The Housewife's Dream

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

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Theadora Smafield clasps her hands with joy: She has just won the Grand Prize in the very first Grand National Recipe and Baking Contest, better known as the Pillsbury Bake-Off. The contest was staged in a ballroom at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York on December 13, 1949. Among the one hundred finalists were such attention- getting entries as Patio Picnic Casserole, Company's Coming Cashew Pie, and Ruth's Dotted Swiss Cake; but Mrs. Smafield's No-Knead Water-Rising Nut Twists triumphed over all. She took home $50,000 and later opened Life magazine to find a glossy picture of herself in glory. (Photo: Martha Holmes/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images.)

Toward the end of February 1954, James Beard was at work in his Greenwich Village kitchen doing what he most loved to do: cooking delicious meals. One night he made lobster à l'américaine for a dinner party; a few days later he entertained guests with a quiche of sautéed bay scallops, then served them fillet of beef with a Marchand de Vin sauce. The next day he set about braising octopus in olive oil and garlic, and while it simmered slowly in red wine, basil, and parsley, he wrote a quick note about the recipe to his friend and gastronomic soul mate, the California cookbook author Helen Evans Brown. "Smells divine," he told her contentedly. With five cookbooks out, most recently Paris Cuisine, and several more being readied for publication in 1954, Beard was well settled at the forefront of his profession. Later that year The New York Times would bestow upon him the title that would accompany his name for decades to come: "Dean of American Cookery." And yet, as he often complained to Brown, American cookery seemed to be barreling off in quite a different direction from their own culinary styles. For every dinner like the one Cecily Brownstone, food editor at the Associated Press, offered him that summer - they dined in her garden on shrimp with dill and tarragon, steak in a garlic and ginger butter sauce, and baked pears with praline - time and again he encountered recipes for its evil twin, a cuisine he bemoaned as "the Home Ec side" of cookery. "I have been going over a brunch cookbook for House and Garden because someone forgot to put in the wines," Beard wrote to Brown in 1960. "Such a mess of stuff. There is actually a recipe for rolling white bread with butter and a sprinkling of Lawry's salt and toasting it in the oven. I nearly popped. What wine you might choose for that is problematic. I would say an old pre-phylloxera Mogen David Concord, with added sugar, myself."

Beard, Brown, and their like-minded colleagues would spend years gloomily monitoring the disappearance of old-fashioned good cooking. Successful though they were in their own careers, they felt powerless as processed foods rolled across the nation like an invasion welcomed by the multitudes. "Where, oh where, do you find a real apple pie, oozing with juices and covered with a flaky brown crust?" he wondered. "Or a fine, well-grained chocolate cake? Or a buttery piece of genuine pound cake?" Not in Portland, Oregon, his hometown. When he arrived for a visit in 1953, the food page of the local paper was rejoicing over Pineapple Betty (marshmallows, pineapple, graham cracker crumbs, and nuts). The nation seemed to have lost its ability to cook with skill or to taste with pleasure. As far as Beard was concerned, what he and Brown undertook in the kitchen and at their typewriters was "missionary work" - bringing the gospel of fine homemade meals to Americans pathetically satisfied with shortcuts and fake pizzazz. Small wonder that when he heard about the daily cooking segments on NBC's lavish new Home show, he was aghast. "Try to get to a television set," he urged Brown. "Poppy Cannon is the food person, and she did a vichyssoise with frozen mashed potatoes, one leek sautéed in butter, and a cream of chicken soup from Campbell's."

Beard himself had been making vichyssoise - real vichyssoise, with cream and a little nutmeg and a rich, homemade broth - at least since 1939 when he and his partners in a chic Manhattan catering company used to put up vats at a time and sell it for an impressive two dollars a pint. Now here was Poppy Cannon, author of the immensely popular Can-Opener Cookbook, blithely deranging a great soup on national television. Her creed - for she, too, was a missionary - was exactly the opposite of Beard's. "It's easy to cook like a gourmet, though you are a beginner," she announced in The Can-Opener Cookbook. "We want you to believe just as we do that in this miraculous age it is quite possible - and it's fun - to be a 'chef' even before you can really cook." Like Beard, she made lobster à l'américaine, but hers started with a can of tomato soup. Her "French" and "so romantic" variation on floating island called for lemon Jell-O in the shape of little hearts, dropped on a "small golden sea of soft Royal Custard sauce." The food industry was no enemy to her; it was Aladdin's lamp.

To Beard, everything that was wrong with American cooking in the postwar era was symbolized by the remorseless Poppy Cannon. Yet the two of them had more in common than a look at (or a taste of) their respective vichyssoises might have indicated. Beard's antagonism to the food industry would relax considerably when he started working as a consultant to food companies. And while Cannon had deep and sometimes inexplicable loyalties to the industry, she was hardly its slave - as we shall see in another chapter. What really separated culinary purists like Beard from industry enthusiasts like Cannon wasn't their assessments of American cooking, it was their views of the American cook. Beard believed the housewife was losing her way, forfeiting her skills, mindlessly surrendering to packaged foods whenever they beckoned. Cannon saw that same housewife heading smartly into the future, reinventing great culinary traditions with the help of epicurean new products.

Neither of them had it quite right. During that winter of 1954, just a few weeks before Cannon made her appearance on the Home show, the women's page editor of The Boston Globe was hit by an unexpected torrent of angry mail. The paper had published an enthusiastic story on New Year's Day about a speech by a food industry consultant trumpeting all the advances made possible by modern science: frozen food, milk in cartons, fresh vegetables available year-round, electric mixers and toasters. "How long is it since you spent a day without the benefit of science?" the industry expert demanded. "Our kitchen culture may be founded on tradition, but each year science has made its gifts to the homemaker." These sentiments inspired a rush of responses from readers who were not only ungrateful for the latest "gift" they encountered on supermarket shelves, they were downright suspicious. "We've had repercussions - but plenty!" the editor wrote in a follow-up story, and quoted from a few of the letters that had poured in. "Just how much more do packaged foods cost?" "How much time do we homemakers save when using packaged food?" "How does packaged food assure a healthier family? Both my Grandparents lived to be over 90 and they bought their flour in a barrel."

Undoubtedly, these readers were glad to bring home their carrots washed and their flour free of bugs, but they weren't abandoning culinary tradition with the zeal the food industry had been counting on. By the time they sat down and wrote to the Globe, in fact, some of these women had been wooed by the food industry for nearly a decade, and they still weren't ready to make a commitment. There was a future for frozen spinach - nobody in the food industry doubted that, and most housewives knew it, too. But it wasn't going to be the future everyone expected, the future that Beard so dreaded and Cannon so joyfully anticipated. It wasn't going to be the glittering future that food companies had been charting since the end of World War II when they turned their attention from military to civilian appetites and began to glimpse the tantalizing profits that lay ahead. Winning the loyalty of American home cooks would turn out to be a lot more difficult than the inventors of instant mashed potatoes and frozen chopped liver ever imagined.

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.