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Rating: 
Summary: A fun look at American food fads from the 20s to the 80s
Review: "Fashionable Food" serves up the most entertaining overview of mealtime in America since Jane and Michael Stern's "Square Meals." From tasty to trendy to just plain oddball, if it was embraced by the guardians of hearth and home, you'll find it here.
Relive the era of Prohibition with "Flapper Pudding", explore new frontiers of soup with a 1930s "Mystery Cake" courtesy of Campbell's, endure the restrictions of the 40s war years - and celebrate the glory of the "goodbye to rations" post-war era. Go swank with a 50s Cocktail Party or sophisticated as you explore 60s gourmet cuisine. Get back to earth with 70s health food and expand your palate with the regional foods of the 80s.
Sprinkled throughout are tantalizing tidbits from re-visiting old friends like The Mystery Chef and Sheila Hibben to rediscovering the wonders of Chinese and Hawaiian cuisine when they were new and exotic. From crockpots to fondues; from Betty Crocker to Alice Waters; from Trader Vic's to Elmer Fudpucker's; if it's part of our gastronomical history, it's part of this entertaining hodgepodge of American food.
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting but Inconsistent
Review: ?Fashionable Foods" comprises a recounting of food fads from the 1920's to the 1990's. Author Sylvia Lovegren discusses the trends and includes recipes from each decade. I rather enjoyed this book; however, I find myself unable to award more than 3 stars. The idea is intriguing as is much of the content, but the book is rather inconsistently developed.
The overarching theme of the book is (seemingly) "how America cooks." However, the author swerves from highlighting absurd recipes (Banana and Popcorn Salad in the 1920's) to typical at-home foods (meatloaf in the 1980's) to haute cuisine served in fine restaurants (Ciopino in the 1970's). Covering a wide array of food trends is fine, but it feels jumbled. The formatting adds to the confusion: finding the breaks between recipes and text is very difficult ? everything simply runs together.
The inclusion of recipes is also somewhat haphazard and seems dictated primarily by the author?s ability to easily procure reprint permission. Thus, some of the food trends that are discussed do not include representative recipes. By and large, recipes are presented as they would have been made during the time period, with minor adjustments for out-of-date products. Nevertheless, some of the recipes are randomly updated to decrease fat and sugar content for a ?90?s taste.? That would seem to defeat the purpose of the book ? i.e., to serve as a historical document of sorts. Also, some of the recipes haven't been tested by the author ? so she recommends that they not be used.
Overall, the book is rather confusing because of these inconsistencies. I really wanted to like ?Fashionable Foods? more than I do. Recommended with reservations for readers looking for an entertaining read about foods, not a cookbook.
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