Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century (Modern Library Food)

This book is basically the history of Home Economics that were taught to the poor in the late 19th and early 20th century. Women in Boston in the late 19th century started a group called the Women's Education Association and later another was the Boston Kitchen.
Women's Education Association of

Show More

Boston "believed that educated women were the natural leaders of a domestic revolution that was only waiting to be ignited."
Women of these organizations worked to improve the appearance, nutritional value and cost efficiency of the food that was being prepared by the lower classes. Notice that taste did not enter into their equation. If it was nutritious and could be made for pennies a day/person, they didn't care what it taste like. However, back in that time , recipes didn't have any consistency until Fannie Farmer came along and standardized measurements. Yes, there really was a Fannie Farmer and when she published recipes they became standards for the new housewives and cooks in the nation. Her books showed basic procedures of how to boil, bake, stew, fry, and debone so that new cooks would be proficient and if when times were tough, domestic help was unattainable.

One of the interesting items was a suggestion that menus be developed according to the workload of the day. Monday - the normal laundry day of the time - was strenuous so potato salad was recommended so that leftovers could then produce mashed potatoes. Tuesday - ironing day - nothing that would give off a scent should be cooked so that the smell of the cooking food wouldn't cling the freshly pressed clothes.

Anything that was served with lettuce was considered a salad - Perfection Salad itself was a mixture of cabbage, celery, and red peppers, chopped finely and bound together by a plain gelatin. Gelatin (KNOX in particular) became very popular at this time. This salad did not last the test of time unlike the Waldorf salad that was developed at the same period. Salads were reserved for the upper class because it was believed that it was Brain food because it required less digestion.

Some fun facts that were noted in the book 1) daily guidelines were for men 90 gr of protein and 4500 calories per day (reduced slightly if not working at physically demanding labor) where women were 1200 calories (obviously they didn't think that housework in those days was physically demanding). 2) Food at the hospitals, almshouses, and prisons was not supposed to be palatable to prevent the people desiring to return for the food. 3) Ladies Home Journal and Good Housekeeping were part of the Home Economics movement of the time. (I didn't know that.)

It was an interesting book, not sure whether I would recommend it or not because the writing style was a bit dry.

Show Less

Meandering tale of the home-ec movement in the late 1800s-early 1900s. There's some pretty great source material here, including many back issues of publications like Ladies' Home Journal. Only the first chapter, on domestic sentimental literature, seems prone to the correlation-is-causation

Show More

problem of cultural criticism. The rest of the book is solidly researched and cleverly written. Instead of glossing over what seems impossible to research (e.g. what were people actually eating, and not writing about), Shapiro uses what she's got, such as letters to the editors of magazines requesting recipes. She also leads you to some insights (What to do with increasing female enrollment in colleges? Shunt them off to food science classes) without hitting you over the head with them.

Show Less

A social history of changing attitudes towards cooking and other aspects of homemaking, specifically the emergence of domestic science aka home economics towards the end of the 19th century. The re-imagining and re-purposing of housework (women’s work) as a matter of scientific logic and

Show More

precision (men’s work) had some interesting social and culinary consequences (some of which Shapiro covers in another excellent book, Something From The Oven).

The title comes from a recipe for chopped vegetables in aspic. At the time, stretching the definition of salad to its absolute limit seems to have been en vogue.

Show Less

This has three themes that it wanders between. The first, and most comprehensive, is the rise of Home Economic, the second is the effects that this had on cooking, and the third is feminism.

In reading this, I kept thinking of a time 45-50 years ago, when I in my teens. There was a great fashion for

Show More

writing columns lambasting McDonalds, and sometimes other fast food restaurants. What never occurred to any of the writers is that Ronald McDonald wasn't standing outside with a rifle forcing people to buy hamburgers at gun point. They never considered why people chose to buy there. Laura Shapiro is somewhat the same. She laments the rise of cake mixes (ooooh noooooo!), prepackaged food, and other conveniences without ever considering why people might choose these. Her judgemental tone got on my nerves at times. It should be noted that most new products that are introduced fail. Advertising alone won't get people to buy something unless they have some reason for it. It may not be a reason that Shapiro (or I) appreciate, but our opinions may not be wanted. In my experience, some people really like to cook, but most woman, who do day-to-day cooking get tired of it. My grandmother loved those little plastic packages that just had to be thrown into boiling water. Apparently the sensual joys of cooking and eating were outweighed by the effort it took.

