Review: Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century, by Laura Shapiro (New York: North Point Press, 1986)

Perfection Salad is a classic food history book that looks at a major shift in ideas about food that took place in the few decades before and after 1900.  Before the shift, cooking was unpredictable, messy, and thoroughly organic; after the shift, cooking was predictable, bland, and rule-bound.  The people responsible for the shift were home economists, and Perfection Salad is, at heart, a history of the home ec movement in America (at least as it applies to food).

The book is organized chronologically, and so starts with an overview of attitudes toward housework and women in the home before the home ec movement began in the late 19th century.  Although a woman’s place then was in the home, her work there was seen to be extremely important as that work supported everyone else in the family.

The home economics movement came out of that sort of attitude.  The goal of home economists was fairly simple: to professionalize the job of a homemaker in the same way others had professionalized the work men did.  As Shapiro writes, the general idea was that “If the home were made a more businesslike place, if husbands were fed and children raised according to scientific principles, if purity and fresh air reached every corner of the house–then, at last, the nation’s homes would be adequate to nurture its greatness.” (page 4)

A homemaker, then, needed to be a chemist (to know how foods interacted with each other), a biologist (for foods that used yeast), an efficiency expert (to get jobs done quickly), and many other things as well.  The problem with cooking was that it was haphazard and slipshod, and home economists went to work to make it more streamlined and foolproof.  They did this by, for example, standardizing recipe ingredient lists.  Instead of calling for a walnut-sized lump of butter, the new recipes called for four tablespoons of butter (and all tablespoons were standardized to the same size).

Shapiro follows a number of different threads in her history.  One was the popularity of cooking schools, especially the Boston Cooking School, run for a time by Fannie Farmer.  These cooking schools appealed to young middle- and upper-class women during a time when more and more of them were having to make due without a hired cook, and so needed to learn how to cook.  Shapiro also follows the growth of home economics in colleges and universities across America, and then as approved subject matter in high schools.

Shapiro is ultimately critical of the home ec movement for at least three different reasons.  First, it not only standardized how recipes looked, it also helped to standardize what American food was.  The food the movement promoted to cooks across America was a cuisine based on foods popular in the northeastern United States.  Ethnic and regional foods were largely ignored in favor of baked beans, salads, and sweets.  Second, since standardization is essentially another form of “dumbing down,” and because home economists wanted their subject to be considered as a science and not as a craft or art, home economists effectively reduced cooking to a series of artless, mundane, routine steps on a checklist.  By the 1950s, in fact, one reason why people accept men as professional chefs instead of women is that men’s approach to cooking is seen as being creative while women need a recipe to be able to figure out how to cook something.  That comes from the early home economists’ insistence that following recipes is the only way a woman should cook.

Finally, Shapiro points out that home ec as either a college major or a career choice was a dead end for women.  College presidents jumped at the idea of starting home ec programs at their colleges largely because it was a good way to shunt women away from programs like English or anthropology, where females frequently had much higher grades than males, so that most of the spaces in those programs could be occupied by men.  The problem was that home ec began with the assumption that a woman’s place was in the home, and as the 20th century wore on, and more and more women worked outside the home, home ec became a much less viable college major.

Perfection Salad is highly recommended, and is probably the best book about American cooking in the early 20th century.