To find out as best I could what was on the table in ordinary, middle-class households, I went frequently to magazines and newspapers. These seemed to me to be closer to the ground than most cookbooks, with the exception of such hardworking classics as Joy of Cooking or the Betty Crocker cookbooks. Hundreds more cookbooks besides these flowed through the '50s; many of them sold very well, and they clearly affected the meals of the time. James Beard, Poppy Cannon, Peg Bracken, and others built sizable reputations with the help of their books; I discuss some of these influential cooks in the chapters ahead. But it's always difficult to know for sure how often women turned to a particular cookbook, no matter how popular it was. Many home cooks consider a cookbook one of their favorites if they use just two or three recipes from it. What we do know is that home cooks regularly tore out recipes that sounded good to them from Woman's Day, Ladies' Home Journal, Good Housekeeping, and other widely circulated magazines. We know because the clippings were saved for years, sometimes for generations, bundled in envelopes or stuffed into recipe boxes. We can't ascertain how often those recipes were used, but plainly they appealed to people. If magazine recipes are imperfect guides to how women cooked, at least such recipes tell us how women planned to cook or how they envisioned themselves cooking, or maybe just how they wished they could cook.

My favorite sources were the food pages of daily newspapers, which by virtue of their place in the community seemed likely to reflect fairly closely the needs and habits of their readers. And my favorite bits in the papers that I studied were the recipes sent in by readers themselves. True, these were recipes from self-selected home cooks, the most confident and enthusiastic cooks in the neighborhood and perhaps not the most typical. But they were sending recipes that brought them success, that friends and family members loved and applauded. Surely these were recipes in which I would be able to discern the real appetites of real people. For the same reason I made use of community cookbooks - those ubiquitous, self-published volumes produced by church groups and other charitable organizations for fund-raising purposes. The recipes, gathered by members of the cookbook committee from everybody in the organization who could be badgered to contribute, were always published over the name of the woman who offered the dish, not necessarily because she claimed to have invented it, but because it represented her. "This is my kitchen," each contributor said with pride. "This is how I cook."

How such women began to renegotiate the terms of domestic life in the new context of work - a spectre that was everywhere in the '50s, even hovering over women who never so much as filled out a job application - is the question that drove my research. Work changed everything. Yes, women with jobs had to continue fixing dinner, vacuuming, and taking children to the dentist; in that sense, work simply made life more harrowing. But women who worked for pay or contemplated it also started to see themselves, their families, and the world in a different way. The proportions changed and the boundaries shifted; now they were actors on another stage altogether. Whether or not they chose to earn money, they were living for the first time in a world where seemingly immutable sex roles were subject to challenge. Poor and working-class women, who had been in the workforce since the industrial revolution and earlier, were accustomed to inhabiting man's sphere while earning their livings, and woman's sphere when they got home. If anybody understood how porous the border actually was, these women did. But for everyone else it was scripture: The cash economy was for men; the emotional economy was for women. And since scripture has a way of cutting across class and gender lines, many Americans subscribed to this increasingly hazy tradition even if they didn't believe in it, even if their own experience contradicted it.

It was in this discomfiting social atmosphere that cooking - the bride's first chore and the grandmother's last, the very heart of homemaking - came under assault from the food industry. Magazines, newspapers, and radio announcers explained over and over to housewives that a welcome new era of effortless food preparation was at hand. "You don't cook it," promised an ad for Sunkist lemons, brandishing a recipe for making lemon pie in an ice-cube tray. "Just mix and beat as directed, place in refrigerator - and that's all." Cookbook author Sylvia Schur assured women that owning a blender "takes the place of years of experience and skill," and Betty Crocker reminded her followers that cake mixes would save them "time, work and the task of following recipes." Yet such ads tell a profoundly lopsided story about the food of the '50s. Most middle-class dinners at home changed far more slowly than the food industry ever acknowledged, despite the mounting importance of paid work in women's lives. Throughout the '50s, good home cooking was far more widespread than frozen fish sticks, as the evidence from women's own hands makes plain. By 1963 - when Julia Child launched her first television series - an audience was waiting.

Cooking, it turned out, had roots so deep and stubborn that even the mighty fist of the food industry couldn't yank all of them up. One of the sources I read at some length for its revelations about what ordinary women thought about cooking in the '50s was the "Confidential Chat," a column that has been running in The Boston Globe for more than a century. Readers write in with questions about every conceivable aspect of home and family life, and other readers respond with their advice and opinions. All the Chatters, as they call themselves, write under pseudonyms. I studied a swath of Chat letters that appeared from 1948 to 1963, hundreds of them about food, and found women who were constantly testing assumptions as well as recipes. Some were accomplished cooks and satisfied housewives; others longed for work outside the home; and others were like the woman who sent in a cry of distress in January 1948: "Won't someone please come to my rescue? . . . My problem is watery custard and bread pudding. . . . I will sign the way I feel about my cooking. Never Satisfied."

What happened over the next several decades was that Never Satisfied, her sisters, and then their daughters found they had a number of choices. At home, at work, everywhere in their lives they were confronted by more possibilities than women had ever known, and this was equally the case when it came to making dessert. There was homemade custard; there was instant chocolate pudding; there was crème caramel - but they had to know what kind of cook they wanted to be. Many surrendered: They came to believe that cooking really was difficult and time-consuming unless ready-made ingredients defined the goal and led the way. Others learned to treat their kitchens the way Julia Child did: as a place where they were in charge, where even failures tasted better to them than packaged perfection. But whether dinner on a given night was boeuf bourguignonne or a canned soup casserole, by the early '60s a great many women were figuring out how to come to their own rescue. Was one of them La Mesa? She wrote the last of the 1963 letters in my survey of Chat sections, heading her contribution simply "Chatters - ". She didn't have a question, and she didn't need help with any problems; she just wanted to share her favorite recipe for a batch of peanut butter cookies. I have to admit I've taken the liberty of reading confidence and pride between the lines of her utterly honest ingredients.

Chatters

½ cup peanut butter
1¼cups flour
1 stick butter or margarine
¾ teaspoon soda
½ cup white sugar
½ teaspoon baking powder
½ cup brown sugar
¼ teaspoon salt
1 egg

Chill, form into tiny balls. Flatten with a fork. Bake in 375-degree oven 10 to 12 minutes.

— La Mesa

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

Tags: Recipes and Cooking

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. More