Something From the Oven
Subtitle: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America
Publisher: Viking Adult
Published: March 25, 2004
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 306
ISBN-13: 9780670871544
Subjects: Social Science; United States; Home Management; Sociology Of Women; Women's Studies - General; Sociology; Cooking; Social History; Women's Studies - History; Social Science / General; Cookery, American; Women cooks; General; 20th century; Convenience foods; History
First sentence: 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.
Description: A narrative history of how American home cooking changed in the 1950s--from "anti-cooking" marketing to Julia Child. In this surprising history, Laura Shapiro recounts the prepackaged dreams that bombarded American kitchens during the fifties. Faced with convincing homemakers that foxhole food could make it in the dining room, the food industry put forth the marketing notion that cooking was hard; opening cans, on the other hand, wasn't. But women weren't so easily convinced by the canned and plastic-wrapped concoctions, and a battle for both the kitchen and the true definition of homemaker ensued. Full of wry observation, this is a fun and illuminating look back at a crossroads in American cooking.--From publisher description.