Guilty Pleasure #1: Peg Bracken

Exhibit A--Isn't it cute?
Originally uploaded by Trilby.

I've put off talking about Peg Bracken until now. I don't know why, exactly. When it comes to horrifying foodstuffs, Peg is a seminal figure. She's right up there with C. W. Post, Clarence Birdseye, and Lucretia Borgia. How can I have avoided her this long? She's like the proverbial elephant in the room that nobody is talking about.

Now, this is the point where the astute essayist gracefully inserts some useful background information, since not everyone remembers eating "Sweep Steak" (pot roast made with cream of mushroom soup) or saw the advertisements where Peg talked our mothers into buying Bird's Eye frozen vegetables. Lucky stiffs.

Well, Ms Bracken--whose name, funnily enough, sounds a great deal like "brackish," although I believe there is no etymological connection--but I may be wrong--was essentially a humorist who chose to hand out advice to housewives. She was sort of an Erma Bombeck figure, if that's helpful. (But it probably isn't.) Or a Helen Gurley Brown, if Helen had written about the kitchens of respectable married ladies instead of the bedrooms of single girls.

Peg's first best-seller, The I Hate to Cook Book, was published in 1960. Now, for foodies, the 1960s are the crucially important decade. The 1960s were the decade in which Julia Child not only published Mastering the Art of French Cooking, but starred on television as "The French Chef." The sixties were also the decade where food faddism stopped being solely the territory of cranks like Gayelord Hauser and Adelle Davis and started to go a bit more mainstream. And most importantly, it was during the sixties that packaged convenience foods hoisted their flag over the American pantry, witih the result that many Americans had no idea what fresh vegetables tasted like.

Clearly, the forces were in place for a foodie revolution.

So Peg Bracken is the standard holder for the instant, frozen, just-add-water school of mid-century American "cooking" that was about to be subsumed by blanquette de veau, granola, regional Chinese food, Northern Italian cooking, sushi, and sun-dried tomatoes. Her books are loaded with recipes made from canned this, frozen that, and instant whatchamacallit.

You'd think I'd have tarred and feathered her long ago.

Except she's a great writer. And she's funny. I suspect that if I didn't have the post-modern, post-foodie outlook I do have, I'd want to be her when I grow up.

On top of that, her books were illustrated by Hilary Knight, who also illustrated the Eloise books and Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle. So we have to give Peg a break, because even if she was hooked on dried onion soup mix, she had excellent taste in illustrators.

On the other hand, Peg still provides a lot of material for mockery. For example, there's her

1976 Trifle

[which] takes

1 strawberry jelly roll--about a pound
2 small packages strawberry Jell-O
1 cup sherry
1 package cook-type vanilla pudding (not the kind you merely mix)
whipped cream
some maraschino cherries

and preferably a transparent bowl to put it in. Line the bottom of with the jelly roll, cut in one-inch slices. Make the Jell-O according to directions EXCEPT use only half the water it calls for and make up the difference with sherry (Not cooking sherry, which is salty.) Pour it on the jelly-roll slices and mush it together gently, then put it in the refrigerator to set while you cook the pudding. Pour it on the top of the Jell-O and let it set. Before serving, decorate it with the whipped cream and the cherries.

Now, this is not the vilest glop I've ever swirled over my mental palette, but it does seem like a lot of bother, considering the number of instant and store-bought ingredients and the time it would take to assemble them. I mean, why not just buy a bakery cake? For all the time and effort involved, you could make a custard and produce a real trifle. So why bother?

Also, the name is bothersome. It's been a long time since I studied American history, but I believe the American colonists fought the revolution and broke the chains of fealty to England in order to avoid eating English food--you'll notice the first thing we did was stop drinking tea--so why make a "1776 Trifle," when clearly, if we're celebrating the Bicentennial, what is called for is apple pie?

So Peg Bracken, Queen of Culinary Incorrectness, is my guilty pleasure. It's probably shocking--as though Oprah Winfrey had been caught reading The Surrendered Wife under the covers with a flashlight--but there it is.

--P