Of the countless cookbook authors of the past 50 years, there is no one who mastered the balance of good recipes and a great voice than Peg Bracken, author of the seminal 1950 collection “The I Hate to Cook Book.”
Bracken, who died in 2007 at age 89, had little time for the highfalutin, picture-perfect housewifery that characterized America’s home-cooking culture of the postwar era. She admitted to loving food, but, as her obituary in the London Times proclaimed, “not if it was at the expense of time for reading, smoking or drinking martinis.”
Her recipes were conversational and realistic, building in time for finding pots and pans, offering easy-outs for difficult dishes, and providing ways to use up every single ingredient lurking in your larder, no matter how basic.
(One of the most memorable recipes is for Coca-Chicken, which reads this way: “Salt and pepper a flock of chicken pieces — 2 or 3 pounds — or a whole chicken, cut up. In a casserole, warm 3/4 cup ketchup, add the chicken, and pour one cup of Coca-Cola over the whole thing. Cover it, cook it for half an hour. Then uncover it, cook for another half- hour, and it’s done. And don’t knock it till you’ve tried it. Then you can, but fair’s fair.”)
What’s great about the book, and its follow-ups, is that in amongst all the snarkiness, Bracken shows off an eminent love of, and appreciation for, food, as in the following recipe.
French Beef Casserole
From “The Compleat I Hate to Cook Book,” by Peg Bracken, who writes: “This recipe looks pretty disastrous at first, with all those ingredients and instructions. But actually it’s only a glorified stew which tastes rather exotic and looks quite beautiful. You can do it all the day before, too. Just be sure you remember to take it out of the refrigerator an hour before you reheat it so the casserole dish won’t crack.” Serves 4-6 with leftovers.
Ingredients
1 1/2 pounds lean beef shoulder, cut in 1 1/2-inch cubes
About 5 tablespoons flour, divided
Generous pinch salt
Pinch pepper
1 can tomatoes (about 15 ounces), drained, juice reserved
4 tablespoons butter, bacon fat, or a mix
1 pound carrots cut in 2-inch chunks
2 green peppers cut in squares
1 1/2 cups sliced celery
3 tablespoons minced onion
1 teaspoon dried basil
1 teaspoon dried tarragon
6-ounce can mushrooms, drained, juice reserved
Directions
Brown the meat — which you’ve sprinkled with salt, pepper, and 1 1/2 tablespoons of flour—in 2 tablespoons of butter and 2 tablespoons of bacon fat, or 4 tablespoons of butter. Put it in a big casserole. Put 3 tablespoons of flour in the pan with the remaining fat, and add the juice from the tomatoes and mushrooms. Stir it till it thickens, then pour it over the meat, add the drained tomatoes, and cover it. Bake for an hour at 325 degrees take it out and add all the other vegetables, plus minced onion, crumbled tarragon and basil leaves. Re-cover it, bake an hour longer at 325, cool it, add the mushrooms, and refrigerate.
To serve it, heat the oven to 350 and bake the casserole, covered, for 45 minutes. Put the rolls in to heat as you sit down to your salad, and everything should go along sweet as a May morning.
But don’t be unduly upset if it doesn’t! If you forget to serve the rolls for a bit, it’s actually no great matter, and if your dinner is so dull that your guests have time to wonder where the rolls are, nothing is going to help it much anyway.
