"At the dawn of the 1950s, a woman was expected to be, in the words of Peg Bracken, "business manager, practical nurse, housecleaner, child psychologist, home decorator, chauffeur, laundress, cook, hostess - all this besides being a gay, well-groomed companion." Something had to give. Big Business chose the kitchen and the postwar food industry stood at the ready, promising to minimize a housewife's time at the stove. Hoping to rid themselves of freeze-dried army leftovers and profit from new food technologies, the industry stuck a clumsy hand into American kitchen and tried to take over the cooking." "Tasteless "gourmet" horrors - frozen bouillabaisse and pate de foie gras, dehydrated wine - failed to convince any woman, no matter how fazzled, for very long. On the other hand, canned peaches, frozen vegetables, frozen orange juice, Spam and other indestructible lunch meats were welcomed and are still popular. No matter how handy some of these ingredients might have been implicit in the suggestion that instant food was "the housewife's dream" was the debilitating idea that women were, and always had been, mere functionaries in the kitchen, leaving the gourmet arts to male chefs: in other words, cooking was hard, and women were not up to the task. There was a battle on and women of all stripes pitched into the fray. Cooks and journalists such as the formidable author and House Beautiful food editor Poppy Cannon - and the fictional Betty Crocker - championed the possibilities of instant cooking while others, M. F. K. Fisher, for example, pursued the sublime. Bemused chroniclers of domestic chaos such as Shirley Jackson, Jean Kerr, and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey laughed away any attempt to idealize the postwar family - or housewife. Then in 1963, just as Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique appeared on the scene, a young, gangly housewife named Julia Child went on TV and changed both the American kitchen and Americans forever. In essence, she said to women, "You don't need to get it from a package. You can take charge. You can stand at the center of your own world and create something very good, from scratch.""--Book jacket