Perfection Salad
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“So, with the zeal so often found in educated, middle-class women born with more brains and energy than they were supposed to possess, they set about changing what America ate and why they ate it.”

From Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century by Laura Shapiro, a social history of the rise of “domestic science” and home economics in the early 1900s.

Perfection salad is, by the way, a gelatin mold containing cabbage, celery, green pepper, pimiento, and olives. Ick. This was an era where anything in gelatin counted as salad and marshmallow was an appropriate garnish for almost any fruit or vegetable.