A Recipe for Dissent: On Peg Bracken’s The I Hate to Cook Book

Harcourt’s 1960 publication of The I Hate to Cook Book cemented Peg Bracken’s reputation as mid-twentieth century America’s most irreverent cook, if not its most popular. At the same time, it marked a watershed moment in American culinary history. The book defined a generation of cooks, not because its recipes were out of the ordinary, but because it exposed an endemic, though unspoken, suffering that many suburban women felt when they walked into their kitchens.

The premise of the work was simple: Bracken, then a copy-writer for an advertising agency, filled the manual with easy-to-make recipes that encouraged women to embrace processed, packaged, and premade foods in order to make their domestic situations more manageable and their lives more fulfilled.  These recipes took whimsical and playful names and featured even more colorful descriptions.

Unlike many of her contemporaries, Bracken emphasized that cooking did not define a woman or her status in the household. More than anything, she hoped to convince her readers that they need not worry about their conflicted feelings about cooking.  Apart from The I Hate to Cook Book, culinary treatises of the era—nearly all aimed at white, middle-class women—emphasized a version of womanhood centered on a moral, even natural, impulse that led them to their Vulcan cook tops or Whirlpool ovens.  Thumb through any volume of Good Housekeeping magazine or pick up a copy of Poppy Cannon’s 1954 The Bride’s Cookbook and you’ll notice little ambiguity about the message these documents were trying to convey: women who disliked cooking were not true women. 

Bracken tackled such a message with a firm but funny rebuttal, asking women who found the moral duties tied to the era’s casseroles to seek shelter and solace in her work. She did so with a kind-hearted, self-depreciating wit that was the signature of her career’s written work.  As she famously remarked in the book’s opening: “Some women, it is said, like to cook….  This book is not for them.”

With a humor that penetrated the most depressing crevices of a suburban womanhood, the book continued course by course, meal by meal, with chapters that ranged from “Canapes and Heartburn Specials, or Who Started this Business?” to “Company’s Coming or Your Back’s to the Wall.”  Her directions for Skid Row Stroganoff—“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.”—remains as memorable a gastronomic passage as anything from the celebrated works of M.F.K. Fischer or Jean Brillat-Savarin.  To accommodate the popularity of the faux foreign dishes of the period, she included the chapter “The Regional or Foreign Specialty, or I Guess You Always Lose a Little in the Translation.” After noting that people are “too fat for dessert anyway,” she follows up with recipes for I Hate Cookies and Immediate Fudge Cake.

Although Bracken was in some ways the anti-cook of her era, it would be a mistake to suggest that she hated food. Far from it. Bracken’s view on food was more complicated than she let on in many of her writings.  Indeed, a close reading of The I Hate to Cook Book reveals a woman whose love for food was obvious, if not tempered by the serving of patriarchy that came with every helping of pot roast. As she noted in an especially candid interview in the late 1990’s, “It's the dailiness of it, particularly if you're a woman… At the end of the day, when she ought to be sipping a cocktail and watching whatever she's watching or reading, she's got to be out there doing that kitchen minuet.”  While simple, many of Bracken’s recipes exhibited a refined sense of taste and nuanced understanding of the properties of food.

Few scholars recognize that cookbooks function as powerful social commentary, but Bracken’s book was just that. Three years before Betty Friedan ignited a reawakening of the feminist impulse in America with the publication of The Feminine Mystique, Bracken spoke with candor to millions of American women who were frustrated with the domestic—and thus culinary—status quo. Bracken’s humorous reassurances offered many women an outlet that paradoxically drew on many of the extant culinary structures to skewer the type of femininity that these structures supported. Her book was revolutionary.  In the process, it transformed the ways in which many women conceived their place not only in the kitchen, but in American culture.