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

FROM THE PUBLISHER

At the dawn of the 1950s, a woman was expected to be, in the words of Peg Bracken, "business manager, practical nurse, housecleaner, child psychologist, home decorator, chauffeur, laundress, cook, hostess -- all this besides being a gay, well-groomed companion." Something had to give. Big business chose the kitchen and the postwar food industry stood at the ready, promising to minimize a housewife's time at the stove. Hoping to rid themselves of freeze-dried army leftovers and profit from new food technologies, the industry stuck a clumsy hand into American kitchens and tried to take over the cooking. Tasteless "gourmet" horrors -- frozen bouillabaisse and pate de foie gras, dehydrated wine -- failed to convince any woman, no matter how frazzled, for very long. On the other hand, canned peaches, frozen vegetables, frozen orange juice, Spam and other indestructible lunch meats were welcomed and are still popular. No matter how handy some of these ingredients might have been, implicit in the suggestion that instant food was "the housewife's dream" was the debilitating idea that women were, and always had been, mere functionaries in the kitchen, leaving the gourmet arts to male chefs: in other words, cooking was hard, and women were not up to the task.

There was a battle on, and women of all stripes pitched into the fray. Cooks and journalists such as the formidable author and House Beautiful food editor Poppy Cannon -- and the fictional Betty Crocker -- championed the possibilities of instant cooking while others, M.F.K. Fisher, for example, pursued the sublime. Bemused chroniclers of domestic chaos such as Shirley Jackson, Jean Kerr, and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey laughed away any attempt to idealize the postwar family -- or housewife. Then in 1963, just as Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique appeared on the scene, a young, gangly housewife named Julia Child went on TV and changed both the American kitchen and Americans forever. In essence, she said to women, "You don't need to get it from a package. You can take charge. You can stand at the center of your own world and create something very good, from scratch." With sharp insight and good humor, Laura Shapiro turns on its head our whole conception of women's roles in and out of the kitchen in the fifties -- and in doing so, has rewritten not just the history of American cuisine, but that of American life.

FROM THE CRITICS

The New York Times

Shapiro apologizes that her book ''focuses almost exclusively on middle-class women,'' but there's no need for guilt -- the hegemony of Nescafe, Bisquick and Jell-O extended almost immediately to the blue-collar kitchen, and the reaction against it has benefited all classes of society. Shapiro's tale of how America gradually turned from eating TV dinners to using the television to learn how to cook real food cheers up immensely when she leaves behind the Cheez Whiz and sherry (added to pep up broccoli) and, in a chapter called ''Don't Check Your Brains at the Kitchen Door,'' introduces Poppy Cannon, the first of the many engaging heroines of this deliciously readable book. — Paul Levy

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.

Library Journal

Shapiro (Perfection Salad) offers a well-researched history of the relationship between the American woman's domestic role as family cook and the American food industry. The book documents the food industry's attempt to reinvent cooking during the 1950s. Its marketing strategy centered on convincing women that purchasing unappetizing packaged food products would free them from the unpleasant chore of cooking. However, to the chagrin of food manufacturers, most American women saw house cleaning as the dreaded chore but enjoyed providing food for their family. Simultaneously, another trend was vying for the attention of the sophisticated homemaker. Julia Child emerged and encouraged women to "take charge of their own world and to cook something very good from scratch." Shapiro argues that this second trend was indicative of women's search for greater independence not only from the food industry but from society's constrained gender roles. Even as someone who sides with the "cooking is a chore" camp, this reviewer found Shapiro's book highly readable. Recommended for public libraries.-Cathy Carpenter, Georgia Inst. of Technology, Atlanta Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews