Book Review: Fashionable Food

I have never been one to mind fashion.

When the preppy look was in at school, I was oblivious, and wore the wrong shoes, the wrong sweaters and the wrong jeans. I never wore a shirt with an alligator, and duck shoes (which I always thought were well-named as they made everyone look like they had huge feet and were waddling) never made it into my closet.

I never liked the popular bands, and all the teen idols that my peers were swooning over made me curl my lip, roll my eyes and pantomime gagging.

I just never understood fads–I was always on the outside looking in, trying to comprehend just what was so appealing about whatever the “in” thing of the moment was about.

So, one might find it a little odd that I had so much fun reading Sylvia Lovegren’s Fashionable Food: Seven Decades of Food Fads. Except, it isn’t odd at all; Lovegren examines each decade of food fads with the jaundiced eye of a cynical observer who is just as puzzled by human food behavior as I was by teen clothing and music choices.

Written with a sharp wit and a light touch, Fashionable Food takes the reader on a romp through the kitchens, restaurants, women’s magazines and other food media of the twentieth century, from the Roaring Twenties up through the mid-1990’s. Along the way, she takes us on a few side trips, where she explores the “exotic” cusines introduced by immigrants–primarily Chinese, Japanese and Italian–and examines how they slowly became imbedded into American food culture.

Sprinkled throughout the text are period menus and recipes, mostly culled from vintage women’s magazines and cookbooks; these visceral illustrations of the food follies of the past illuminate her prose in hilarious and often alarming ways.

For example, she prints a recipe (which I think I am going to have to make, just to see how hideous the result can be) for “Italian Spaghetti,” circa 1924, wherein the cook is instructed to “boil the spaghetti one hour in salted water.”

When I read that, I could feel my frontal lobe slam into my forehead.

Boil spaghetti for an hour?

What, did they make pasta out of lead in the 1920’s? Was wheat more muscular? Can spaghetti even retain a coherent shape if boiled that long?

The author doesn’t answer these questions, because she notes quite dryly that the “recipe has not been tested.”

There is a lot to fear in this book. If the thought of boiling spaghetti for an hour doesn’t strike enough terror into the heart of the reader, the amount of “dainty” foods discussed therein will.

Dainty.

I shudder just to type the damned word.

But, apparently, back in the 1920’s and 30’s, women liked dainty food. It made them feel–dainty–I guess.

Nothing, except perhaps a moose or an elephant loitering in my general vicinity is going to make me feel dainty. Certainly not such delicacies as bird’s nest salad, which consisted of balls of pastel-tinted cream cheese in iceberg lettuce nests. Nor anything having to do with marshmallows.

Speaking of marshmallows, as I was describing one recipe from the book–“Sweet Potato-Marshmallow Surprise” (which consists of mashed sweet potatoes wrapped around large marshmallows, then rolled in crushed cereal and baked)–Zak asked me when marshmallows were invented.

After having read about so many culinary depredations that involved those sticky, pillowy, tooth-achingly sweet confections recounted in Lovegren’s narrative, I quipped, “Too early in human history.”

After we finished laughing, I thought about it. While most of the book is concerned with the foolish food foibles of past eras, Lovegren doesn’t just focus on the negative; she also celebrates the positive. She has no qualms about praising a particular dish for being tasty even if it has fallen from favor. And while she rightly bemoans the preponderance of packaged convenience foods in American cookery as she chronicles the rise in its use through the century, she doesn’t hesitate to note that sometimes, some foods made with mixes or cans were not bad, and were perhaps even good.

What I found most interesting about the narrative was how long Americans have had a love affair with processed foods–it is not something that arose after World War II as many modern cooks might suppose. American cooks were taking advantage of boxed, canned and powdered foods long before the 1950’s, though indeed, that decade was the era of Poppy Cannon’s best-selling, The Can-Opener Cookbook.

The other point of interest was the staying power of some dishes–the inexplicable three decade long popularity of tomato aspic boggles the mind, while the perennial popularity of meatloaf–a staple of the Depression and wartime kitchens–comes as no surprise.

There is much to admire in the book, and it is a great deal of fun, but it also isn’t really a serious history, filled with footnotes and sprinkled with analysis. However, I don’t think that Fashionable Foods was ever meant to be a scholarly book–it was contrived to entertain the cooking enthusiast while giving them a taste of American food history.

My greatest criticism is about the recipes–far too many of them have been “adapted” by Lovegren to fit the nutritional awareness and tastes of current cooks. I think that changing these recipes at all violates the spirit of the book–the idea is to capture the flavor of the past as it was, not as we would wish it to be.

All in all, I had a great deal of fun reading Lovegren’s sometimes snarky prose, and so I will forgive her instinct to tweak the recipes she encountered in her research to fit modern sensibilities. It was enough that she made me laugh aloud and sigh with nostalgia, then blush with embarrassment and goggle in disbelief, that I won’t hold it against her that she changed some recipes, yet left that horrific injunction to “boil spaghetti one hour in salted water” intact.

Besides–I still have to try that recipe.

