Rating: 
Summary: Ambitious Documentary on Women and Food in America
Review: This journalistic account of women and food by Laura Schenone has the air of a Ken Burns documentary in text and photographs filled with anecdotal information, `sound byte' sidebars, and photographs and drawings contemporary to the times detailed in the text. The subject seems promising, as the subtitle is `A History of American Women Told Through Food, Recipes, and Remembrances'.First, I would like to congratulate the author and the book layout designers and artists at W. W. Norton for a very nicely composed and bound book. This accounted for at least half of the reason I decided to buy the book. The other half was the expectation of an entertaining read somewhere in the same style of Eric Schlosser's `Fast Food Nation' or possibly an M. F. K. Fisher influenced collection of essays on women and food. I was disappointed for at least two reasons. The first was that unlike Schlosser's deservedly famous book, there was no central theme to the narrative. It was very much like Henri Bergson's complaint about 19th century philosophy of being a series of pearls with no connecting string. In the chapter on the later 20th century, there are paragraphs devoted to Julia Child, Rachael Carson, Alice Waters, Frances Moore Lappe, and Betty Friedan, with practically no common thread connecting them. They were all simply people who had an influence on food trends in the middle third of the last century. Even here, much was missed. I sincerely agree with the author's placing Julia Child as the most influential person in American culinary change in the 20th century, yet Schenone misses some of Child's biggest influences. She has been credited with single-handedly broadening the range of foodstuffs available in local supermarkets through her justifiably famous public TV shows. The second was that Ms. Schenone did not get all her facts right. I am willing to believe that this is true because of a failure of research and copy editing. Her assessment of Alice Waters, for example, buys into the myth of Lady Alice as the chef who is the driving force behind the California cuisine and thereby the new American cuisine. This overlooks the very important role played by both chef Jeremiah Tower and chef Paul Bertolli in the success of Chez Panisse. Tower especially is instrumental in the popularization of California cuisine, as he is willing to say over and over again. I suspect Tower may be overstating his case a bit, but in the foodie world, it is well known that while Waters deserves great credit for starting Chez Panisse and setting it's agenda, the real cooking and much of the culinary inspiration came from her (male) chefs. Other annoyances I found were occasional less than perfect wordsmithing. For example, she describes Martha Stewart as a `media scion'. A scion of what? For all of Martha's blemishes, one of her more admirable aspects is that she is quite literally self-made, having practically invented the upper middle class lifestyle / entertaining genre from a lower middle class background. I do give the author points for giving Martha her due share of the credit in influencing American lifestyles. On the next page of her book, I take those points away due to a snide aside on the `high-fallutin' style of Williams-Sonoma. The book deserves a lot of credit for it's many tales of women's life with food going back to pre-Columbian days. In the introduction, she even indulges in a bit of mythmaking about prehistoric women's' roles in food gathering and invention. I call this mythmaking since there are no bibliographic references to scholarly sources for the introduction. Beginning with Chapter 1, most anecdotes are backed up by scholarly references in the bibliography, although it should have been better done with notes connecting particular statements with specific references. It's ironic that the title cites a thousand years over a hot stove, while the text says that a proper iron stove was not available to the American housewife until after the Civil War. The book does redeem itself from several sins by recounting the extent to which commercially available foodstuffs were corrupted by processing in the 19th century before the advent of federal regulation with the Food and Drug Administration. These were the days when the difference between packaged and farmers market food was a whole lot more dramatic than it is today. If there is any theme to the book, it may be the irony that many food inventions originated with women, yet the world of commercial food production and haute cuisine cooking is largely the world of men. The former is easy to understand, as men ruled the world of commerce since Og traded furs with Mog in Neolithic times. The latter deserves some explanation, which I could not find in this book. My pet theory is that the work of a commercial restaurant kitchen demands a kind of athletic stamina of which men can reasonably be said to have more. I agree with the author that `la cuisine Bourgeoisie' was the invention of women. Haute cuisine is based on the women's cuisine of the common folk, enhanced and codified by the chefs to nobility and the wealthy. The choice of photographs shows skill and some good research. The connection between the photographs with the text is sometimes less than perfect, but on balance, the selection of photographs is one of the best features of the book. The choice of recipes is fair, but generally simply illustrations of points in the main text rather than of any real culinary value. I generally enjoyed reading the book, but I was disappointed by some inaccuracies when I had independent information on the subject. This made me suspect those chapters where I did not have confirming background information. I suspect the author would have done better to adapt a more strictly documentary tone. These aspects of the narrative succeed and the polemic tone in the book does not.
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