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sienamysticPerfection Salad is a study of American diet, cookery, home-ec, and eating. It looks at a specific time period, the late 1800s into the early 1900s, where the theory of "scientific cookery" then in vogue serves as a good doorway into attitudes about women in the workplace, women in the home, feminism, proper nutrition, and eating. Much of the attitudes developing at this point in time would lead directly to the 1950s and its focus on food that was pre-processed, already cooked (just heat and serve!), or packaged scientifically. In recent decades, attitudes towards food and eating (and women's role as feeder of the family) continue to shift. In many ways we're trying to relinquish ideas about food and feeding that entered the culture at this time.
Behind the cut are some of the ideas discussed in the book, illustrated with images from a cooking magazine called "Table Talk".
This time period was a collision of so many new ideas, new technology, newness everywhere. Processed food was forming a bigger part of a housewife's pantry, but the laws that governed packaging and processing safety and cleanliness were still a bit patchworky, so there was a concern with food purity and safety. Looking to books and magazines for recommendations was a way to navigate the minefield of food with a little more confidence.
Women were attempting to enter the university and the workplace in more traditional men's fields, which was being resisted. A compromise of sorts sprung up - women could study chemistry, mathematics, and biology at big universities like Yale and Harvard, but they would be in special, female-only classes; the female chemists and biologists that these classes produced would use their knowledge to improve things within a female sphere, namely the family meal and raising a healthy child. Cookery schools sprang up, attempting to reach audiences of young women about to become homemakers, to educate poor women on better nutrition, and to train professional cooks, waitresses, and hospital nurses. A circular industry sprang up around the subject of running the home on scientific principles: young women would train at one of these schools, and then enter the field herself, whether as an instructor or an author for one of the many cookery magazines that sprang up to spread the gospel of making menus and keeping a proper home.
Proper nutrition would be the salvation of the poor, as a good, cheap meal ruthlessly constructed along scientific lines would result in happier, more productive workers who would have no need of organizations such as labor unions. This was also the beginning of nursing as a distinct profession for women (tending to the sick being a female duty) and feeding invalids was soon a course of study in and of itself.
Housewives with questions could write in to get answers to pressing questions. Columns like "Suggestions and Experience" worked in the same way that "Hints from Heloise," which began in 1959, still do today.
There was a lot of emphasis on daintiness of food. Meat was seen as mostly unladylike, unless consumed in a croquette, creamed. Lamb chops were also suitable. Food was no longer to sprawl across the plate in an undignified manner, but instead was forced to behave. Salads, gelatin molds, croquettes, puddings: they all became ways to tame unruly ingredients and make them suitable to serve by a well-bred lady. (Shapiro discusses the first serialized story in "Good Housekeeping," where a new wife's good breeding is demonstrated by her food, which wins over her skeptical in-laws.) Taste was not high up on the list of what made a meal "good," although sometimes the audience rebelled and had to be appeased with recipes for things like pie and cake.
(From "The Delineator, 1916)
Since appearance was so important, a fad for dinners themed around a color or suitably delicate emblem sprung up. "White luncheons" and "Butterfly suppers" were wildly popular.
I realize as I've been typing this that it doesn't work as a book review at all. Instead, it's cleverly disguised squee about how fascinating the subject matter is and how far into it I was drawn! Plus, a certain amount of "look at the cool things I bought off Ebay.)
At any rate, I highly recommend the book as a well-written, insightful study of this slightly wacky time period in the US, which is still with us in so many ways. I think about it every time I go to the farmer's market, actually. It also dovetails nicely with a book I've already recommended a bajillion times before, Caroline Walker Bynum's Holy Feast and Holy Fast, which also deals with social implications of women and feeding, but in an entirely different context. So cheers, and pass me a slice of that fish pudding. (On second thought, don't.)
Behind the cut are some of the ideas discussed in the book, illustrated with images from a cooking magazine called "Table Talk".
This time period was a collision of so many new ideas, new technology, newness everywhere. Processed food was forming a bigger part of a housewife's pantry, but the laws that governed packaging and processing safety and cleanliness were still a bit patchworky, so there was a concern with food purity and safety. Looking to books and magazines for recommendations was a way to navigate the minefield of food with a little more confidence.
