Peg Bracken

When Miss Edith was just a little girl, she spent her summers at a house in New Hampshire. The original owners of the house left all their furniture behind when they sold the house, and so Miss Edith played with chairs that had been clawed by cats she’d never met; she played games that had been purchased for children she’d never met; and she read books purchased for children she’d never met. Among those books was a jacketless, Prussian blue picture book called Eloise in Paris. This was a magical book to Miss Edith, and while everyone raves about the author of this book, Kay Thompson, easily 80% of the magic of Eloise is in the drawings, which were done by Hilary Knight.

Miss Edith, as a youngster, spent hours and hours and hours absorbing these drawings, wanting to be able to draw just like Hilary Knight. And she learned to recognize that distinctive line, that unique style, that Knight used over and over again – in the entire Eloise series, as Edith would learn, but also in other books. In fact, it was when Miss Edith was about eight years old that she noticed, in her own mother’s book collection, a book that was illustrated by Hilary Knight. Because it had those drawings, Miss Edith assumed it was a book for children, and read it over and over again, even though it wasn’t really intended for little girls at all. The book was titled The I Hate to Cook Book and it was by a woman named Peg Bracken.

Miss Edith’s mother, who loathed cooking, and who to this day will not cook a meal for herself, believing she did her time when her children were young, adored this book and if you ask her will remember that several of the recipes in it, including one for liver and wild rice, were really very good. Miss Edith’s mother probably thought it was incredibly funny that her child would sit and read this crappy paperback over and over again, but that’s exactly what Miss Edith did, and to this day, Miss Edith reads The I Hate to Cook Book when she’s feeling blue. Or wants a laugh. Or can’t think of anything else good to read.

Peg Bracken resides in my mind right next to Betty MacDonald, author of the Mrs. Piggle Wiggle books, because – you guessed it – those were also illustrated by Hilary Knight (except for the one which was done by a very young Maurice Sendak). But the attachment is stronger than my literal-child mind would have guessed; it’s true that the illustrations make a strong bond between all these books, but there’s also a sort of wry attitude toward domestic life that’s reflected in the works of both Bracken and MacDonald. And MacDonald was – I would learn years later – the author of The Egg and I, one of the funniest books ever written, and one which discusses in clear, snarky terms exactly why housekeeping is an endless uphill battle that really doesn’t get anyone anywhere in the end. (You can see that Miss Edith’s love for books like Home Comforts sits comfortably right alongside these cranky housewife books; life is full of these dichotomies.)

I would say that over the years I have read the complete Peg Bracken dozens of times – including her memoir, which no one seems to remember but me, which was titled A Window Over the Sink -- and in fact two weeks ago I began to re-read said memoir on a lark. A few days after I completed it and dropped it on my desk, too lazy to reshelve it (and it’s still here, I’m staring at it as I type), I saw in the New York Times an obituary for Peg Bracken. I hadn’t realized she was still alive; god, I’d’ve written her a fan letter aeons ago if I’d ever stopped to think about it.

Peg Bracken was, as far as I can tell, entirely unique in her literary persona. I don’t know much of anything about her personal life (memoirs notwithstanding) but she was the kind of writer who talked about boring things like cooking and cleaning without getting all preachy on you: her audience was smart women who worked. Her audience was women who felt that there was more to life than whelping pups, mopping the floor, and making sure that tablecloths were kept in a cabinet hanging so that they wouldn’t show unsightly creases when placed on the dining table. Her feeling was, If you’re the kind of person who wants to worry about tablecloth creases, that’s fine – just don’t make the rest of us think about it. To this end, she wrote The I Hate to Cook Book, and then a book on housekeeping, The I Hate to Housekeep Book, and a book on etiquette, the title of which I adore: I Try to Behave Myself. She also wrote about travel, and published a number of books of essays and magazine pieces and so on. I mean, there was more to Peg Bracken than this one little cookbook. But even if that was all she’d done – even if it was just, say, that brilliant domestic trilogy – that would be enough. One of the great frustrations of my time as a book buyer in new books was the discovery that The I Hate to Cook Book was out of print, and I could not order it for the store. If I’d’ve been able to, I would have sold a copy of that book every week. It’s not that I’d expect people to want to eat those recipes today – as the New York Times obituary points out, in the Age of Arugula Bracken’s recipes seem rather hopeless – but because Bracken’s voice, her way of expressing herself on the subject of cooking, is just priceless. The book was in print not too long ago as a mass market paperback that couldn’t have been priced at more than $8.99; I remember this because I actually bought a copy to give to my sister in law, who does not cook so much as a hard-boiled egg, ever. (I thought she would find the book just funny to read, but I’m assuming I was wrong, because she’s never once mentioned it to me.) It is a crying shame that America’s publishers let Peg Bracken’s greatest titles go out of print. Were there any justice in the publishing world, there would be a Library of America edition collecting all three of her domestic tomes, with introductory essays by Nora Ephron, Cheryl Mendelson, and someone else like maybe Cynthia Heimel or something.

But there is no justice.

A side note: the New York Times obituary was printed on October 23, 2007, right next to the obituary for Vincent DeDomenico, the man who invented Rice-A-Roni. I have not been so thrilled by an obituary page since the obituary for Selma Kock, lingerie fitter (“… died Thursday at Mount Sinai Medical Center. She was 95 and a 34B.”) ran next to the obituary for philosopher Bernard Williams.

The next time I have a martini, it shall be raised in Peg Bracken’s honor.