Quotes from Laura Shapiro

Toward the end of February 1954, James Beard was at work in his Greenwich Village kitchen doing what he most loved to do: cooking delicious meals.

To be a wife was to cook. Not to eat—that was a different matter entirely—but to cook.

At Cornell she had discovered that domesticity had a brain; here, in the beloved, safe home that was entirely hers, she was learning that it had a heart.

Tell me what you ate when you were a child, and whether the memory cheers you up or not.

Culinary historians looking back at the first decades of the twenty-first century will be blessed with vast quantities of material to study, thanks to blogs and social media, but all that material will still reflect only the lives of a certain swathe of active and self-promoting food lovers.

It was the early 1960s, and the best-known names in home cooking—Fannie Farmer, Betty Crocker, Irma Rombauer, Dione Lucas—projected a warm and cozy domestic image that was the opposite of what she and David were after.

But what struck me as I followed the paper trail through each life was that while extraordinary circumstances produce extraordinary women, food makes them recognizable.

No self-respecting gastronome was going to look back on the 1950s with anything except pity. •

she quickly hired a housekeeper and a kitchen staff for the White House and then threw herself into what mattered far more to her—civil rights, women's equality, poverty, housing, employment, and the war. She was the busiest, most public, most productive First Lady in history, and complaints about dinner just didn't register. But

Cooking — that is, the actual mixing, measuring, boiling, and baking — was taught under the heading Laboratory Practice.

The important function of an American white sauce was not to enhance but to blanket.

Many dinners emerging from the scientific kitchen were entirely white…

Compounds like wedding cake, suet plum-puddings, and rich turtle soup, are masses of indigestible material, which should never find their way to any Christian table (Shapiro citing Mary Peabody Mann, Christianity in the Kitchen).

The characteristic sweetness of much American cooking was also established during these years, as cooks relied more and more on the blandness and general acceptability of sugar as a flavoring.

Like the food experts of the last century, today's enthusiasts are fully convinced they have rescued food from the barbarous prisons of the past.

Hitler's aide, used to see her sitting with Hitler in his study at night, wearing a dressing gown, having champagne while he drank tea.

In recent years women have been moving into the realm of professional cooking in significant numbers, but at its highest levels the world of great cookery is probably more staunchly masculine than the armed forces.

She was the rare feminist, possibly the only feminist, with an unabashed commitment to male supremacy.

Julia's attitude toward British food—that it was inedible, that it had little relevant history apart from being inedible, and that a more sensible population would simply take its meals in France—had been locked into place for a long time, and no respectable gourmand would have contradicted her.

After all, academic reputations were at stake. Home cooking was associated with women, which was bad enough, and housework, which was fatal. Luckily

Any morsel that wasn't low-calorie was "sinful," "naughty," "gobble gobble gobble," "heavy sinning," or "a cruel but devastating lover." Just

Today, of course, popular culture is on a culinary binge; and so much personal writing is now devoted to gazing back upon the kitchen and the table that we've had to invent a new literary genre, the food memoir, to contain all of it.

We're meant to read the lives of important people as if they never bothered with breakfast, lunch, or dinner, or took a coffee break, or stopped for a hot dog on the street, or wandered downstairs for a few spoonfuls of chocolate pudding in the middle of the night.

The food could climb the social ladder but sometimes the cook was left behind.