Casseroles, Can Openers, and Jell-O provides insight on how American food culture developed during the early years of the Cold War. Highlighting gender roles, the promotion of democracy and capitalism, and the impact of mass market advertising, the book draws on cookbooks, popular magazines, television advertisements, government publications, and industry pamphlets to paint a vivid picture of what Americans ate and how food was enlisted as a symbol of America’s postwar dominance. Featuring eighty recipes, the book shows how the food industry promoted new processed foods to an increasingly industrialized nation. For anyone wanting to better understand how America’s food culture developed during the mid-twentieth century and for those who were raised on TV dinners and Campbell's soup, the book offers an engaging and evocative look at the story of American cuisine during the early years of the Cold War.

Contains vegetarian recipes for salads, soups, bread, rice dishes, curries, desserts, and Vanamali special dishes

An "all-you-can-eat" tour of American life in the postwar period, told through the foods we loved.

An insider explores the transformation of ballroom dance into an Olympic sport.

For the past ten years, Jean Anderson has been on a quest: to search out the most popular recipes of the 20th century and to chronicle 100 years of culinary change in America. The result is a rich and fascinating look at where we've been, at the recipes our mothers and grandmothers loved, and at how our own tastes have evolved. The more than 500 cherished recipes in these pages are mainstays of American home cooking, the recipes that have remained favorites year after year. For the smallest sampling: California dip . . . Buffalo chicken wings . . . vichyssoise . . . tuna-noodle casserole . . . Swiss steak . . . frosted meat loaf . . . tamale pie . . . corn dogs . . . lobster rolls . . . classic green bean bake . . . perfection salad . . . green goddess salad . . . frozen fruit salad . . . chiffon cake . . . brownies . . . chocolate chip cookies . . . chocolate decadence Beyond this collection is Jean's exploration of the diversity of our nation's cuisine and our adoption of such "foreign" dishes as pizza, gazpacho, lasagne, moussaka, and tarte tatin. Her painstakingly researched text includes extensive headnotes, thumbnail profiles of important people and products (from Fannie Farmer to James Beard and from electric refrigerators to the microwave), and a timeline of major 20th-century food firsts. In recording popular recipes that might have been lost, in setting them in richly detailed historical context, Jean Anderson has written her masterwork. The American Century Cookbook may well be the most important new cookbook of the decade; it is certainly the book America will love.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A"rollicking biography" (People Magazine) and extraordinarily entertaining account of how Julia Child transformed herself into the cult figure who touched off a food revolution that has gripped the country for decades. Spanning Pasadena to Paris, acclaimed author Bob Spitz reveals the history behind the woman who taught America how to cook. A genuine rebel who took the pretensions that embellished French cuisine and fricasseed them to a fare-thee-well, paving the way for a new era of American food—not to mention blazing a new trail in television—Child redefined herself in middle age, fought for women’s rights, and forever altered how we think about what we eat. Chronicling Julia's struggles, her heartwarming romance with Paul, and, of course, the publication of Mastering the Art of French Cooking and her triumphant TV career, Dearie is a stunning story of a truly remarkable life.