Book ~ "Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America" (2004) - Laura Shapiro

From Amazon.com ~ In the fifties, we're always told, the food industry barged into the American kitchen, waving TV dinners, and destroyed home cooking. Not so fast, Shapiro says. As she reveals, women refused many of the new convenience foods. Fish sticks they accepted, but not ham sticks. Canned peaches, yes; canned hamburgers, no. The industry people hired psychologists to help them combat such resistance; the women's magazines, fond of their advertisers, told readers how, by splashing some sherry over the frozen peas, they could still make dinner look as though they had cooked it.

Interesting book to read considering where we are today with convenience meals ... Lean Cuisines, President's Choice products, etc.

The quotes from those times were hilarious. Gord and my favourite from radio personality, Mary Margaret McBride:

"She went on to predict that homemade biscuits and cakes would never lose their appeal, 'just as no satisfaction will ever equal the joy a woman finds in setting those biscuits and other delicious products of her own skill before her family.'"