Eighteen years ago, Laura Shapiro's book Perfection Salad made a strikingly depressing connection between turn-of-the-century domestic science—with its emphasis on nutrition over sensuality—and the eventual decline of American home cooking into bland victuals overseen by homemakers operating with intentionally suppressed creativity. Shapiro completes that thought with Something From The Oven, which investigates how a handful of influential women broke through the conspiratorial stranglehold of corporations and their media arms, and ultimately reminded Americans of the virtue of fresh ingredients, combined with care.
The common perception of '50s kitchen culture—reinforced by kitsch calendars and refrigerator magnets—has the decade dominated by Spam salads and Jell-O molds, but while Shapiro's survey of popular magazines revealed ample evidence of miniature marshmallows where no miniature marshmallows should be, she also pored over church cookbooks and newspaper food sections for examples of what America's women were really cooking. She found complicated scratch cakes and all-day meat sauces, as well as a pervasive frustration with the rise of frozen foods and dry mixes, which made cooking faster and easier, but played havoc with housewives' sense of self-worth.
As with Perfection Salad, Shapiro argues in Something From The Oven that the idea of liberating women from the kitchen via modern appliances and packaged food insultingly implies that women are incapable of mastering simple cooking techniques. But Something From The Oven is better organized and wittier than Perfection Salad; the book is arranged as a set of personality profiles, with frequent contextual digressions. Shapiro shows the evolution of the fictional Betty Crocker from confident businesswoman to corner-cutting housewife, and she recounts the strange, sad friendship of packaged-food shill Poppy Cannon and notorious foodie Alice B. Toklas. She also charts the rise of domestic literature like The Egg And I and Please Don't Eat The Daisies, which mocked the ideals of good housekeeping, but only gently, while leaving their authors' real troubles off the page.
Shapiro concludes with a comparison of Julia Child and Betty Friedan, both of whom entered the popular consciousness within months of each other; the former insisted that women could do better for themselves in the kitchen, while the latter insisted that they didn't have to. Shapiro's sympathy lies more with Child, for giving women (and men) useful tools. Conversely, she describes Friedan as a slick packager of ideas already dominating the mainstream. But it's clear that Shapiro admires Friedan, too, as someone equally skilled at making a coherent narrative out of cultural minutiae.