Laura Shapiro

“No self-respecting gastronome was going to look back on the 1950s with anything except pity. •”

— Laura Shapiro

“After all, academic reputations were at stake. Home cooking was associated with women, which was bad enough, and housework, which was fatal.…

— Laura Shapiro

“At Cornell she had discovered that domesticity had a brain; here, in the beloved, safe home that was entirely hers, she was…

— Laura Shapiro

“Toward the end of February 1954, James Beard was at work in his Greenwich Village kitchen doing what he most loved to…

— Laura Shapiro

“But what struck me as I followed the paper trail through each life was that while extraordinary circumstances produce extraordinary women, food…

— Laura Shapiro

“Tell me what you ate when you were a child, and whether the memory cheers you up or not.”

— Laura Shapiro

“Hitler’s aide, used to see her sitting with Hitler in his study at night, wearing a dressing gown, having champagne while he…

— Laura Shapiro

“Any morsel that wasn’t low-calorie was “sinful,” “naughty,” “gobble gobble gobble,” “heavy sinning,” or “a cruel but devastating lover.” Just”

— Laura Shapiro

“It was the early 1960s, and the best-known names in home cooking—Fannie Farmer, Betty Crocker, Irma Rombauer, Dione Lucas—projected a warm and…

— Laura Shapiro

“We’re meant to read the lives of important people as if they never bothered with breakfast, lunch, or dinner, or took a…

— Laura Shapiro

“she quickly hired a housekeeper and a kitchen staff for the White House and then threw herself into what mattered far more…

— Laura Shapiro

“Julia’s attitude toward British food—that it was inedible, that it had little relevant history apart from being inedible, and that a more…

— Laura Shapiro

“Culinary historians looking back at the first decades of the twenty-first century will be blessed with vast quantities of material to study,…

— Laura Shapiro

“Today, of course, popular culture is on a culinary binge; and so much personal writing is now devoted to gazing back upon…

— Laura Shapiro

“These new friends had fought for suffrage, they had won, and now they were determined to use the vote to advance women’s…

— Laura Shapiro

“Her favorite place to watch human behavior was a restaurant, for there she could sit quietly in the background while people interacted…

— Laura Shapiro

“I had erected someone outside myself who was the President’s wife. I was lost somewhere deep down inside myself. That is the…

— Laura Shapiro

“To be a wife was to cook. Not to eat—that was a different matter entirely—but to cook.”

— Laura Shapiro

“She was the rare feminist, possibly the only feminist, with an unabashed commitment to male supremacy.”

— Laura Shapiro