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Title: You Truly Can't Judge a Book By the Cover
Review: Sounds like a cookbook, but the nonfiction account of changes in food culture due to women's changing roles in society and the natural changes this produced in their expression in cooking is what you find inside. The book covers pre-WWII to the early 1960's and uses household names like Betty Crocker and Julia Child to draw the reader into a more detailed, gender-based analysis of cooking n American and our resultant "Food Culture".The book is exceedingly dry and the title is misleading. What appears to start as a tale-based journey back in time quickly degrades into a familiar feminist lament of under-appreciation and under-representation. The book even ends with a comparison of Julia Childs and Betty Friedan as "pioneers" for women - odd partners in the feminist movement. At 254 pages, it should have been more entertaining. But, I was fascinated to learn early cupcake mixes included dried egg.
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