A Classic Cookbook Returns, Canned Soup and All

By Julie Bosman

Published: August 18, 2010 - New York Times

Fifty years after the original publication of “The I Hate to Cook Book,” it has been updated, revised and re-released this summer, its publisher hoping to find a new generation of homemakers who appreciate the processed-cheese, canned-soup and alcohol-laden recipes that made it beloved among several million rebellious housewives in the 1960s and 1970s.

The 184-recipe book, by Peg Bracken, was written with a premise that was then considered heretical: cooking is not joyful, and it should be done as quickly as possible, preferably with ingredients readily available in the cupboard.

Its pages are filled with creations like Sole Survivor (baked fish fillets with shrimp sprinkled on top), Saturday Chicken (chicken, paprika, cream soup) and Fake Hollandaise sauce (mayonnaise, milk, salt, pepper and lemon juice, accompanied by a chorus of “Gloomy Sunday” in the background).

So far, sales of the new edition have been modest — about 24,000 copies are in print — but it seems to have found an audience among women yet to embrace the organic, clean-food movement.

“I cook as a necessity because I have two children and a husband,” said Jenn Foreacre, a 26-year-old freelance writer and stay-at-home mother in Lancaster, Pa. “I thought, wow, this is somebody just like me. It made me feel not so alone in my dislike for cooking.”

In one typically breezy aside, as Ms. Bracken argued in favor of using simple cake mixes instead of baking from scratch, she wrote, “We don’t get our creative kicks from adding an egg, we get them from painting pictures or bathrooms, or potting geraniums or babies, or writing stories or amendments, or, possibly, engaging in some interesting type of psycho-neurochemical research like seeing if, perhaps, we can replace colloids with sulphates. And we simply love ready-mixes.”
Bosman's full story at NYT.