Peg Bracken — The Cookbook Author Who Aimed to Keep Women Out of the Kitchen
Funny, subversive and sympathetic to the plight of the housewife, Peg Bracken helped women put dinner on the table so they could get back to what they really wanted to be doing.
My mother’s favorite cookbook was the “I Hate to Cook Book” by Peg Bracken, first published in 1960. It was shelved in our kitchen right next to the “Joy of Cooking,” the title of which my mother considered quite the stretch.
I still have my mom’s grey, dog-eared copy of the former, the cover illustrated — by Hilary Knight of “Eloise” fame — with a wary woman glancing up at a levitating chef’s toque. Inside, Bracken, who doesn’t mince words (or garlic for that matter), breezily defines the problem that underpins the purpose of the book: that women had to cook, despite no one asking them if they wanted to cook, much less offering to pay them for their efforts. At that time, cooking was simply part of the deal — packaged with the ring, the diapers and the housework.
The dilemma was a precursor to the “problem that had no name,” which Betty Friedan would go on to characterize in her book, “The Feminine Mystique” just three years later.
Jettisoning the guilt
Peg Bracken was born in Idaho in 1918 and graduated from Antioch College. She married four times, but kept her maiden name throughout her career, unusual for the era. She settled in Portland, Oregon, with her first husband, Mike Smith, where she worked as an advertising copywriter. There (fun fact!) she and a co-worker, Homer Groening, the father of the “Simpsons” creator Matt Groening, wrote a syndicated cartoon called “Phoebe, Get Your Man,” which Bracken later described as a how-to “about a gal eager to get married.” Her humorous take on women’s traditional roles led to her snarky cookbook, written for women who felt more like indentured servants than chefs.
Bracken’s second marriage to the short story writer Robert Lull — with whom she had her only child, Johanna Bracken — broke up when Lull criticized the manuscript for the “I Hate to Cook Book,” telling his wife, and I quote, “It stinks.”
Over the years, Bracken wrote on a variety of so-called “women’s topics” for magazines such as Family Circle, Good Housekeeping, Redbook, and Cosmopolitan, yet she was not one to dispense the conventional advice of the time, such as how to keep your husband happy or decorate on a budget. Rather, she wanted to give women of the 1950s and ‘60s a choice about cooking – and about housework, too. (She followed her cookbook with the “I Hate to Housekeep Book” in 1962.) As Bracken saw it, the question wasn’t about whether women had to do these things, because they did; that choice wasn’t even on the table. The question was whether women had to pretend to be happy about it. “This book,” Bracken wrote in her introduction, “is for those of us who… have learned, through hard experience, that some activities become no less painful through repetition: childbearing, paying taxes, cooking.”
“This book is for those of us who have learned, through hard experience, that some activities become no less painful through repetition: childbearing, paying taxes, cooking.”
Cheerfully subversive, Bracken’s cookbook allowed housewives to let go of guilt they might feel about hating household chores and wifely duties, granting women permission to feel OK about preferring to do just about anything other than cooking.
To that end, Bracken aimed to make cooking faster and easier, making use of all of the new convenient boxed and canned foods that were being developed at the time. As for the recipes, they included a few twists on what was then standard fare: “Hurry Curry,” “Cancan Casserole” (one of many dishes featuring canned tuna), “Sole Survivor,” “Fake Hollandaise,” several varieties of burgers, and “Hootenholler Whisky Cake.”
The idea for the book came from her lunch club of working women (who called themselves “the Hags,”) and who were all, as she wrote in the book, “unusually bored” with what they were cooking, day after day. “We decided to pool our ignorance, tell each other our shabby little secrets, and toss into the pot the recipes we swear by instead of at.”
She selected the easiest, copying them down from the “batter-spattered file cards,” adding a splash of alcohol to some recipes (along with a glass for the cook), and giving them witty names like “Stayabed Stew.” Recipes were grouped by chapter, some ominous, when company was looming for example; and others outrageous —“Desserts: Or People Are Too Fat Anyway.” The goal, as she gleefully wrote, was to gather recipes for women who “would rather put their hands around a dry martini than a wet flounder,” getting them in and out of the kitchen as fast as possible.
