Lime Jell-O Marshmallow Cottage Cheese Surprise (original) (raw)
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- April 18, 2004
SOMETHING FROM
THE OVEN
Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America.
By Laura Shapiro.
Illustrated. 306 pp. New York:
Viking. $24.95.
EVERYBODY who lived through the 1950's in America will recall how awful the food was. Party fare consisted of dips made by mixing a tub of sour cream with a packet of dried onion soup. Home cooks made sauces by adding a can of condensed mushroom soup to chicken -- or incorporated the same cylinder of sludge, plus crushed cornflakes, into meatloaf that tasted just as nasty. It is either brave or perverse of Laura Shapiro to want to remember, let alone write a book about, what might be the worst culinary decade in history.
Shapiro's previous book, ''Perfection Salad,'' showed what happened when ''science'' sneaked into the late-19th-century American kitchen, quantifying ingredients in recipes where previously women had relied on their senses (and common sense) to tell them, for example, how much liquid had to be added to the flour and yeast to make a workable dough. The kitchen acquired new shibboleths: food had to do more than taste good and fill you up, it also had to satisfy the demands of the nutrition and sanitation inspectors. Now everybody knew about calories and germs.
Though the expression ''scientific cookery'' soon disappeared, its exponents had already made an alliance with the nascent food industry, giving us, as Shapiro puts it in her introduction to ''Something From the Oven,'' ''the canned soup gravy, the pale, puffy bread and the omnipresent bottle of ketchup . . . culinary icons that would forever be identified with the American table.'' But it was only after the end of World War II, she adds, that the food industry would ''take aim at home cooking per se, rapturously envisioning a day when virtually all contact between the cook and the raw makings of dinner would be obsolete.''
Shapiro apologizes that her book ''focuses almost exclusively on middle-class women,'' but there's no need for guilt -- the hegemony of Nescafé, 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.
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