Peg Bracken fans (myself among them) are delighted with the 50th-anniversary re-issue of “The I Hate To Cook Book.” Not that we diehards need a new edition; we already have at least two dog-eared copies of the original lying around.
The title of this book is only half jest — Bracken, who died in 2007, didn’t exactly despise cooking. No one could produce such a smart set of recipes without enjoying her time behind the stove. But she understood that cooking was not the gauzy, Vaseline-lens exercise in domestic bliss that the television commercials of the time suggested. Then, as now, day-to-day cooking was a grind. You want what you cook to taste good and be nutritious and make your family happy, but you don’t want to sacrifice the rest of your life — or your sense of humor.
Here is a recipe from Chapter 9, titled “Desserts, or people are too fat anyway.”
Bracken wrote: “Once, in an elevator en route to my office, I was eating some spice cookies which I had made from a recipe in my big fat cookbook. I gave one to the Elevator Lady, and she tasted it. ‘My,’ she said reflectively, ‘I can sure make a better spice cooky than that.’ So she brought me her recipe, and she was quite right.”
Elevator Lady Spice Cookies
From “The I Hate to Cook Book,” by Peg Bracken with a new foreward by Jo Bracken (Grand Central). Makes about 3 dozen.
Mix together:
3/4 cup shortening
1 cup sugar
1 egg, unbeaten
1/4 cup molasses
Then sift together and stir in:
2 cups flour
2 teaspoons baking soda (bakers above 5,000 feet might want to reduce this slightly)
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon cinnamon
3/4 teaspoon powdered cloves
3/4 teaspoon powdered ginger
Now mix it all together and form it into walnut-sized balls. Put them 2 inches apart on a greased cooky sheet, and bake at 375 degrees for 10 to 12 minutes.
