New release: Casseroles, Can Openers, and Jell-O: American Food and the Cold War, 1947-1959 by Elizabeth Aldrich

 

Find it on Amazon HERE

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

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.

Elizabeth Aldrich is Curator Emeritus of Dance at the Library of Congress. She is the author of From Ballroom to Hell: Grace and Folly in Nineteenth-Century Dance.