Toasted marshmallows stuffed with raisins? Green-and-white luncheons? Chemistry in the kitchen? This entertaining and erudite social history, now in its fourth paperback edition, tells the remarkable story of America's transformation from a nation of honest appetites into an obedient market for instant mashed potatoes. In Perfection Salad, Laura Shapiro investigates a band of passionate but ladylike reformers at the turn of the twentieth century--including Fannie Farmer of the Boston Cooking School--who were determined to modernize the American diet through a "scientific" approach to...

Although My Kitchen Wars is a war story, this time the warrior is a woman and the battleground the kitchen. Her weapons the batterie de cuisine of grills and squeezers and knives evoke a lifetime s need to make dinner, love, and war. By prying open the past with these implements, Betty Fussell gives voice to a generation of women whose stories were shaped and yet simultaneously silenced by an era of domestic strife and global conflict, from World War II to Vietnam.My Kitchen Wars also is a love story, recounting Fussell s liberation from the tyrannical Puritanism of her...

Author of the forthcoming What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food That Tells Their Stories (Summer 2017)
With a swooping voice, an irrepressible sense of humor, and a passion for good food, Julia Child ushered in the nation's culinary renaissance. In Julia Child, award-winning food writer Laura Shapiro tells the story of Child's unlikely career path, from California party girl to coolheaded chief clerk in a World War II spy station to bewildered amateur cook and finally to the Cordon Bleu in Paris, the school that inspired her calling. A food lover who was quintessentially...

`If you find the subject of food to be both vexing and transfixing, you'll love What She Ate' Elle