Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century (California Studies in Food and Culture) (Volume 24) - Softcover

Shapiro, Laura

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0520257383 ISBN 13: 9780520257382

Publisher: University of California Press, 2008

Synopsis

Toasted marshmallows stuffed with raisins? Green-and-white luncheons? Chemistry in the kitchen? This entertaining and erudite social history, now in its fourth paperback edition, tells the remarkable story of America's transformation from a nation of honest appetites into an obedient market for instant mashed potatoes. In Perfection Salad, Laura Shapiro investigates a band of passionate but ladylike reformers at the turn of the twentieth century―including Fannie Farmer of the Boston Cooking School―who were determined to modernize the American diet through a "scientific" approach to cooking. Shapiro's fascinating tale shows why we think the way we do about food today.

About this title

Review

Perfection Salad, a dish that won its creator first prize in a 1905 cooking contest, consisted of pristine molded aspic containing celery, red pepper, and chopped cabbage. Laura Shapiro, author of this eponymous social history, part of the Modern Library Food series, takes the salad as a model for the domestic science movement, an intriguing women's crusade of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Bent on convincing housewives that the way to domestic order lay in cooking "dainty" nutritional meals from sanitary ingredients in "scientific" kitchens, the movement helped give birth to our mass-market food scene, with its reliance on home economics precepts, processed convenience foods, and no-cook cooking--our cuisine of boil-in bags and microwave frozen dinners. Entertaining and informative, but also unexpectedly moving, the book chronicles in numerous intriguing stories the ways in which an impulse to liberate women from the drudgery and imprecision of daily food preparation led to its debasement. It's a fascinating story, of interest to anyone who wonders why and how we cook and eat--and think about food--as we do.

Beginning with portraits of early domestic movement reformers such as Catherine Beecher and Mary Lincoln, and investigating institutions like the Boston Cooking School, home of Fannie Farmer, the Mother of Level Measurements, the book then pursues "scientific cookery" into its mid-20th-century manifestation. "With the help of the new industry of advertising," Shapiro writes, "the food business was able to reflect Mrs. Lincoln's values [of food-production uniformity] by keeping its achievements in packing, sanitation, convenience, and novelty at the forefront." But greater ills ensued: the effect of the reformers, Shapiro contends, was to encourage women to become docile consumers tethered to commercial interests--and to rob our vigorous cooking and eating traditions of their rich life. In making that point, Perfection Salad reveals its true subject: the cultural priorities that defined American 20th-century life and, finally, the sorry nature of the order they established. --Arthur Boehm

From the Inside Flap

"Shapiro recounts the story of scientific cooking with a deft humor some might find unbecoming to a work of impeccable scholarship. Yet how else are we to think about a movement that upheld mayonnaise, cream sauce, and the extended boiling of vegetables as cures for every social ill, from drunkenness and degeneracy to feminism and labor unrest?.... My only disappointment with Perfection Salad is that it ends too soon." --Barbara Ehrenreich, New York Times Book Review
"A comprehensive, droll social history of a curious women's movement that's responsible for everything from nutritional education programs to TV dinners."--Maureen Corrigan, Village Voice

Edition details

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0520257383
• ISBN 13: 9780520257382
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 294