01/13/2026
Any of you tired of cooking night after night?
After planning, shopping for, and preparing well over 14,000 evening meals in my adult life for my husband and children so far, I understand completely the premise of this book. (I Hate To Cook Book) I have often said, “I’m not Betty Crocker.” I don’t really like to cook.
As my kids got older, they helped in the kitchen at mealtimes. Chopping, setting the table, loading the dishwasher. When my grown kids come home now, we cook together. My husband grocery shops and makes meals too. It’s more communal, and that makes it enjoyable.
Recently, I was asked to join a group of women (at least 20 years younger than me) to meal prep dinners for the freezer so evenings could go smoother, easier. I said yes. I’ve done this before. I’ve brought food to women who are ill, grieving, have new babies, or just feel like they can’t keep up. I get it. I understand. Simple recipes and mealtime hacks have gotten me through those years when I felt I couldn’t keep up.
I once bought a cookbook called “Once a Month Cooking” to put a month’s worth of meals in the freezer in one day. I felt like I needed a vacation after that day, not sure all that concentrated effort was worth it.
It seemed harder to cook when the kids left home and I was cooking for just two, reducing recipes - giving away half a cake or salad because it was just too much for us to finish. Widows tell me it’s harder even to cook for one. It’s just not fun.
I know we should be grateful that there is food on the table, or people to share a meal with. Next time you have supper, kiss the cook!
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America, 1960. Women were supposed to love cooking. It was meant to be their joy, their fulfillment, their sacred duty.
If you didn't love it? That was your failing. Your shameful secret.
Peg Bracken had a different idea.
She was 42, working as an advertising copywriter in Portland, Oregon. She had a daughter, a job, and absolutely no desire to spend hours every evening making elaborate dinners.
Neither did her friends.
They called themselves "The Hags." A group of working women who met for lunch and commiserated about the tyranny of the dinner hour. While magazines insisted cooking was women's profound pleasure, The Hags knew the truth: sometimes cooking was just a tedious chore you had to get done so you could do literally anything else.
One day, they decided to stop pretending.
"We pooled our ignorance," Bracken explained, "told each other our shabby little secrets, and tossed into the pot the recipes we swear by."
Not impressive recipes they'd never make. Not complicated dishes from fancy cookbooks. The actual recipes they used when they were tired, when time was short, when they just needed dinner on the table.
Bracken started writing them down.
She added commentary—sarcastic, honest, funny. Instructions like: "Brown the garlic, onion, and crumbled beef in the oil. 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."
She called it The I Hate to Cook Book.
Her husband read the manuscript. His assessment: "It stinks."
She submitted it to publishers anyway.
Six male editors rejected it. They all gave her the same reason: women regard cooking as sacred. Women would be offended by a book that suggested cooking could be anything other than a joy and a privilege.
Bracken kept trying.
Finally, a female editor at Harcourt Brace saw what the men had missed. She recognized what Bracken was actually doing: not insulting cooking, but validating an experience millions of women had but were trained to hide.
The I Hate to Cook Book was published in 1960, illustrated by Hilary Knight, the artist behind the Eloise books.
The opening line was a declaration: "Some women, it is said, like to cook. This book is not for them."
Bracken made her audience explicit. This wasn't for domestic goddesses. This was for women who had other things they'd rather be doing. Women who wanted to "fold our big dishwater hands around a dry Martini instead of a wet flounder, come the end of a long day."
The book's structure was subversive through honesty. A chapter on vegetables: "This Side of Beriberi"—acknowledging vegetables were nutritionally necessary but rarely exciting. Her main dishes: "The Rock Pile"—a reference to prison labor.
Recipe names were deliberately unpretentious: "Stayabed Stew" for days when you're "en negligee, en bed, with a murder story." "Spuds O'Grotten" for mashed potatoes with cheese.
The recipes relied on shortcuts: canned soups, frozen vegetables, prepared foods. This wasn't about impressing anyone. This was about getting dinner done.
What Bracken understood—what male editors and her own husband hadn't—was that she wasn't writing a cookbook at all.
She was writing recognition.
The book became a phenomenon. It sold three million copies. Women bought it for themselves and gave it to friends with a knowing look. Bracken became a celebrity—spokesperson for Bird's Eye frozen foods, television appearances, newspaper columns.