Women were attempting to enter the university and the workplace in more traditional men's fields, which was being resisted. A compromise of sorts sprung up - women could study chemistry, mathematics, and biology at big universities like Yale and Harvard, but they would be in special, female-only classes; the female chemists and biologists that these classes produced would use their knowledge to improve things within a female sphere, namely the family meal and raising a healthy child. Cookery schools sprang up, attempting to reach audiences of young women about to become homemakers, to educate poor women on better nutrition, and to train professional cooks, waitresses, and hospital nurses. A circular industry sprang up around the subject of running the home on scientific principles: young women would train at one of these schools, and then enter the field herself, whether as an instructor or an author for one of the many cookery magazines that sprang up to spread the gospel of making menus and keeping a proper home.
Proper nutrition would be the salvation of the poor, as a good, cheap meal ruthlessly constructed along scientific lines would result in happier, more productive workers who would have no need of organizations such as labor unions. This was also the beginning of nursing as a distinct profession for women (tending to the sick being a female duty) and feeding invalids was soon a course of study in and of itself.
Housewives with questions could write in to get answers to pressing questions. Columns like "Suggestions and Experience" worked in the same way that "Hints from Heloise," which began in 1959, still do today.
There was a lot of emphasis on daintiness of food. Meat was seen as mostly unladylike, unless consumed in a croquette, creamed. Lamb chops were also suitable. Food was no longer to sprawl across the plate in an undignified manner, but instead was forced to behave. Salads, gelatin molds, croquettes, puddings: they all became ways to tame unruly ingredients and make them suitable to serve by a well-bred lady. (Shapiro discusses the first serialized story in "Good Housekeeping," where a new wife's good breeding is demonstrated by her food, which wins over her skeptical in-laws.) Taste was not high up on the list of what made a meal "good," although sometimes the audience rebelled and had to be appeased with recipes for things like pie and cake.
(From "The Delineator, 1916)
Since appearance was so important, a fad for dinners themed around a color or suitably delicate emblem sprung up. "White luncheons" and "Butterfly suppers" were wildly popular.
I realize as I've been typing this that it doesn't work as a book review at all. Instead, it's cleverly disguised squee about how fascinating the subject matter is and how far into it I was drawn! Plus, a certain amount of "look at the cool things I bought off Ebay.)
At any rate, I highly recommend the book as a well-written, insightful study of this slightly wacky time period in the US, which is still with us in so many ways. I think about it every time I go to the farmer's market, actually. It also dovetails nicely with a book I've already recommended a bajillion times before, Caroline Walker Bynum's Holy Feast and Holy Fast, which also deals with social implications of women and feeding, but in an entirely different context. So cheers, and pass me a slice of that fish pudding. (On second thought, don't.)
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(no subject)
Date: 2010-06-21 10:58 pm (UTC)I enjoy the communities on LJ devoted to showcasing the horrifying recipes of years past, but I have often wished that there was more analysis because I think it really is fascinating--and I think it's wonderful that you were able to illustrate your review with appropriate illustrations from the time period!
Why haven't I ever had Egg-O-See?
Date: 2010-06-22 12:54 am (UTC)My former mother-in-law and brother-in-law somehow picked up a lot of erroneous information about food, possibly from chiropractors or old food books. She used to preach that one shouldn't drink water with meals because it would dilute stomach acids and impede digestion, and that we shouldn't eat black pepper because it was a "passenger" and would "go right through us" without imparting any "food value at all". Sound familiar? Brother-in-law thought mushrooms were worthless nutritionally until I showed him a brand new diet book with all the vitamins listed that he changed his mind.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-06-22 08:34 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-06-22 04:33 pm (UTC)And it's especially interesting to read as someone whose grandmother, only a few decades later, was a food chemist. (Until, of course, she married. Very happily, but nonetheless, in those days you were definitely a working girl only until you were a wife.) She and all three of her sisters went to the same university and got degrees in Home Ec. That was the deal with my great-grandfather; he would pay for college if they went to Cornell, and if they majored in Home Ec, since it would be useful to them as wives or give them a career if they never married. I sometimes wonder what she'd have chosen if left to her own devices like a modern woman, although as far as I know she found (and finds) food chemistry genuinely interesting.