Something From the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "TOWARD THE END of February 1954, James Beard was at work in his Greenwich Village kitchen doing what he most loved to do: cooking delicious..." (more)
Key Phrases: Betty Crocker, General Mills, New York (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From 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.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

From Booklist

When World War II ended, American industry was left with overcapacity in food manufacture and preservation. Before this could be transferred to domestic use, food manufacturers had to distinguish between what a soldier needed to eat and what a family wanted to eat. Canned and frozen foods appeared in groceries, but American housewives initially rejected most of them. Marketing and modern food science soon overcame objections, television advertising spread the gospel of efficiency, and the 1950s American kitchen and diet were transformed. Shapiro delves into this period of rapid change and comes up with absorbing stories of the era's women. In addition to the familiar tales of the fictional Betty Crocker and cultural icon Julia Child, Shapiro relates the astounding stories of other mid-century foodies such as Poppy Cannon, who publicized convenience foods while falling in love with Walter White, influential NAACP leader, in a time still suspicious of interracial marriage. She also tells of Freda De Knight at Ebony, who studied at the same Parisian cooking school as Julia Child and then brought French haute cuisine into the middle-class African American kitchen. Shapiro's graceful, flowing prose makes this history of both cooking and women utterly compelling. Mark Knoblauch
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Viking Adult; First Edition, Second Printing edition (March 25, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0670871540
• ISBN-13: 978-0670871544
• Product Dimensions: 9.8 x 6.1 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #615,360 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Peeling the Stale Images of the '50s, May 11, 2004

By	Ricky Hunter (New York City, NY United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.

22 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Revealing culinary journalism. Highly recommended., September 3, 2004

By	B. Marold "Bruce W. Marold" (Bethlehem, PA United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

`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.

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Couldn't put it down!, July 22, 2004

By	E. Voves (Philly, USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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