I picked this book up on a whim at at chuch rummage sale, and I am so glad I did. The recipes may be somewhat dated, though familiar to anyone who grew up in the 50's and 60's when cream of mushroom soup was in EVERYTHING, but some of them are still useable.

However, the recipes are NOT the reason you must read this book. Or rather, COOKING the recipes is not the reason to read it. You must read this book for the joy of spending a few hours with a woman who would be anyone's ideal of the witty best friend. Peg Bracken takes us back to a time when married women were housewives first and foremost, no matter what else they might happen to have going on upstairs, and if you were the housewife, you were the cook. Period. As she says:

"We don't get our creative kicks from adding an egg, we get them from painting pictures or bathrooms, or potting geraniums or babies, or writing stories or ammendments, or, possibly, engaging in some interesting type of psycho-neuro-chemical research like seeing if, perhaps, we can replace colloids with sulphates. And we simply love ready-mixes."

In fact, this little cookbook functions as a sort of subversive feminist broadside, but with a wicked sense of humor. From the recipe for Skid Road Stroganoff: "Add the flour, salt, paprika, and mushrooms, stir, and let it cook five minutes while you light a cigarette and stare sullenly at the sink." Another recipe is called "Something Else To Do With New Potatoes Besides Boiling Them And Rolling Them In Melted Butter and Parsley" The book is a joy from start to finish. I'm going to start looking for copies to give to my friends. ( )

When I was first married in the mid '60's, a wonderful family friend gave me this book because she knew cooking was not my passion. It was a life saver for me and many of the recipes I used even after I became a competent cook who actually enjoyed it. ( )

Funny. Simple recipes seem easy to follow, though I haven't tried many. ( )

Why cook and serve nourishing, good-tasting meals when you can throw together quick slop from a can? Why appreciate world cuisines when you can make horrifying approximations using processed ingredients? This book makes me glad I missed the 1960s entirely and didn't think about what I was eating until the mid-1980s.

Even though I love to cook, this is still very funny and sometimes useful. I inherited it from my mother who did, indeed, see cooking as a necessary evil. Amusing chapter headings tell you what to expect, such as "Company's Coming, or: Your Back's to the Wall!"