We associate these recipes with the 1950s and 1960s, but they're actually part of a larger trend of mind-boggling foods. Laura Shapiro's Perfection Salad examines the rise of the domestic science movement in the late 19th century, which was spurred by well-intentioned reformers of poor immigrants and by female doctors who couldn't find employment elsewhere: their recipes were supposed to provide the proper amount of nutrition without being excessively tasty, as eating for pleasure was frowned upon. Perfection Salad is itself one of those jellied salads, which were invented around the turn of the century.

But going forward to the post-war period, there's Shapiro's Something From the Oven. She compared the professional cookbooks to those self-printed and -bound church cookbooks and found that many women were still making "real" meals from scratch and were opposed to the mixes and frozen foods that were the end result of the domestic science's movement to standardize cooking.