The goal was to gather recipes for women who “would rather put their hands around a dry martini than a wet flounder.”
When the manuscript was ready, she sent it off to six male editors, each of whom — like her husband — thought, essentially, that it stank, and rejected it. Finally, a female editor at Harcourt, Brace & Co. commissioned the book with a $338 advance — just over $3500 in today’s dollars — a number, even in a difficult publishing market, that we can fairly say stinks.
Hilary Knight was brought in to do the illustrations: cheerful line drawings including animated canapé plates, dogs enjoying leftovers with a bib and fork, and wary children at a birthday party eyeing a suspicious dish instead of cake. The book went on to sell three million copies — twice as many as Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” (1961) and about the same number as Craig Claiborne’s “The New York Times Cookbook” (also 1961). In 2010, it was reissued in a 50th-anniversary edition, broadening the publicity pitch to “everyone, men and women alike, who wants to get from cooking hour to cocktail hour in as little time as possible. It remains in print today; one of the most successful cookbooks ever published.
Easing women’s panic about entertaining
Perhaps just as important as her recipes, Bracken cracked open various stereotypes of the time: the image of the perfectly content, frilly-aproned housewife, as well as the snobbish, coiffed suburban homemaker who ran around extolling the virtues of another revolutionary of the time, Julia Child.
Bracken counseled women to stop trying to impress their guests with difficult canapés, which she thought were over-rated anyway, especially after they’d been sitting out for a few hours: “They look as though the guests had been walking through them barefoot.”
Bracken’s kind of cheerful resentment permeated her writing, tapping into the frustrations of countless American women at the time. “Never compute the number of meals you have to cook and set before the shining little faces of your loved ones in the course of a lifetime,” Bracken wrote in the introduction to the first chapter, “30 Day-by-Day Entrees” (Subtitle: The Rock Pile). “This only staggers the imagination and raises the blood pressure. The way to face the future is to take it as Alcoholics Anonymous does: one day at a time.”
Bracken also eased the kind of panic housewives might have experienced before their guests arrived — they were being judged after all. But, now, here was Bracken telling her readers, who cared if they’d repeated a dish for their dinner guests, never mind whether they kept a notebook of what they’d served to whom and when. “If you find you are serving the same thing too often to the same people, invite someone else instead. It is much easier to change your friends than your recipes,” Bracken advised in the introduction to her Chapter 6 “Company’s Coming: or Your Back’s to the Wall.”
“If you find you are serving the same thing too often to the same people, invite someone else instead. It is much easier to change your friends than your recipes.”
The famed American chef James Beard, who championed quality ingredients and laborious cooking methods, may have considered Bracken and her cooking-hating ilk, “the enemy camp,” but while he, Julia Child, and countless editors of traditional women’s magazines were coming up with ever more complicated ways to make dinner, Bracken went in the other direction, often combining vegetables, potatoes, meat in one slow-cooking pot. (A stew!)
Emma Haslett
Bracken, who died in 2007 at the age of 89, had little tolerance for people who talked about food all the time. She’d likely have rolled her eyes at tiresome bores like me who have been known to spend hours reminiscing about a lunch in Piemonte a decade earlier. Then again, I enjoy cooking and talking about food because no one ever expected me to feed a family, day after day. Bracken, by contrast, was all about demystifying cooking. She considered it a burdensome necessity, best done behind closed doors. “Actually, your cooking is a personal thing, like your sex life,” Bracken wrote, “and it shouldn't be the subject of general conversation.”
But my mother, for one, was glad that Bracken did bother to make cooking a topic of conversation — despite what she’d written about keeping silent about it. Bracken’s generous and bold proclamation of the “housewife’s problem,” rebellious yet laden with sympathy and wit, provided some liberating solutions while making women laugh. And why not? More than six decades on, the jokes hold up, as does her recipe for “Skid Road Stroganoff,” which instructs the cook to: “Add the flour, salt, paprika and mushrooms, stir, and let it cook five minutes while you light a cigarette and stare sullenly at the sink.”
Who can’t get behind a piece of advice like that?