The Home Economics movement, which seems to have been centered in New England, had several purposes. One was to teach housewives and/or their cooks. The other was to assist the poor by teaching them to cook economically -- not always a self-supporting endeavor. In either case, nutrition was held to be more important than taste, which is reasonable, but this extended to a discouraging eating as a pleasure; one should eat to live, not live to eat. In this era of increasing obesity, their is something to be said for that. They found, however, that people want to eat familiar foods, not necessarily what was familiar to the would-be teachers, a lesson which has taken a lot of time to learn. When I was in elementary school, we saw a film claiming that the problem of hunger was being brought under control -- there was this wonderful, nutritious (and revolting in my mind) soup that small children were being shown eating. Perhaps it appeals to the truly starving, but a few years later people were admitting that even the hungry want food that they find familiar and tasty. Again, I think Shapiro gets a little carried away -- the poor may have wanted different recipes, but she seems to have little understanding of what it is to be truly poor, to buy cheap meat because that is all one can afford, in an era when food was relatively more expensive than it is now.

I do not have a high regard for nutritionists, however. So often they talk as if eating were a hobby, not the stuff of life itself. I gave up listening too much to them after my roommate and I agreed to give up salt after one of their panics. Then they decided that salt was fine, except for certain people. Well, no maybe it isn't. Fat, cholesterol, and carbohydrates have all gone through cycles of being good and bad. The books in the food section of the library where I work would tie the person trying in knots who tried to combine their advice.

I would also have liked more context. Laura Shapiro seems to hint at a previous halcyon time of better cooking. More Work For Mother: The Ironies Of Household Technology From The Open Hearth To The Microwave by Ruth Schwartz Cowan, points out that food in colonial times, pioneer settings, and among the poor, was often very simple, johnny cake and stew, for example, and that improved technology tended to lead to more demanding, and labor intensive, standards; labor-saving devices weren't. Cooking was just behind doing the laundry as very labor intensive. Shapiro talks about what the "experts" were pushing, but we get little about what people were actually eating -- some historians argue that expert advice is as likely to be a guide to what people weren't doing as what they were. There isn't much point in lecturing people on doing what they are doing anyway. Shapiro also complains about preparing food without actually touching it, exchanging food sold in bins for prepackaged food, for example. I have my doubts that most women missed not grinding their own flour and churning their own butter. Bins are not necessarily sanitary, and food adulteration goes back much further than the manufacturers that she deplores. The Good Old Days: They Were Terrible! by Otto Bettmann (founder of the Bettman Archives) is instructive here.

There are some interesting nuggets -- popcorn wasn't just treated as a snack. One recipe calls for boiled chicken on a bed of popcorn. The menus reflected the pattern of weekly work -- on Monday, washing day, a simple supper of popcorn and milk was suggested (hopefully not mixed together.) And the favorite word was "dainty." If Shapiro seems to dislike this era, it may have to do with having read that word a few too many times. Three quarters of the way through the book, I never wanted to hear the word again -- imagine doing the original research!

I was expecting Laura Shapiro to end with a discussion of tasteless food, but instead she relates the Home Economics movement to feminism in the broad sense. One of HE's purposes was to raise the dignity of housekeeping. Shapiro thinks that instead it reinforced the segregation of women. Even those who entered college were steered to more "womanly" studies. A female student interested in chemistry would be urged, or forced, to focus her interest on food or other domestic uses. A friend of mine pointed out to her niece that she probably wouldn't be a medical doctor without Feminism. The niece couldn't believe it, what excuse could they give for excluding her? It used to be enough to say that they didn't accept, or only accepted a restricted number of women.

Show Less

This was a great read on so many levels. Laura Shapiro writes with an easy and often humorous style. If you are interested in the science behind cooking; the chemical process of cooking food or the biological process of digestion; how arithmetic factors into cooking. How about the study of

Show More

bacteria, whether it be from the germy dishcloth or the garbage can? Domestic "scientists" were determined to improve diets through science and chemistry.
Cooking because the great equalizer at the turn of the century. the interest in learning to cook was as such that in shops cooking was done in the open so that customers could witness both ingredients and preparation (the birth of the cooking show?).
From a feminist angle, it was great to read about so many women "firsts." For example, Ellen Richards as the first woman admitted to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Even though she was considered a "special student" she broke the male-only barrier in 1870.
My favorite invention from this time period was the "Aladdin Oven" - a portable stove the size of a dinner pail that would cook a meal all day long. The first slow cooker!

Show Less