The men who ruled the world in the late 1950s, or at least six of the men who ruled publishing, rejected Peg Bracken’s manuscript, “The I Hate to Cook Book.” It would never sell, they told her, because “women regard cooking as sacred.” It took a female editor at Harcourt Brace to look at the hundreds of easy-to-follow recipes wittily pitched at the indentured housewife and say, “Hallelujah!” Since its publication in 1960, Bracken’s iconic book, which celebrated the speedy virtues of canned cream-of-mushroom soup and chicken bouillon cubes, has sold more than three million copies. That helped lift her spirits, her daughter, Jo Bracken, said, about her $338 advance.

Bracken had the nerve to say then what so many women felt: They liked cooking fine, as long as they didn’t have to cook all the time. There was scant takeout in postwar America, no prepared foods, certainly no men rushing home from the office to don an apron and help out. The job of a wife and mother was to put food on the table, three times a day, seven days a week. And not just like it — live for it.

" Along with a co-worker, Homer Groening, the father of the “Simpsons” creator Matt Groening, she wrote a syndicated cartoon called “Phoebe, Get Your Man,” which she later described as a how-to “about a gal eager to get married.”"
- bill 12-30-2007 6:45 pm [add a comment]