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“. . . in this miraculous age it is quite
possible — and it’s fun — to be a ‘chef’ even
before you can really cook.” — from The Can-Opener Cookbook, by
Poppy Cannon, 1952
The Travel Channel’s Bizarre Foods features host Andrew
Zimmern traveling
around the world eating weird food. It can be interesting, but
there’s definitely a gross-out factor; it almost seems geared for
early-adolescent boys. Too bad Zimmern can’t take a time trip back to
America in the ’50s. Some people look back at that decade with
longing, others with an amused condescension. Strangely, the two groups see
the same picture: a simpler time idealized by TV shows such as Father Knows Best. Mom was at
home serving meals (even breakfast!) with perfectly coiffed hair,
discreetly tasteful makeup, and a crisply starched dress and tiny apron
that was more decoration that protection. At the table sat her husband, in
a suit coat, and her equally starched and pressed children — though
the kids did get into mischief, those little scamps! Life was stable; any
civil or familial discord or discontent was swept under the rug. One group
finds that vision reassuringly secure; the other sees it as stultifying.
Of course, 1950s America was far more complex, no
matter how uniform its façade. Even so, it was a time of wide-eyed optimism.
Prosperity was in the air, and, as long as we could keep the communists
from taking over, most people believed the promises of advertisers and the
media that science and good ol’ American ingenuity would provide
ever-brighter tomorrows.
Nowhere was that more true than in food and cooking.
Convenience foods such as canned soup and Jell-O had appeared earlier in
the 20th century, but it wasn’t until after World War II that the
burgeoning food industry began intensely marketing such products to
homemakers. The reason, according to Laura Shapiro in Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America, was that “the food industry found itself confronted
with the most daunting challenge in its history: to create a peacetime
market for wartime foods. Manufacturers and packagers had put considerable
expertise into . . . turning out an array of specially designed foods that
could accompany the armed forces anywhere.”
Spam is a wartime product that survives and is joked
about to this day, but, in their excitement about converting their
facilities to products for home use, industrial food producers regarded
anything as fair game. Tatonuts were potato tidbits that boasted
“strong resistance to weather conditions.” Powdered orange
juice was a wartime innovation, but now an engineer utilized that
technology to dry wine: “sophisticated” diners would select
powders of sherry, port, and Chianti; spoon them into their wineglasses;
and stir in water and alcohol. The possibilities of freezing appeared
endless. Initially, convenience foods didn’t take off as
puzzled manufacturers expected. It apparently didn’t occur to them
that their products didn’t taste good, but they kept up the
advertising drumbeat of convenience and eventually their marketing blitz
paid off. As Shapiro notes, “Factory conditions imposed strict limits
on the sensory qualities possible in packaged foods, making them
predominately very salty, very sweet, or very bland. The more such
qualities were reflected in a family’s home cooking, the more
acceptable they became.”
Moreover, the advertising made homemakers feel as if
they had to use packaged convenience foods if they wanted to keep up with
the times. Newspaper columns, “women’s” magazines, and
daily radio programs hosted by such luminaries as “Harriet
Hepplewhite, the Happy Housewife” assured their audience that cooking
from scratch was hopelessly outdated. Paradoxically, even as they
celebrated the joys of being a full-time homemaker, they were earnestly
attempting not just to reduce some of the work of food preparation but also
to reduce cooking to “heat and eat” and eventually eliminate it
altogether. “Fresh produce for retail consumption is a
thing of the past,” proudly proclaimed 1954 article “A Fantasy
of the Future.” “There’s no such thing as a
‘kitchen’ nowadays,” says the article’s proud
housewife. “Just freezer space, electronic cooking, automatic
dishwashing. Life’s really simple nowadays — science has
emancipated women right out of the kitchen.”
Even as use of their products increased, food
industrialists became aware of another stumbling block: Many homemakers
missed the satisfaction of preparing meals. The industry’s answer: Get creative with
convenience foods. Advertising featured recipes incorporating packaged
products, the food media took up the cry, and creative convenience cooking
surged. It wasn’t entirely new. Even before World War
II, “when a newly scientific and mechanized food supply began
reshaping the nation’s eating habits, American cooking had been
characterized by a blatant irrationality,” says Shapiro, citing as an
example “Red Crest Salad,” a scary-sounding concoction of
chopped pickles and tomatoes suspended in strawberry Jell-O. “One of
the most distinctive features of packaged-food cuisine was the mysterious
nature of many dishes that seemed to follow no apparent culinary logic. In
large part this was a tribute to the commercial underpinnings of the
cuisine: Each recipe was wholly in thrall to the product being promoted.
Hence canned fruit cocktail was reborn as a cole slaw ingredient.”
Food writers emphatically believed the ’50s
homemaker was fulfilled by the new “cooking.” “She may
spend less time in the kitchen, and she may buy canned food,” said
one, “but she makes up for it by greater creativity. Another cited
modern women’s pride in creating “unusual combinations of
canned foods.”
Unusual and creative they were, but some of the
resultant dishes sound like surrealist nightmares, such as sliced tomatoes
sprinkled with cheese, topped with bananas, covered with mayonnaise, and
broiled. Snowball Sandwiches were“two-layer circular sandwiches, one
layer of canned tuna fish and the other of crushed pineapple mixed with
whipped cream, iced with cream cheese and topped with a maraschino cherry.
“Glamourizing” food was an important
goal, and canned pineapple was a sure way to achieve it in such marvels as
a shredded-rutabaga-and-pineapple salad — but then Household magazine told its
readers that canned fruit turned any mixture into “salad glamour for
summer.”
Fire was another surefire path to glamour, and it was
eagerly embraced by Cannon. Just about any food could be flambéed,
including Flaming Cabbage, a large cabbage with a can of Sterno in the
hollowed-out center. Guests toasted pieces of hotdogs on toothpicks stuck
all over the cabbage. Dessert might be “The Snapdragon of Merrie Olde
England” — bunches of sultana raisins on stems, doused in
brandy and set aflame. “The idea,” she wrote, “is to
snatch as many raisins as you can. Who gets the most is luckiest.”
Let’s hope she had a supply of bandages. Some creations had unintentional implications. The
woman who served a Christmas “salad” of half a banana centered
in a pineapple ring with a peppermint Lifesaver stuck at the bottom and a
dab of mayonnaise on the tip was mystified by guests’ poorly stifled
laughter: it was supposed to be a candle in a holder, not something
obscene. Fortunately, an alternative to the convenience food
culture was beginning to emerge. Gourmet magazine, begun — incredibly — during World
War II, was thriving. James Beard was promoting American food and regional
ingredients. Julia Child was working on the manuscript of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, which would be published in 1961 and is still regarded as
indispensable not just to home cooks but also to chefs. Good home cooking hadn’t died; it just
wasn’t getting much attention. The bizarre excesses of
convenience food creativity were beginning to be the subject of sly humor.
Take Laura Petrie’s famous hors d’ oeuvres on the Dick Van Dyke Show,
“Potato Poopies.” After being served a salad of macaroni,
pineapple chunks, peanuts, cabbage, marshmallows, and olives, bestselling
author Betty MacDonald lamented: “I don’t know what is
happening to the women of America, but it ought to be stopped.”
I’m glad we’ve moved beyond those days
and that food, but if anyone has a recipe for Potato Poopies I’d be
interested.
Contact Julianne Glatz at realcuisine@insightbb.com.
This article appears in Apr 3-9, 2008.
