Perfection Salad, a dish that won its creator first prize in a 1905 cooking contest, consisted of pristine molded aspic containing celery, red pepper, and chopped cabbage. Laura Shapiro, author of this eponymous social history, part of the Modern Library Food series, takes the salad as a model for the domestic science movement, an intriguing women's crusade of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Bent on convincing housewives that the way to domestic order lay in cooking "dainty" nutritional meals from sanitary ingredients in "scientific" kitchens, the movement helped give birth to our mass-market food scene, with its reliance on home economics precepts, processed convenience foods, and no-cook cooking--our cuisine of boil-in bags and microwave frozen dinners. Entertaining and informative, but also unexpectedly moving, the book chronicles in numerous intriguing stories the ways in which an impulse to liberate women from the drudgery and imprecision of daily food preparation led to its debasement. It's a fascinating story, of interest to anyone who wonders why and how we cook and eat--and think about food--as we do.

Beginning with portraits of early domestic movement reformers such as Catherine Beecher and Mary Lincoln, and investigating institutions like the Boston Cooking School, home of Fannie Farmer, the Mother of Level Measurements, the book then pursues "scientific cookery" into its mid-20th-century manifestation. "With the help of the new industry of advertising," Shapiro writes, "the food business was able to reflect Mrs. Lincoln's values [of food-production uniformity] by keeping its achievements in packing, sanitation, convenience, and novelty at the forefront." But greater ills ensued: the effect of the reformers, Shapiro contends, was to encourage women to become docile consumers tethered to commercial interests--and to rob our vigorous cooking and eating traditions of their rich life. In making that point, Perfection Salad reveals its true subject: the cultural priorities that defined American 20th-century life and, finally, the sorry nature of the order they established. --Arthur Boehm


From Publishers Weekly
A journalist who has written extensively on aspects of feminism, Shapiro presents a well-researched history of women as nutritional revolutionaries during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This serious study is lively entertainment, spiced by the author's wit and wry perceptions. Through her, we discover clues to the motives of women who turned American kitchens into laboratories, run according to the dicta of the Boston Cooking School and similar establishments that proliferated across the country. The most memorable of the culinary movers was Fannie Farmer, whose cookbook was published in a modest 3000-copy edition in 1896. Stories about Farmer and other domestic scientists of the period add strong appeal to Shapiro's report. So do the parallels between early feminists and today's advocates of equal rights. It is somber to realize, as the author emphasizes, that fear of significant power for women "even over themselves" kept their aims restricted. By 1900, they had settled for the status of experts in home economics instead of independence. Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
In documenting the history of the American domestic science movement at the turn of this century, Shapiro's very readable book helps explain why middle-class Americans developed a preference for a cuisine that sacrifices taste to the pure and the plastic. It was an era when science was in ascendency, and the leaders of the domestic science movement hoped to change the eating habits of the nation and to do away with the irrational methods of traditional housekeeping. How these women succeeded and where they failed is a fascinating story. A good bibliography nicely supplements this admirable book, which should appeal to a wide audience. Highly recommended. Joyce S. Toomre, Russian Research Ctr., Harvard Univ.Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
Laura Shapiro's Perfection Salad documents the state of women and their relationship to cooking at the outset of the twentieth century and offers an analysis of the beginnings of contemporary feminism. Mark Knoblauch
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

FROM OUR EDITORS

"Q. Are vegetables ever served at a buffet luncheon? A. Yes, indeed...provided they appear in a form which will not look messy on the plate.... Even the plebian baked bean, in dainty individual ramekins with a garnish of fried apple balls and cress, or toasted marshmallows, stuffed with raisins...."

This advice, published in a popular cooking magazine in 1923, illustrates what happened to American cooking when well-meaning cooking teachers took up the domestic science banner, introducing "businesslike principles" to home management.

Laura Shapiro's insightful and amusing social history is full of such anecdotes. She documents the birth of domestic science, the movement that launched a million home economics courses and encouraged the overuse of white sauce, the invention of TV dinners, and the packaging of salads in Jell-O.

She vividly portrays such teachers as Fannie Farmer, "the mother of level measurements," and Ellen Richards and her Woman's Laboratory at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which taught Hygiene, Bacteriology, Foods, and Laundry Work. Another eminent teacher, Mrs. Lincoln, even devised a special scent-free menu of baked bean soup, dry toast, and stewed raisins for Tuesdays (the day after washday), so that clean clothes would not pick up cooking odors immediately.

As Shapiro sees it, "They chose domesticity as a way of getting out of the house, and food as a means of transcending the body. But they carved out an identity for women so powerful that we're still trying to clamber out of it, and their influence on American cooking was devastating."

Perfection Saladhas been republished as part of the new Modern Library Food Series, with an introduction by Jane and Michael Stern. (Ginger Curwen)

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Perfection Salad presents an entertaining and erudite social history of women and cooking at the turn of the twentieth century. With sly humor and lucid insight, Laura Shapiro uncovers our ancestors' wide-spread obsession with food, and in doing so, tells us why we think as we do about food today. This edition includes a new Introduction by Michael Stern, who, with Jane Stern, is the author of Gourmet magazine's popular column "Roadfood" and the book Eat Your Way Across the U.S.A.

FROM THE CRITICS

Nach Waxman

Dazzling may be an odd word to use about a work of social history, but dazzling it is. Laura Shapiro's gimlet-eyed exploration of the roots of modern home cooking in America offers utterly fascinating research, analytic acuity, wit, pace, and writing so exhilaratingly good that it's sometimes hard to remember what an important book this is. Three cheers for this classic. Entertaining, and it's good for you. What more could we ask?
—Owner, Kitchen Arts and Letters

Richard Saz

How good to see this worthy book in print again. And how rare a writer is Laura Shapiro-she has synthesized an immense amount of research through the lens of her own crystal-clear thinking (and not incidentally her sly humor). Along the way: white sauce as purifier and ennobler, color-coordinated menus, Crisco as sandwich spread (!), "Dainty Desserts for Dainty People," home economics as agent for keeping "the male world male." This book is a pleasure to read. Welcome back, Perfection Salad.
— author of Classic Home Desserts

Kirkus Reviews