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n 1952, an earth-shaking event occurred, for lack of freezer space. Just after Thanksgiving season, the C.A. Swanson & Sons Company found that it had a problem on its hands, in the form of more than a half-million pounds of unsold frozen turkey. The company could not find a storage plant with sufficient room for it, so the meat was being shuttled back and forth across the country in refrigerated boxcars. With the turkey-selling season over for another year, Swanson's challenged its executives to come up with a creative way to utilize the poultry. The one that emerged altered the way Americans ate forever.
Swanson's Gerald Thomas had the idea that was adopted; he had seen divided stainless food trays on airliners that kept food separate while it was being transported and reheated. Ordering a scaled-down version made in heavy aluminum foil, he directed it to be filled with cooked, sliced turkey, cornbread dressing, peas, and mashed sweet potato. More foil went over the top, and a cardboard box protected the tray. The stroke of genius that made the product popular was tying it to the new national pastime, television watching, by calling it a "TV Dinner". Priced at 98 cents (equal to more than $5.00 today), the initial run of 5000 dinners quickly sold out, becoming a torrent of millions within two years. Swanson's became such a valuable company, it was purchased by Campbell's Soup. America's love affair with convenience food had begun.
With stunning speed, the emphasis on mealtimes changed from nutrition and family togetherness, to convenience, gratification, even hedonism. In 1950, convenience foods had been limited to canned foods, some instant products like coffee, and cake mixes. By 1960, there was virtually nothing from any major cuisine that could not be had in a frozen, canned, or powdered form. Consumers and the food industry were not bashful about their new love affair; Swanson's even ran ads touting its TV dinners as a perfect item to have on hand in case of unexpected guests.
Completely prepared meals were big sellers, and highly popular, but there was still some resistance on the part of some moms - many did not want to let go of the meal-making process completely. The food industry responded with an array of strategies calculated to get Mom to let her guard down. One of the most profitable and reliable was giving consumers recipes using a product as an ingredient. Canned soups could be sauces, cake mixes could be infinitely varied with additions like crushed peppermint candies or chocolate chips, and some products even made appearances in ways that could not easily be traced back to their source. One of the earliest and most famous examples was Lipton's 1954 recipe for its celebrated California Dip; the company's onion soup mix was combined with sour cream to create the most delicious and savory substance most Mid-Century Americans had ever tasted. California Dip was so popular, it turned a moribund niche product into a best-seller, and also transformed sour cream from an obscure ethnic ingredient into a mass-market favorite.
Other companies were just as inventive; the Vernor's ginger ale people came up with Duckling à la Vernor's, which used their distinctively bitey, plush product in the bird's glaze. Crushed Kellogg's cornflakes were used to coat baked chicken, for a mock-fried effect. Hellman's amazed homemakers by urging them to add mayonnaise to layer cakes, which wasn't as strange as it seemed, since the eggs, oil, and acid in mayonnaise were constituents of most traditional cake recipes. Once the thrill of tossing mayo into cake batter palled, Mom could bring back the excitement by turning to Campbell's Tomato Spice Cake recipe, which used cream of tomato soup. One of the most addictive Fifties product recipes was Kellogg's Marshmallow Squares, sweet, crunchy, and taking only five minutes to prepare. The result was so popular, cookie companies actually began making their own versions, taking things from convenient to effortless.
Meal mixes became a Fifties staple, especially for ethnic foods whose ingredients were not readily available fresh in most American grocery stores. Chef Boy-Ar-Dee, a company named after founder and chef Hector Boiardi, was big on Italian food. Its spaghetti meal kit was a can of sauce, a can of Parmesan cheese, and the requisite pasta; Mom could have the meal ready in ten minutes, and yet feel she'd done her duty as a homemaker. Chef Boy-Ar-Dee's pizza kit was more ambitious; the kit held a pouch of pizza-dough mix that had to be allowed to rise, then formed into the pizza's crust. The company periodically offered the necessary pan as a premium, asking two boxtops and a token fifty cents. Chinese food - or at least most Mid-Century Americans' comprehension of it - was available from two major competitors, La Choy and Chun King, who packaged their meals in two cans bound together with plastic. Heating the two components and combining them was all that was needed. Lovers of Mexican and Tex-Mex flavors had dozens of choices, from a plethora of canned chilis to taco kits, which weren't quite as convenient as most convenience food, since they required ground beef, added cheese, and shredded lettuce.
