In Memory of the Life and Work of Gina Feldberg

Gina Feldberg – as a mentor, friend, and PhD supervisor – shaped my first book, Food Will Win the War: The Politics, Culture and Science of Food on Canada's Home Front, in countless ways. But it was her passion for cookbooks and the stories they tell about women's lives that pushed me to read literally thousands of recipes and dozens of cookbooks during the course of my research. It was also probably Gina's influence that led me to conclude that that popular food writer, radio personality, and wartime food salvage spokeswoman Kate Aitken's 1945 recipe for "Green Salad" best sums up the tastes, anxieties, and culinary practices of Canadian home cooks during this period. It was a recipe, after all, that Gina was perhaps the foremost expert on – having no doubt seen dozens of variations on this theme in the course of her research – and Aitken's instructions begin like many salad recipes of the period:

Soak the gelatine in the cold water for 5 minutes; [and] dissolve in the boiling water. Add enough vegetable coloring to tint a delicate green; add the salt, lemon juice and rind. Let chill till the mixture begins to set; [then] add the mayonnaise, pickle and horseradish. Beat till fluffy; [and] pour into an oiled ring mould.

Clearly, the only thing green about Aitken's salad is the food colouring and pickles. But a quick look through the rest of her Canadian Cook Book only provides further confirmation that salad meant something very different in 1945 than it does today. Of the 26 salad recipes provided by Aitken, only one includes lettuce as an ingredient, while a whopping 16 contain gelatine. And, in fact, Aitken was not alone. Most salad sections in Canadian cookbooks from the 1940s follow a similar pattern. The mixtures of leafy greens and chopped vegetables that are now more commonly accepted as "salad" are largely absent or, at the very least, are greatly outnumbered by their sweet and savoury gelatine-based counterparts.

It is this transformation – from the quivering, jellied salads of the early postwar years to the more familiar crisp green salads that had almost completely replaced them by the 1970s – that was at the heart of a research project that Gina began working on in the early 2000s and was in the early stages of writing prior to her 2006 diagnosis with multiple myeloma. According to Gina, this project started with the rather simple question: Why did Americans – particularly American women – begin eating so much lettuce salad in the 1960s and 1970s? More than simply a culinary history, it was conceived as an ambitious project that built on her earlier work on the social history of tuberculosis by examining the intersections between food, identity, and popular ideas about health and gender during the postwar years. And, although I am not completely certain, I have a feeling that this line of research also may have stemmed from Gina's own personal dislike for lettuce salads. I distinctly remember that, at one of our first meetings to discuss the possibility of Gina supervising my MA research on popular nutrition advice, she delicately broached the topic of my feelings towards salad. We quickly bonded over our mutual disdain for iceberg lettuce and – given the barely half formed ideas about my research direction at the time – I believe that it was probably the salad portion of our conversation that solidified what would become the most important relationship of my academic career.

As I would later learn through countless subsequent conversations, Gina's approach to the history of salad began with what her good friend Kate McPherson has described as the kind of "challenging, difficult, and sometimes unpopular questions" that characterized her research more generally. In the past, these had included the questions such as the following: Did medically administered "rape kits" result in better prosecutions at sexual assault trials? Did legal proscriptions against commercialized reproductive technology necessarily protect female consumers and providers of those technologies? Did "women's" hospitals offer dramatically different care than "general" hospitals? And, just as her answers to these questions...