Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America

by Laura Shapiro

Book Overview

Author of the forthcoming What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food That Tells Their Stories (Summer 2017) In this captivating blend of culinary history and popular culture, the award-winning... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 014303491X
• Release Date: March 2005
• Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 0.59 lbs.
• Dimensions: 7.8" x 0.8" x 5.1"

Customer Reviews

A Revelation

Conventional wisdom about the 1950s is that it was the decade in which everything went bad, and the fear of non-conformity and Communism made everything about American life bland, nowhere more so than in the kitchen, where white bread and TV dinners took over and banned fresh food and gourmet cooking from fashion. Laura Shapiro's new book SOMETHING FROM THE OVEN argues convincingly that this generalization has been absurdly overstated and that none of it is true in the least. Her previous book PERFECTION SALAD was good-the rise of "white foods" at the turn of the century, the moment when cook books started specifying amounts in their recipes as "science," or an absurd version of it, became desirable in the kitchen. But SOMETHING improves on PERFECTION, as it were. Shapiro plunges right in with the invention and promulgation of frozen foods, showing how American housewives took to them slowly and with the utmost discrimination, rejecting the ones that didn't taste good. She shows how serious chefs like James Beard and Dione Lucas started out scorning convenience foods but they, too eventually came to approve of some of them, using the same intuitive responses as the mass of US housewives. She then opens up the story by writing a gimlet eyed account of the original Pillsbury Bake-Off, showing how marketing and drive made the Bake-Off a double-edges sword, by promoting Pillsbury's convenience food but also showcasing the creativity and ingenuity of US home cooks. Shapiro also reminds us that the 1950s was the age in which Alice B. Toklas published her famous cookbook. A sequel was prepared with the collaboration of the food writer Poppy Cannon, although it didn't do too well. Poppy Cannon, one of the enigmatic personalities of the food world, is given the big biographical treatment. Married to Walter White, the light-skinned head of the NAACP, Poppy Cannon led her own kind of double life for many years, and Shapiro really digs in and devours every nuance. Shapiro is also good at discussing the family comedy writers of the 1950s, who balanced home-making with feminism, including often ignored writers like Jean Kerr, Ernestine Gilbreth Carey, Peg Bracken, and the one and only Shirley Jackson. By viewing these women as integral to the story of food and food writing in the 1950s, Shapiro does us all a huge service. It is definitely one of the most intriguing and revisionary books I've read in a long time.

"Convenience food" cuisine

Laura Shapiro's book, written in articulate and entertaining style, is a tour de force of post-WW II American cuisine. Those of us who grew up strong and healthy on Chef Boyardee canned spaghetti and lime jello with marshmallows, will find this trip down tastebud-memory lane, a delight. (That does not mean that much of the food of those days was so delightful!) The baby boom generation mothers were encouraged to leave kitchen drudgery behind, to put together meals by using can openers and taking tv dinners from the freezer. Surprisingly, many women rejected this approach, some more than others. The food industry learned some lessons about merchandising; one of the most famous is that women felt better about the cakes they made from boxes if they were called upon to add a fresh egg of their own to the powdered mix. When I was a young wife and mother, I and many of my friends staged our own little revolution against "convenience cuisine". The bread we kneaded and baked, the yogurt cultures we nourished, the from-scratch decorated cookies we made at holidays, the fresh vegetables we scrubbed and served...all these foods tasted GOOD, in stark contrast to the boxed and frozen food of our own childhoods. No one would want to return to the age of the wood stove and all-day cooking chores, when cake making required attacking the eggs laboriously with a hand beater. Shapiro's book is about that transition stage, through the late 40s, and on into the 50s and 60s, when taste and even nutrition were often sacrificed for ease of preparation. Today, with bread machines, Cuisinarts, and a Trader Joe's Market down the street with its sophisticated world cuisine, we are blessed with meals that are easy to make and gloriously delicious to eat.

Couldn't put it down!

I'm usually not into this sort of thing. But I causally picked up, " Something From the Oven : Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America by Laura Shapiro, and couldn't put it down. It is cocked full of fascinating and almost forgotten history, as well as being superbly written. Shapiro has read and researched reams of source material and has come up with a treasure trove. Ms.Shapiro's wit is a treasure too! I actually read parts out loud to my husband...who asked for more! Don't miss it

Peeling the Stale Images of the '50s

If Laura Shapiro does nothing more (and she does much, much more) it will have been a very valuable service to rescue Poppy Cannon and her Can-Opener Cookbook from the infamy of '50s dreck. The author, in Something From the Oven, does a superb job of taking the idea of a '50s dinner and making it a more complex and multi-layered idea than is usually represented. She peels away all the stereotypes the decade has been dragging behind it and shows the truth. Canned and frozen foods(including my mother's favourite, the TV dinner) make appearances but the author show how women did not blindly follow every marketing scheme tossed at them. And Poppy, along with such luminaries as Betty Crocker and Julia Child, help populate this rich tale with great personalities, in addition to the many anonymous readers and letter writers to women's magazines and food columns. This is a well researched, enjoyable book that makes the 1950s come alive.