Most remarkably, it was published in 1960. Three years before Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique launched the second-wave feminist movement by naming "the problem that has no name"—the emptiness educated housewives felt despite having everything they were supposed to want.
Bracken had identified the same problem. She just approached it through the kitchen.
She never wrote manifestos about women's oppression. She didn't need to. Her humor said everything.
In 1982, Bracken published A Window Over the Sink, a collection of essays. In it, she wrote the line that captured what she'd always understood:
"As millions of women have done before me, I pulled domesticity over my head like a blanket and found I was still cold."
The metaphor is devastating in its restraint.
A blanket should provide warmth. If it doesn't, something is wrong with the blanket—not the person underneath it. Domesticity, Bracken suggested, was never designed to fully nourish women. It was designed to occupy them.
That insight remains uncomfortable precisely because it's still current.
Women are still encouraged to find complete fulfillment in traditional roles. When those roles feel insufficient, the prescribed solution is usually more effort, more gratitude, more adjustment. The assumption is that if you're not satisfied, you're not trying hard enough.
Bracken refused that logic.
She suggested that perhaps the problem wasn't women's effort or attitude. Perhaps the structure itself was inadequate. Perhaps no amount of compliance could produce warmth if what you were wrapping yourself in simply wasn't enough.
She said this without drama, without anger, without demanding anyone change. She just observed the temperature and reported honestly: it's cold in here.
That honesty was radical.
Because once someone says the thing you've been feeling but doubted—once someone validates that experience—it becomes harder to accept the gaslighting that insists you should feel warm when you're freezing.
Bracken kept writing through her 70s. She published books on housekeeping (The I Hate to Housekeep Book), etiquette, travel. She always considered herself primarily a humorist, not a domestic expert.
Her last book, On Getting Old for the First Time, was published in 1997 when she was 79.
She died October 20, 2007, at age 89 in her Portland home.
The I Hate to Cook Book was reissued in 2010 for its 50th anniversary, with a foreword by her daughter Johanna. Even decades later, it resonated. Reviewers noted how relevant Bracken's observations remained—that the pressure on women to perform domestic perfection hadn't actually gone away. It had just gotten more layers.
Now women are supposed to love cooking and have careers and maintain Pinterest-perfect homes and be endlessly available to children and stay fit and remain cheerful through all of it.
The blanket got bigger. It didn't get warmer.
What makes Bracken's work endure isn't just the humor. It's that she told the truth without apology.
She didn't argue that women shouldn't cook or that domestic work has no value. She just refused to pretend that cooking three meals a day, seven days a week, was inevitably a source of joy rather than sometimes being exactly what it actually is: a repetitive chore.
She gave permission to women who felt guilty for not loving something they were told they should love. She said: you're not broken. The expectation is unrealistic.
That message threatened the six male editors who rejected her book. It threatened a cultural narrative that required women to find complete fulfillment in domesticity. It even threatened her husband.
But it liberated millions of readers.
Here's what Bracken understood: validation isn't just about feeling heard. It's about trusting your own perception of reality.
If everyone insists a blanket is warm but you're still cold, you start doubting yourself. Maybe I'm not appreciating the blanket properly. Maybe I'm defective. Maybe if I tried harder, I'd feel warm.
Bracken said: No. You're cold because the blanket isn't warm enough. Trust what you're feeling.
That's a revolutionary statement.
Not because it solves the problem—Bracken never pretended quick recipes would fix structural inequalities—but because it validates the experience. It makes it okay to name what you're actually feeling instead of performing what you're supposed to feel.
Women are still pressured to wrap themselves in prescribed roles. Caregiver. Support system. Emotional regulator. The accommodating one. The one who makes everything work smoothly for everyone else.
When those roles feel insufficient—when you're giving everything and still feeling empty—society often suggests the problem is your attitude.
Bracken's metaphor cuts through that: If the structure itself is inadequate, no amount of personal adjustment will make it sufficient.
She didn't fix the problem. She couldn't. One cookbook can't restructure society.
But she did something equally important: she made it easier for women to stop pretending they were warm when they were cold. To trust their own experience over prescribed narratives.
To say, honestly: this isn't enough for me.
That honesty is the first step toward change.
Peg Bracken noticed the cold and said so. Quietly, with humor, without demanding revolution—she just reported the temperature accurately.
And in doing that, she helped millions of women trust what they'd been feeling all along.
The blanket was never meant to be enough. And recognizing that isn't failure—it's clarity.
