The I Hate to Cook Book (2 page)

S
ome women, it is said, like to cook.

This book is not for them.

This book is for those of us who hate to, who have learned, through hard experience, that some activities become no less painful through repetition: childbearing, paying taxes, cooking. This book is for those of us who want to fold our big dishwater hands around a dry Martini instead of a wet flounder, come the end of a long day.

When you hate to cook, life is full of jolts: for instance, those ubiquitous full-color double-page spreads picturing what to serve on those little evenings when you want to take it easy. You’re flabbergasted. You wouldn’t cook that much food for a combination Thanksgiving and Irish wake. (Equally discouraging is the way the china always matches the food. You wonder what you’re doing wrong; because whether you’re serving fried oysters or baked beans, your plates always have the same old blue rims.)

And you’re flattened by articles that begin “Of course you know that basil and tomatoes are soulmates, but
did
you know…” They can stop right there, because the fact is, you didn’t know any such thing. It is a still sadder fact that, having been told, you
won’t remember. When you hate to cook, your mind doesn’t retain items of this nature.

Oh, you keep on buying cookbooks, the way a homely woman buys hat after hat in the vain hope that this one will do it. And, heaven knows, the choice is wide, from the haute cuisine cookbook that is so haute it requires a pressurized kitchen, through
Aunt Em’s Down-on-the-Farm Book of Cornmeal Cookery,
all the way to the exotic little foreign recipe book, which is the last thing you want when you hate to cook. Not only are there pleasanter ways to shorten your life, but, more important, your husband won’t take you out for enchiladas if he knows he can get good enchiladas at home.

Finally, and worst of all, there are the big fat cookbooks that tell you everything about everything. For one thing, they contain too many recipes. Just look at all the things you can do with a chop, and aren’t about to! What you want is just one little old dependable thing you can do with a chop besides broil it, that’s all.

Also, they’re always telling you what any chucklehead would know. “Place dough in pan to rise and cover with a clean cloth,” they say. What did they
think
you’d cover it with? This terrible explicitness also leads them to say, “Pour mixture into 2½ qt. saucepan.” Well, when you hate to cook, you’ve no idea what size your saucepans are, except big, middle-sized, and little. Indeed, the less attention called to your cooking equipment the better. You buy the minimum, grudgingly, and you use it till it falls apart. If anyone gives you a shiny new cooking utensil for Christmas, you’re as thrilled as a janitor with a new bucket of cleaning solvent.

But perhaps the most depressing thing about those big fat cookbooks is that you have to have one. Maybe your mother-in-law gives you a bushel of peppers or a pumpkin, and you must make piccalilli or a pumpkin pie. Well, there’s nothing to do but
look it up in your big fat cookbook, that’s all. But you certainly can train yourself not to look at anything else.

Now, about this book: its genesis was a luncheon with several good friends, all of whom hate to cook but have to. At that time, we were all unusually bored with what we had been cooking and, therefore, eating. For variety’s sake, we decided to pool our ignorance, tell each other our shabby little secrets, and toss into the pot the recipes we swear by instead of at.

This is an extension of the result. It is seasoned with a good sprinkling of Household Hints (the crème de la crème of a private collection of 3,744). Mainly, though, it contains around two hundred recipes.

These recipes have not been tested by experts. That is why they are valuable. Experts in their sunny spotless test kitchens can make anything taste good. But even
we
can make these taste good.

Their exact origins are misty. Some of them, to be sure, were off-the-cuff inventions of women who hate to cook and whose motivating idea was to get in and out of that kitchen fast. But most of them were copied from batter-spattered file cards belonging to people who had copied them from other batter-spattered file cards, because a good recipe travels as far, and fast, as a good joke. So, in most cases, it is impossible to credit the prime source, although the prime source was probably a good cook who liked to.

Bless her, and bow low. We who hate to cook have a respect bordering on awe for the Good Cooks Who Like to Cook—those brave, energetic, imaginative people who can, and do, cook a prime rib and a Yorkshire pudding in a one-oven stove, for instance, and who are not frightened by rotisseries. But we’ve little to say to them, really, except, “Invite us over often, please.” And stay away from our husbands.

