If you can forgive your
Poet Laureate a lapse into prose, I want to introduce--or, if you're lucky,
re-introduce--you to Peg Bracken, one of my very best friends-I've-never-met.
Bracken, born in 1918, is best known for The
I Hate to Cook Book (Harcourt Brace, 1960) and its sequels, which helped
a generation of women spend less time on kitchen drudgery and presumably more
time collapsed on their low-slung mid-century couches, overcome by paroxysms
of laughter.
Her wit has rightly been called "as
dry as a gin martini and as sharp as a paring knife," but in counterpoint
to that piquancy is a warmth and thoughtfulness that makes her writing a comfort
as well as a tonic.
Bracken's work is as refreshing now as it was in the days
when the Eames's roamed the earth, and luckily there's a lot of it, from the
Spring Cleaning classic I
Hate to Housekeep Book to the sunset of On
Getting Old for the First Time. A dear friend just gifted me
with The
I Hate to Cook Almanack: A Book of Days, which I'm finding every bit
as inspirational as those dreadful Daily Reflections sorts of books, and more
practical too, in a can-and-a-garnish kind of way.
Even if you are the sort of
apartment dweller who keeps sweaters in your oven and a cleaning service's number
in your speed dial, this is stuff worthy of its place on your CADO system shelves,
right next to Laurie Colwin and MFK Fisher, the top talents in the literature
of the domestic.
To convice you that a suburban
homemaker-cum-humorist of a certain age is relevant to ironic, minimalist, urban
DINKs like (some of) us, here's a taste:
Some people collect paperweights, or pre-Columbian figures, or old masters,
or young mistresses, or tombstone rubbings, or five-minute recipes, or any
of a thousand other things including bruises, most of them satisfying, depending
on the genes and the bank account and where the heart lies.
My own collection is sunrises; and I find that they have their advantages.
Sunrises are usually handsome, they can't possibly be dusted, and they take
only a little room, so long as it has a window to see them from. Moreover,
I can't give way to the urge to show off my collection to my friends. I
can only talk about it, and they needn't listen.
(
I Didn't Come Here to Argue, "The Sunrise Collector: What
to Do till Your Horoscope Gets There", via
Wikiquote)
SGH
Thanks for reminding me of Peg Bracken. My mom was one of those who laughed over The I Hate to Cook Book and I loved it too. You've risen more in my esteem (if that's possible) by mentioned two of my other favorite writers, M.F.K. Fisher and Laurie Colwin.
Laurie Colwin IS my favorite writer. I found my first book by her when I was 13 and now have all of them. They're not first editions - or even hardbacks - but they are the books I treasure the most out of the 700+ that I have on my shelves. She died unexpectedly young, so there will be no more books or stories with her singularly exquisite phrasing.
Colwin's two non-fiction works will surely be of interest to AT'ers - Home Cooking and More Home Cooking. I don't even cook but I do love the books.
Her voice, as it pours through the page, has such warmth and resonance, and it brings me comfort to this day. Get Home Cooking as a treat for yourself, and you'll want to read more of her work.
More on Laurie Colwin -
Laurie Colwin - an introduction
www.scils.rutgers.edu/~esmith/colwin.html
Colwin's Stories Can Feed the Soul
www.scils.rutgers.edu/~esmith/pate.html
peg bracken helped make the boiling bag of frozen vegetables a big success by doing tv commercials for birds eye. this was pre micro wave and it seemed the most modern way to cook at the time. each tv spot began by peg saying, i'm peg bracken and i wrote the i hate to cook book. brilliant, i'm sure many copies of the book were sold because of the commercial.
my mother and I LOVE her books! I got the impression that she was a pre-feminine mystique feminist trying to make the most of being stuck in the suburbs under the barbed and funny comments
Peg Bracken delivers reason and common sense, and a great deal of philosophy with her recipes. She speaks to people of the largeness of life itself as she downplays the everlasting sameness and drudgery in the role of cook in chapters containing recipes and in the *I Hate to Cook Book*. That irony gave her a unique place as an advice writer for the domestic/homemaker and traveler.
She does applaud the expertise of professional chefs and their diligence in *But I Wouldn't Have Missed It for the World*. It is the quest and art that she applauds, not merely the function, and she applies this as well to many levels and layers of her own experiences.
Yes, Peg Bracken had great advice about housekeeping and cooking, and maybe she was a proto-feminist as well (all right, she was!), but her most obvious talent was her prose style. She wrote as well as Edmund White or Mary McCarthy--witty, well balanced sentences, full of sophisticated, self-deprecating humor. She let her readers in on the joke, and addressed an audience of equals, always. Rhetoricians should study her for a fabulous example of "good ethos," and without even knowing I was learning to write while reading her books, I absorbed a tremendous body of information about self-presentation, timing, and wit.