There were also entirely new categories of food preservation, like vacuum-packaged meats. With their introduction, cold cuts were no longer the exclusive province of delis in major cities; the smallest backwater could have pastrami, salami and frankfurters as fresh as anything found in New York, if quite a bit blander. For a time, nearly every sort of meat product was available vacuum-packed; the Standard Packaging Corporation was so committed to the process, it issued a ghost-written promotional cookbook "by" daytime television's most revered star, Arlene Francis. Called No Time for Cooking, the volume was perfectly pitched to the era's housewives; Francis was shown in her elegant New York apartment dishing up perfectly styled food supposedly made in a jiffy, piling Dansk teakwood platters high with cold cuts, and tuning bologna into party hors d'oeuvres. The inference was clear: Milady could have it all - career, family, and a reputation as a good cook and stylish hostess - if only she knew what products to buy and how to use them.
The idea of shortcuts was so tempting, cookbook writers appropriated it for cookbooks that weren't specific to one manufacturer's products. Columnist Peg Bracken was the biggest name in shortcut cooking, with her phenomenally successful work, The I Hate to Cook Book. Bracken's irreverent approach to getting supper on the table reduced cooking to a level so basic it was really feeding, not cuisine, but hordes of tired housewives embraced it. Relying heavily on combined canned ingredients, Bracken's recipes weren't anything terribly special, but her humorous text was, and so were her wacky recipe names, like "Boddian Sole" for a fish recipe, and "Sweep Steak" for a shortcut pot roast. A stylish, wickedly funny set of illustrations by Hilary Knight, who'd drawn Kay Thompson's immortal Eloise, helped elevate Bracken's book to best-seller status.
All this convenience and time-saving had to be sold to consumers, since the cost of the products that made them possible was higher than cooking from scratch. An industry arose around product and recipe photography; food was no longer merely arranged for photographs, it was styled with infinite care, with every parsley sprig and artfully misted lettuce leaf perfectly placed. Just as important as the way the product itself looked was the dinnerware and flatware it was associated with - the best was none too good for a magazine ad or layout in a national publication. An inexpensive product like My-T-Fine pudding mix was shown being spooned up with a piece of Dansk "Fjord" flatware costing twenty times what the pudding did. "Fjord" was the darling of food stylists for nearly ten years, dishing up instant soup, spreading margarine on toast, laid out next to buffets groaning with sour-cream dips and cocktail wieners on frilled toothpicks. A look at women's and decorating magazines of the Fifties shows the tremendous effort and expense that went into finding just the right modern tabletop for photos - Dansk, Catherineholm, Arabia, Raymor, Iroquois, Midwinter, and Gustavsberg were favored china and cookware for food shots. Flatware could be anything from Gense's "Focus de Luxe", to more mass-market offerings like Oneida's "Accent".
The proliferation of products and shortcuts was so widespread that by the early 1960's, a backlash set in, with serious cooking and cookbooks regaining popularity. Craig Claiborne, food editor of The New York Times, led the way with his New York Times Cookbook, exquisitely propped with Mid-Century tabletop. The book showed things, like Georg Jensen's "Bernadotte" sterling, that not even magazines could afford, since Manhattan retailers vied to get their merchandise into Times, photos and loaned it free of charge. And a Cambridge, Massachusetts woman who'd spent some time in France learning to cook collaborated on a French cookbook, then went solo with a TV show that made Julia Child a household name. While Child's haute cuisine recipes were anything but Mid-Century convenient, her emphasis on high-tech American equipment like KitchenAid mixers and Garland ranges was beloved of male fans, who might never have entered a kitchen, but for the lure of tools as modern and exotic as any sports car.
But there was never really any going back; serious cooking might be done on ceremonial occasions, and for recreation, but convenience food fed, and still feeds, America's families. Today, meal kits are enjoying a renewed popularity, with comfort foods like chicken and dumplings taking the place of Chef Boy-Ar-Dee's jiffy spaghetti. The 1967 debut of Amana's countertop Radarange (r) microwave oven may be the most significant consumer product introduction of the last fifty years; cooking that used to take hours takes minutes today, and many convenience foods are designed with microwaves in mind from the beginning. A whole new take-out industry rides on the coattails of MacDonald's, the company that originated today's standards of fast-food service; everything from prosaic hamburgers to hand-made gourmet fare is available to most consumers nowadays. The inroads made by convenience foods can be summed up in one simple food-industry statistic: only 33% of all meals consumed in the United States today are made from scratch, and the number drops yearly.
The next time you're sitting down to dinner, it probably won't be with all the family around the table, the way sitcom families did it in the Fifties. But you, and every member of the family, can have whatever anyone could want, anytime it's convenient, anywhere you'd like to eat. For once, the product claims of the Mid-Century era have come true, and more than true. The future is here, and it tastes great.
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