauce to flavor our Thai stir-fries.

This is the kind of book I will keep on my shelf to refer to, and to re-read in the future. I absolutely loved it!