Do Women Like to Cook?

Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America
by Laura Shapiro

A lively narrative history of how American home cooking changed in the 1950s - from "anti-cooking" marketing to Julia Child.

In this captivating blend of culinary history and popular culture, the award-winning author of Perfection Salad shows us what happened when the food industry elbowed its way into the kitchen after World War II, brandishing canned hamburgers, frozen baked beans, and instant piecrusts. Big Business waged an all-out campaign to win the allegiance of American housewives, but most women were suspicious of the new foods - and the make-believe cooking they entailed. With sharp insight and good humor, Laura Shapiro shows how the ensuing battle helped shape the way we eat today, and how the clash in the kitchen reverberated elsewhere in the house as women struggled with marriage, work, and domesticity. This unconventional history overturns our notions about the '50s and offers new thinking on some of its fascinating figures, including Poppy Cannon, Shirley Jackson, Julia Child, and Betty Friedan.

For many years I have been thinking about the conjunction between women and cooking, an association so deeply rooted that over the centuries it has turned cooking into something tantamount to a sex-linked characteristic, less definitive than pregnancy but often just as cumbersome to deflect. Biology and anthropology tell us pretty much what we need to know about how this relationship came about: Women have the babies, women feed the babies, women feed everyone else while they're at it; hence, women cook. Men cook, too, of course, especially now; but, traditionally, they went to the stove as a job or a profession, to show off for an admiring crowd, or simply for the pleasure of it. Women cook because they're expected to and because the people around them have to eat; happy is she who also enjoys the work. What interests me most about women and cooking isn't so much why they have been entwined all these years, but how that intimacy has affected both parties: the cooks and the food.

In an earlier book, Perfection Salad, I looked at what happened when science showed up in the late-nineteenth-century American kitchen with all the charisma of a new religion. Generations of women accustomed to cooking with their senses at the forefront, tasting and touching and remembering, gave way to brides who were learning to maintain a practical distance between themselves and the food. Nutrients and calories bid for attention; standardized equipment and measurements took the place of impressionistic cupfuls; and sanitation became the most demanding deity in the nation's culinary pantheon. Changes like these, which contributed a certain amount of objectivity to the task of cooking, didn't get in the way of talented home cooks. They could absorb the new imperatives or ignore them. And the other home cooks, women who weren't born with the instincts to make food taste good and who struggled to acquire the skills, now had help in getting an acceptable meal on the table. If they followed the written rules, they had a fighting chance. But, inevitably, such changes helped hammer into place a singularly American approach to raw food that was more akin to conquering it than welcoming it home. Nuances of flavor and texture were irrelevant in the scientific kitchen, and pleasure was sent off to wait in the parlor. To cook without exercising the senses, indeed barely exercising the mind, was going to have a considerable effect on how and what we eat.

What gave scientific cookery its staying power, long after the term itself disappeared, was its partnership with the food industry, which was becoming an ambitious new player in the American kitchen. During the last decades of the nineteenth century, factory-made foods began forging their way into homes across the country as rapidly as transportation and income levels permitted. Canned meats, soups, fruits, and vegetables, along with ketchup, pancake mix, granulated gelatin, and baking powder, were among the earliest products to become familiar and then indispensable. As pantry shelves filled up, the food industry began leaving unmistakable fingerprints on the meals and the recipes that characterized home cooking. The ginger ale salad, the canned soup gravy, the pale, puffy bread, and the omnipresent bottle of ketchup became culinary icons that would forever be identified with the American table.

But not until the end of World War II did the food industry 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. By the 1950s, magazines and newspapers were conjuring scenes in which traditional, kitchen-centered home life was being carried out in perfectly delightful fashion without a trace of traditional, kitchen-centered home cooking. The table was set, the smiling family was gathered, the mother wore a pretty apron, and the food was frozen. Or dehydrated. Or canned. Or prepared from what women were calling a "ready-mix." Do women like to cook? That is, are there any good reasons to cook from scratch, apart from habit, sentiment, and the family budget? The question had never emerged before, but, suddenly, thanks to all the new products, there was a glimmer of space between women and cooking, just enough to invite reflection. Do we like to cook? Is it important to cook? Before the question could even be asked, it was answered with a powerful "Not anymore." The ones speaking up so convincingly were the advertisers.