And, if you hate to cook, expect no actual magic here, no
Escoffier creations you can build in five minutes or even ten. But you might well find some recipes you’ll like—to use the word loosely—to make now and again. Perhaps you’ll even find some you will take to your heart. At the very least, you should find a hands-across-the-pantry feeling coming right through the ink. It is always nice to know you are not alone.

OR THE ROCK PILE

N
ever doubt it, there’s a long, long trail a-winding when you hate to cook. And never compute the number of meals you have to cook and set before the shining little faces of your loved ones in the course of a lifetime. This only staggers the imagination and raises the blood pressure. The way to face the future is to take it as Alcoholics Anonymous does: one day at a time.

This chapter contains recipes for thirty everyday main dishes. Some of them aren’t very exciting. In fact, some are pretty dull—just as a lot of recipes are in the other cookbooks, but the other cookbooks don’t admit it. And some of the recipes in this chapter
are so—well, so simple—that they’d have any Cordon Bleu chef pounding his head with his omelet pan.

The thing about these recipes is this: they’re
here!
You don’t have to ferret them out of your huge, jolly, encyclopedic cookbook.
And they’ll get you through the month!
After all, who needs more than thirty recipes? You already have your own standard routines: the steak-roast-and-chop bit, the frozen-TV-dinner bit, the doctored-up-canned-beans bit, not to mention your mother’s favorite recipe for Carrot-Tapioca-Meat Loaf Surprise. And if somebody waves a dinner invitation, you leap like a trout to the fly. So, with these additional thirty, you’re in.

Now, the points that are special about them are these:

1. They all taste good.

2. They are all easy to make.

3. Each has been approved by representative women who hate to cook, and not one calls for a bouquet garni.

4. Some do two jobs. They involve either meat, fish, or chicken plus a vegetable, so all you need is bread of some kind, or meat, fish, or chicken and a starch, so all you need is a vegetable.

5. Many can be made ahead. (Of course, you won’t do this very often. When you hate to cook, you keep postponing it. But once in a while, you wake up full of fire. This is the time when you can lump dinner right in with the other dirty work you do around the house in the morning, and get it
done
.)

6. Most of them are quick to fix. Actually, you can’t trust the word “quick” any more. Some cookbooks, when they say “quick,” mean that you needn’t grind your own flour. Others mean that you can pour a can of tomato soup over a veal chop and call it Scallopini.

We must face facts. If a recipe calls for eleven different chopped ingredients and cream sauce and a cheese-topped meringue, you
don’t call it “quick” if you hate to cook. On the other hand, that tomato soup on the veal chop will taste remarkably like tomato soup on a veal chop, and you can’t call it Scallopini.

The really jet-propelled recipes in this book are in Chapter 11. But here we take a middle-of-the-road path. Thawing and/or cooking time isn’t what bothers you most when you hate to cook; it’s preparation time, which, in these recipes, is mercifully short. For instance

     SWEEP STEAK     

4–6 servings

(So called because a couple of seasons ago, this recipe swept the country.)

2- to 3-pound round steak or pot roast

both 1-ounce packets in the package of onion-soup mix

Put the meat on a sheet of aluminum foil big enough to wrap it in. Sprinkle the onion-soup mix on top of it, fold the foil, airtight, around it, put it in a baking pan, and bake it at 300˚ for three hours or 200˚ for nine hours, it really doesn’t matter. You can open it up, if you like, an hour or so before it’s done, and surround it with potatoes and carrots.

     STAYABED STEW     

5–6 servings

(This is for those days when you’re
en
negligee,
en
bed, with a murder story and a box of bonbons, or possibly a good case of flu.)

Mix these things up in a casserole dish that has a tight lid

2 pounds beef stew meat, cubed

1 can of little tiny peas
*

1 cup of sliced carrots