Hating To Cook, Loving To Knit

A very domestic Two Bossy Dames 🧶

I (Karen) am not alone in thinking it’s a perfect time to remember and appreciate the groundbreaking and martini-centric work of Peg Bracken (1918-2007), author of several books including, most famously, 1960’s The I Hate To Cook Book. Both Eater and The Bittman Project have covered her over the last year and a half, the Lost Ladies of Lit podcast did an episode on her waaaaaaay back in 2021, and Mary Elizabeth Williams wrote about her in Salon during that surreal month of April 2020, suggesting readers “give up on that sourdough and embrace the tao of “I Hate To Cook”!” I have had not one but two copies on The I Hate To Cook Book on my shelf for a million years—one softcover, one hardcover—featuring the always welcome and whimsical-and-glamorous with-an-edge illustrations of Hilary Knight of Eloise fame—and yet I’ve never really given it a thorough look-see until recently, despite actually hating to cook myself.

Hating to cook is not quite as much of a problem here in 2024 as it was in 1960, but there’s certainly a continual mania online for following, praising, and coveting the lives of those who cook well and beautifully. Granted, the current vibe is more Laurie Colwin fresh from the farmers’ market with a canvas tote full of microgreens, tiny eggplant, and fresh flowers [the “domestic sensualist,” if you will, thank you, Mia Manzulli for Literary Hub, and btw I LOVE Laurie Colwin, RIP] than, say, Mastering The Art of French Cooking [which came out a mere year after The I Hate To Cook Book and also RIP to both Julia Child and Julie Powell, speaking of how the internet has historically talked about cooking. Some critics really hated how blog-y her book was, my goodness!] But I am not a domestic sensualist — it doesn’t matter that there are now a million smug, mainstream examples of how we’re “all” able to enjoy vegetables now because we know that it’s actually so “simple” to get fresh ones and roast them or whatever, as opposed to boiling them to death or worse yet, opening a can and…boiling them to death, because every minute spent dealing with preparing food is a minute spent feeling anxious, angry, and desperate to just order a goddamn pizza.

Peg Bracken had similar feelings, only she was a late 1950’s working mother — she worked as a advertising copy writer and had a syndicated comic strip with Homer “Matt’s Dad” Groening called “Phoebe Get Your Man” that seems to be lost to the sands of time. The I Hate To Cook book famously starts with the line “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,” which of course is perfect in a Mad Men way. It also makes me think of the modern conceit of the “wine mom,” which is right there alongside “live, laugh, love” decor as a cringe-laden concept to scorn, but guess what, people have and continue to use alcohol to wind down and cope with difficulties, cringe or not.

A few lines later comes the real relatability, as far as I’m concerned: “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.” YES, FUCKING YES! The multi-course meals that Instagram puts in my eyeballs when I’m looking for actually simple meals that aren’t a bowl of cereal or another goddamn pizza that inevitably results in said cereal or pizza! A few lines later, Peg writes “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.” EXACTLY, PEG!!! She ends the introduction writing not to expect magic, but rather “a hands-across-the-pantry feeling, coming right through the ink. It is always nice to know you are not alone.”

This is especially touching because per her 2007 New York Times obituary, her second husband/father of her child’s response to the I Hate To Cook manuscript was “It stinks” and this marked the beginning of the end of their relationship, per her daughter Jo. Jo had her own blog in 2010, seemingly meant to be in tandem with the 2010 republication of IHTC, where she noted that the recipes came to be via a “lunchtime cabal known as The Hags [yesssssssss!!!]…[and] many discussions of culinary contempt, fueled by martinis and macaroni salad.” Who would like to discuss culinary contempt with me over martinis and macaroni salad?! Six male editors agreed with Peg’s soon to be ex husband but an unnamed female editor at Harcourt Brace loved it and a star was born. The book eventually sold over three million copies and Peg went on to write several other books in the same vein, including 1962’s The I Hate To Housekeep Book which, touchingly and relatably, has an entire chapter on depression called “How To Be Happy When You Are Miserable,” which gives advice on self-care and self-motivation that would absolutely be of no use to an actually depressed person, but that’s 1962 for you. She also went on to be a spokesperson for Bird’s Eye and made a series of commercials:

A New York Times article about the 2010 reprint called Peg Bracken a precursor to “quick and easy” style food writers like Sandra Lee and Rachel Ray, both of whom are considered a bit passé at this point, but it’s not as if canned food isn’t still beloved, even if the trend is more along the lines of expensive beans and of course tinned fish. I consider her a humorist along the lines of Erma Bombeck or Jean Kerr, who blurbed the book as “a gem…and wonderfully funny” and a cultural tour de force who dared to (partially) name what Betty Friedan would call “the problem that has no name” three years later in The Feminine Mystique.

