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 widespread 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. 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 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 "A comprehensive, droll social history of a curious women's movement that's responsible for everything from nutritional education programs to TV dinners. 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 widespread 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. Laura Shapiro was an award-winning writer at Newsweek for more than fifteen years. Her articles have appeared in many publications, including The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Granta , and Gourmet. She is at work on a book about how women's attitudes toward food in the late '40s to early '60s presaged the cultural and culinary revolutions to come. She lives in New York City. Chapter One: Drudgery Divine Harriet Beecher Stowe once suggested that a special place in heaven be reserved for certain women she called "domestic saints." Her own aunt Esther was a good example-"and her name shall be recorded as Saint Esther"-a spinster who cheerfully gave her life to caring for children, nursing the sick, and silently helping out wherever she saw need. Here was a calling worthy of canonization, wrote Mrs. Stowe: "to be truly noble and heroic in the insipid details of every-day life." This tribute first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in 1864, a time when home life was considered to be our point of closest contact with heaven. Indeed, the boundary between those two pleasant realms was sometimes indistinct-one best-selling novelist of the day explicitly furnished her heaven with pianos, and provided the angels with gingerbread. Motherhood, of course, best personified the mingling of home and heaven, for a mother was a saint by definition. But while maternity never lost its eminence, during the next few decades an increasi