Laura Shapiro

This was a great read on so many levels. Laura Shapiro writes with an easy and often humorous style. If you are interested in the science behind cooking; the chemical process of cooking food or the biological process of digestion; how arithmetic factors into cooking. How about the study of bacteria, whether it be from the germy dishcloth or the garbage can? Domestic "scientists" were determined to improve diets through science and chemistry.
Cooking because the great equalizer at the turn of show more the century. the interest in learning to cook was as such that in shops cooking was done in the open so that customers could witness both ingredients and preparation (the birth of the cooking show?).
From a feminist angle, it was great to read about so many women "firsts." For example, Ellen Richards as the first woman admitted to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Even though she was considered a "special student" she broke the male-only barrier in 1870.
My favorite invention from this time period was the "Aladdin Oven" - a portable stove the size of a dinner pail that would cook a meal all day long. The first slow cooker! show less

I am still trying to figure out how to rate this book.

I loved the idea, and some of the chapters were fascinating — I loved the Eleanor Roosevelt chapter most, but I was also happy to read about Dorothy Wordsworth, Rosa Lewis, and Barbara Pym. It was fascinating to read about their relationships to food, the things they ate or wanted to eat, what food was like for them. It was great to know that Eleanor Roosevelt probably actually enjoyed good food, and her famous disinterest in food, show more which led to her employing the worst cook in White House history, was more about hating her mother-in-law and being justifiably furious about FDR’s infidelity. I enjoyed reading about Barbara Pym’s love of ordinary food, and her delight in eavesdropping on people, especially in restaurants. (I also felt vindicated. I, uh, also enjoy that a lot.) Wordsworth, Lewis, Roosevelt, and Pym were interesting women, and fun to spend time with.

I did not, however, love two of the chapters. I knew I’d hate the Eva Braun chapter — I don’t really want to read about the human side of Hitler at all, ever, and I am not interested in what he ate or drank or thought or did in his day-to-day life while he was killing millions of people. I’d also rather not read about concentration camps, especially side by side with Nazis happily eating and enjoying their buccolic lives, in my light popular history books. To be clear: this is important research, I’m glad it’s being done, and I want people to remember the Holocaust. Just, as a Jewish person, I’d rather not read about what Nazis ate. And the Braun chapter is mostly about that; Braun herself didn’t eat (or do, or think) much. As a result, this chapter really doesn’t fit in the book, and I don’t think it’s just my sadness at reading it that’s making me think so.

I was surprised, though, at how much I loathed the chapter on Helen Gurley Brown. I knew who she was, but only in general terms (editor of Cosmo is where it began and ended for me), and getting to know her and her loathing of food and fat people and her love of her own anorexia (and her delight in her favorite dessert: diet Jello made with 1/4 the intended amount of water, so it was a dense rubbery mass, topped with diet yogurt) made me absolutely detest her. She made her eating disorder mandatory for so many American women, and I just — did not want to read about that. At all. I wanted to read about what women ate, not what they hated themselves for eating, and hated everyone else for eating, too.

But the other thing that really bothered me was the women who weren’t included. Every woman in this book was white and either English or American. (And the author, while noting that her subjects are not representative of the women of their age, and are all exceptional, seems to have failed to notice that.) I really wanted to know more about the food stories, as the author calls them, of black women, of Latinas, of Muslim women, of ... just a wider variety of women, really.

So basically I would have loved this book entirely if it had focused on a) women who actually ate and b) a wider variety of women. As it is, though, I’d advise skipping the introduction and the Braun and Brown chapters, and just reading the rest of it, for a moderately interesting look at what four random women ate. show less

From the difficulties of getting consumers to buy frozen dinners, the rise of food advice newspaper columns and the emergence of famous female cooks who specialized in home cooking, as opposed to the trained male chefs showing how to do professional dishes who had been nearly the only experts until the 1950s. The book focuses on the female cook as the one who traditionally cooked for the family.
There's a chapter on the beginnings and entries of The Pillsbury Bake-Off, and a bio of a show more long-forgotten cookbook author named Poppy Cannon, author of The Can Opener Cookbook and several others, who became famous even though she had little culinary skill and was called out for publishing recipes that didn't work. She once recommended serving Campbell's tomato soup topped with canned fish cakes as the first course at an elegant dinner party.
There's a chapter called "Is She Real?" that addresses product spokeswomen such as Betty Crocker and Aunt Jemima, and another chapter that is half Julia Child, and the other half is a bio of Betty Friedan, which is sort of out of place and seems like it's there just because the author wanted to write about her.
Overall, lots of interesting and hard to find information. show less

Excellent, accessible history of cooking and food industry developments in the 1950s -- placed in the context of social change (postwar suburban householding but also women's increasing role in the workplace) -- all of it anticipating the near simultaneous debuts of Julia Child and Betty Friedan. This sounds like dry stuff but it isn't in Shapiro's hands -- she's definitely writing for the common reader, not academics. My favorite character in the book was Poppy Cannon, author of the show more Can-Opener Cookbook -- and, improbably, the friend of Alice B. Toklas. show less