![]() The faster the cooking, the less it was going to feel like real cooking, and the greater the potential for guilt on the part of the homemaker. "That's how speedy the fixing can be when the hub of your meal is delicious canned meat." The five menus included several recipes of a type that would become legendary in the annals of packaged-food cuisine, including "Twenty Minute Roast" - wedges of Spam glazed with orange marmalade –- and a pan of Vienna sausages broiled with canned peaches, which this story identified as a "Harvest Luncheon."īut the insistent rhetoric of high-speed cookery had to be handled with care. "It's just 1-2-3, and dinner's on the table," exclaimed a story in Better Homes & Gardens. "When baby wants attention and daddy wants dinner, your best friend is quick-quick Minute Rice!" Soon no excuse at all was needed, and stories simply promised "Hot breads-in a jiffy!" "Quick fix desserts!" "Suppers that beat the clock!" Here was one claim that manufacturers could stand behind and when it came to some foods, this was probably the sole claim that could be made with any credibility. "Baby fussing? Dinner to get?" inquired an ad in 1953. In the pages of Forecast and other magazines, it wasn't the arrival of sudden company that threw a household into emergency status -ordinary life was sufficient. "I, in company with innumerable other women, feel the pressing need of entertaining my friends well but with a minimum of time and energy spent in preparation." Her solution was to use a can of baby food as a lasagna ingredient. "In this fast-moving era, everyone is concerned with saving time," emphasized a teacher who was submitting her favorite recipe to Forecast, the home economics magazine. According to Kellogg, what mothers really liked about the new Corn Pops was that the cereal was presweetened, a boon they found to be a great time-saver. Not even cold cereal got to the table fast enough. ![]() "If you're a typical modern housewife, you want to do your cooking as fast as possible," wrote a columnist at Household magazine who was promoting instant coffee and canned onion soup. Advertisements and stories plowed across the media reminding readers again and again how busy they were, how frantic their days, how desperately they needed products and recipes for quick meals. Novice cooks were always advised to keep a well-stocked pantry in case visitors dropped by.īut during the postwar era, time became an obsession of the food industry and eventually of American homemakers as a manufactured sense of panic began to pervade even day-to-day cooking. ![]() In its classic formulation, speed was associated with emergencies, and emergencies generally amounted to unexpected guests. Homemakers had always valued recipes for dishes that could be prepared with dispatch, and the concept of saving time by using this product or that recipe had been a familiar theme in food writing and advertising for decades. …At the heart of the industry's new definition of cooking was a ticking clock. ![]() Read an excerpt from Shapiro's book below: She discusses her history of packaged food with NPR's Melissa Block, host of All Things Considered. Shapiro says the '50s food industry tried to convince American women that they didn't enjoy cooking or have time to do it - and that they'd be better off turning to a box or can. She describes how some foods developed for soldiers during World War II were successfully transplanted into the home, while others died unappetizing deaths: Canned peaches survived, but the canned deep-fried hamburger, thankfully, did not. ![]() In her new book, Something from the Oven, author Laura Shapiro deconstructs food from the '50s - and the industry that foisted it on American households. Think 1950s food and you might conjure up Jell-O salads with a riot of add-ons or soda pop put to unnatural uses. "An audience was waiting for both."įrom 'Something from the Oven'/Courtesy Penguin Group Shapiro notes that Julia Child and Betty Friedan "sprang up simultaneously as national icons" in 1963. ![]()
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