Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century

One hundred years ago, Americans were engaged in a widespread social and commercial obsession with food that in many ways parallels the food mania of today. The leading professional cooks of the day were women bent on thoroughly modernizing and taming the American diet. With their scientific cookery, they hoped to convince American women to forget about Mom's apple pie and learn to think of the kitchen as a home laboratory for food production.