That moment when the burgeoning food industry confronted millions of American women and tried to refashion them in its own image is the one I explore in this book. It was an encounter that took place chiefly in middle-class homes; for this reason, the book focuses almost exclusively on middle-class women. But if they were the first to engage with the new concept of convenience foods, this was an event that would have overwhelming consequences for the entire nation. The 1950s were a turning point in a process set in motion half a century earlier, back when women discovered canned soup and Jell-O and found out how wonderfully easy they were to prepare. Cooking was genuinely laborious in the 1890s, and such shortcuts had an impact we can hardly imagine today. Once innovations like these settled into place, home cooking would never be the same, not just because the food began to change but because as it changed, Americans began to think differently about eating. Factory conditions imposed strict limits on the sensory qualities possible in packaged foods, making them predominantly very sweet, very salty, or very bland. The more such qualities were reflected in a family's home cooking, the more acceptable they became - so much so that in the worst of the nation's cooking, even dishes made from scratch paid homage to factory flavors. During the first decades of the twentieth century, millions of American palates adjusted to artificial flavors and then welcomed them; and consumers started to let the food industry make a great many decisions on matters of taste that people in the past had always made for themselves. The marketing innovations that would make junk food and fast food a way of life were still far in the future. But by midcentury, when the food industry launched its massive campaign against traditional cooking, manufacturers and processors had every reason to believe that they could lure a critical mass of the population away from conventional meals and into gustatory realms hitherto unexplored.

When I started my research, I assumed I would meet the 1950s - a term I apply fairly loosely to the period stretching from the end of World War II through the mid-'60s - in the version that has long been inscribed in popular history. After all, everyone knows the story of women in postwar America: Conscientiously happy housewives gave over their days to fussing with cake mixes and marshmallow salads, never imagining any other life. Those who dared to feel restless were kept in line by a culture that ferociously enforced the laws of traditional femininity. It took only a little reading to discover the shortcomings of that image. In the course of the 1950s, a rapidly increasing proportion of mothers went out looking for jobs, for instance, and the same women's magazines that ran stories on the matchless excitement of planning birthday parties for five-year-olds were also running stories on the satisfactions of paid work. As for the marshmallow salads, they showed up frequently wherever recipes were published, but so did a wide array of dishes made from scratch, including green salads with vinaigrette dressings and entrées that ranged from meat loaf to shashlik.

The labor statistics spoke for themselves, at least to a certain extent, but the food didn't. Food rarely speaks up at all when the subject is home cooking, for we have very few sources and they're hardly objective. In culinary history, the ordinary food of ordinary people is the great unknown. To track more distinguished cuisine - the sort produced in the best restaurants and in the kitchens of the rich - we can sometimes dig up menus and recipe collections, market lists, bills and receipts, or cookbooks produced by famous chefs. But if we want to know what millions of Americans ate in a certain era night after night and if we're curious about who cooked the dinner and how and why, then the primary source material tends to be elusive. Popular cookbooks tell us a great deal about the culinary climate of a given period, about the expectations and aspirations that hovered over the stove and the dinner table, and about the range of material and technical influences that affected home cooking. What they can't convey is a sense of day-to-day cookery as it was genuinely experienced in the kitchens of real life.

Copyright © 2005 Penguin, a division of Penguin Putnam, Inc., used by permission.

About the Author

Award-winning writer Laura Shapiro was at Newsweek for more than fifteen years. The author of Perfection Salad, she has written for many other publications, including The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Granta, and Gourmet.