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She’s crafty, and she’s just my type (which is good because I, Sophie, am she, and there’s no escaping oneself!)

I write about knitting pretty frequently for someone whose pace of completed projects is…stately? poky? dawdling? Some combination of all three is likely, often with a generous portion of adding needless complexity to the mix. I wrote in these very pixel pages in 2022 about swatching for Pabaigh, a very straightforward short-sleeved pullover by Kate Davies, which I just finished and started wearing last month. Last month!! 

Determined to maintain the modest (but real!) momentum I’ve got going, I’m swatching for my next project, Evenfall, a cropped pullover featuring colorwork that to my eye, has a slight air of Glen Plaid about it. (If any of you have knitted Evenfall, or other slipped stitch projects in the round, sound off in the comments! ) It’s a slightly more ambitious project than Pabaigh, and I think that’ll be good grist for the mill. Can mills knit? In my fevered metaphorical imagination, sure, why not? 

Choosing and getting a new project on needles has been a good short-term goal, but now I’m thinking about knitting infrastructure. I have great materials and no method for keeping them close at hand. Sure, they’re around, in that my yarn, needles, and notions are all present in the living room, with a few satellite items in the enclosed front porch. 

Being around isn’t the same as being close at hand, though. Close at hand suggests knowing where specific items are, which has long been a problem for me – I write to you today as a woman who once left her prescription sunglasses in the fridge. Fortunately, I open the fridge multiple times daily, so they didn’t remain on their brisk little vacation among the yogurt and eggs for very long. 

Anyway! What I’m taking my sweet Friday afternoon time to say is that I think, now that I’ve been knitting off and on for close to 30 years, this seems like a sufficiently well-established hobby that I might want to spend some time figuring out ways to store my yarn, needles, and notions so that they’re close at hand rather than sprawled here and there all around the living room.

It might be time for me to level up from the gallon-sized ziploc bags of yarn in the large cardboard boxes we used when we moved into this house about 20 years ago. Who can say? It might even be time for me to create a very basic little spreadsheet as a bulwark against re-purchasing circular needles in sizes and lengths I already have. 

So, I put it to you, dear crafty friends of Dames Nation, how do you organize the tools you use to make things? It doesn’t need to be knitting or a fiber art of any kind. I’ve allowed one way of doing things, which was good enough and had value at the time I adopted it, to become The Way I Do Them, so I’m stuck in a sort of limbo and feel overwhelmed by the possibilities I imagine are out there. I’m looking for classic methods and unexpected solutions, the simpler and quicker to implement, the better.

Dame Sophie’s Modest Retail Therapy & TV Yelling Corner

I surmise that the Venn diagram of people who read Two Bossy Dames and who watch All Creatures Great and Small may not be a circle, but is so close to being one as makes no difference. The series’ fifth season is currently airing in the UK on Channel 5 while those of us in the US must wait impatiently for January to roll around to watch it on Masterpiece (the vestigial “Theatre” must live on in our hearts). One thing that may help tide you over is the recent launch of the official All Creatures Store. I know!! They’ve got mugs, refrigerator magnets, tea towels, totes (they know their target demographic), and even postcards featuring Siegfried (again, a keen understanding of their viewership). 

For those already watching Season Five and going nearly feral over the quiet, steady ratcheting up of vibes between Siegfried and Mrs. Hall, it might be helpful to (re?)read  the Q&A I did with Samuel West as Season Three was winding down. Maybe Hallfried (Hallnon? Does this ship have a cute portmanteau?) will never amount to more than yearning glances and the occasional awkward silence between them, but I think whatever does happen will unfold in writerly good faith.