Just to see what will happen.

books book review food history food & drink

8 Comments

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1. This is a book that I want to read! Sounds both interesting and fun, thanks a lot for reviewing it Barbara!

   Comment by Ilva-Lucullian delights — November 11, 2005 #

2. NiHowdy Barb
   Check this out:
   “Marshmallow candy dates back to ancient Egypt where it was a honey-based candy flavored and thickened with the sap of the root of the Marsh-Mallow plant (althea officinalis). Marsh-Mallow grows in salt marshes and on banks near large bodies of water. It is common in the eastern United States. Until the mid 1800’s, marshmallow candy was made using the sap of the Marsh-Mallow plant. Gelatin replaces the sap in the modern recipes.”
   http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blmarshmallows.htm

   Yet even more useless trivia brought to you by yours truely 🙂
   -=Bryian=-

   Comment by Bryian — November 11, 2005 #

3. Barb! I have a “classic” recipe for a jello “salad” made with applesauce, jello, 7 up, and other delights. (Blah!!)It isn’t bad in small quantities, it is lacking in marshmallows (which I detest). Mom and I used to have a huge battle over her jello salad with canned fruit cocktail (another “blah!”) because she insisted upon adding bananas. The only way I can stand bananas is plain..not in cake, pie, cookies, pudding, or anything else. They would lurk in that jello like nasty cotton balls, and I used to pick them out & give them to your dad, who loved bananas then. Aunt Judy.

   Comment by yourauntjudy — November 11, 2005 #

4. Glad to be of service, Ilva!

   Nihao, Bry–see! Marshmallows did come into existence too early in mankind’s history! We are not trustworthy around them, nope. Maybe in a few hundred years we will be ready for them, but not so long as Jello and canned sweet potatoes are also in existence.

   Maybe the latter two culinary delights will die out like dinosaurs, and then it will be safe to have marshmallows about.

   Aunt Judy! Hey–everybody–this is Aunt Judy–the infamous maker of chocolate mousse and other delights.

   I dislike fruit cocktail in jello. Actually–I don’t much like jello, now that I think about it. I used to, and I suspect that I could still eat it to be polite, but it is not anything I would purposefully seek out and eat anymore.

   Bananas–I am with you on that. The only bananaoid thing I like besides plain old bananas is banana bread, but only if it has real bananas. As much as I dislike bananas in things, I hate artificial banana flavoring even worse. There is nothing more foul.

   Gah. I get the shudders even thinking of the smell of fake banana flavoring.

   Ick.

   Comment by Barbara Fisher — November 11, 2005 #

5. Hi from another Ohioan!
   This book sounds great–I’m going to order it from the library. I have a small collection of vintage cookbooks–they have some great recipes (especially cakes, for some reason), but there are some really bizarre ones too. Here’s my latest bizarre recipe find, from a fundraising cookbook put out by a women’s group in Alabama: Egg Salad Pie–it’s the usual sort of ingredients for an egg salad, suspended in gelatin, and served in a pie crust. Maybe this was dainty? The cookbook dates from 1962.

   Comment by lucette — November 12, 2005 #

6. Welcome, Lucette! I see you are a novelist–that is extremely cool–I have a couple of novel manuscripts that I should go back to, but have been busy writing about food instead. Oops, bad me.

   Egg salad pie sounds suspiciously dainty to me. It also sounds quite icky and more than a little frightful.

   It gives me the creeps, to put it mildly.

   Comment by Barbara Fisher — November 12, 2005 #

7. Hey Barbara,

   I’m glad you ended by hinting you might try boiling spaghetti for an hour. I’ve been getting interested in old foods and thinking of making recipes that look like they would be disasters to see how they really turn out. We too easily get fixed in our contemporary food orthodoxies. Pasta is great al dente, but the way I remember the chicken noodle soup of my childhood, for example, is that the noodles were just short of disintegrating into the liquid. I also used eat canned pasta as a child (a Canadian product called zoodles in fun animal shapes). It was pretty mushy and I loved it.

   I enjoyed your review. Thanks for turning me on to this book.

   Comment by mzn — November 14, 2005 #

8. I have to make an admission–I never liked mushy pasta–even in the Campbell’s chicken noodle soup. I ate it–but I never liked it.

   I also grew up eating pasta cooked too long, because that is what folks in West Virginia do–but I never much cared for it that way.

   So–my experiment is not really as unbiased as one might think. I fully expect the dish to come out as a hideous, inedible mess. However, I am also hoping to be pleasantly surprised if it turns out to taste good, too.

   Besides–it really is just morbid curiousity on my part–what will happen if I boil pasta for a solid hour? What will happen? Will the world end, or will I just have a very messy pot to clean up? Will it have a coherent shape, or will it turn into a mass of goo?

   All these questions and more will plague me until I set aside an afternoon and put this thing together.

   That said, I have to cop to actually liking some of the old fashioned scary casserole recipes–like that green bean casserole stuff with the fried onions. I love that stuff. I know it is godawful and nasty and hideous for the arteries, but man–I like the way it tastes.

   Comment by Barbara Fisher — November 14, 2005 #

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