Peg Bracken, sassy author who skewered cuisine, dies at 89

Peg Bracken, 89, who wrote witty best-selling books tweaking the pretensions of gourmet-food preparation and proper etiquette, died Oct. 20 at her home in Portland. She had a lung ailment.

Ms. Bracken was an advertising copywriter before "I Hate to Cook Book" (1960) sold a reported 3 million copies and established her as an authority on resourceful cooking. The book became a staple for housewives with little interest in cooking beyond what they could scrounge from an understocked pantry.

She aimed for an audience that shared her dislike for women's magazines that set an impossible standard by offering tantalizing but impossibly opulent recipes suitable for Henry VIII's banquets.

"We live in a cooking-happy age," she wrote in "I Hate to Cook Book." "You watch your friends redoing their kitchens and hoarding their pennies for glamorous cooking equipment and new cookbooks called 'Eggplant Comes to the Party' or 'Let's Waltz Into the Kitchen,' and presently you begin to feel un-American."

She emphasized convenience over the fresh ingredients and time-consuming preparation pushed by the gourmet school of thinkers, including Julia Child and James Beard.

"I Hate to Cook Book" gave a green light to canned vegetables and promoted mushroom soup to cover up mistakes. Throughout, Ms. Bracken offered recipes written with a nod to the weary housewife.

To make "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."

She warned against condiment overkill, writing that "a lot of people feel that anything peppered should look as though it had been fished out of a gravel pit."

She also dispensed tongue-in-cheek semantic advice. For example, she told readers that to say "garnish with crispy bacon curls" made one appear more knowledgeable in the kitchen than to say "top with bacon."

Ms. Bracken's cookbook received favorable reviews, although it rarely has been a favorite of purists. Decades later, food writer Miriam Ungerer said the book was "still around, pandering to the slothful."

Ruth Eleanor Bracken was born Feb. 25, 1918, in Filer, Idaho, and reared in Clayton, Mo. She graduated in 1940 from Antioch College in Ohio and changed her name to Peg "out of thin air," she said, when she began looking for work.

Ms. Bracken wrote fashion copy for an advertising company in Portland and contributed light verse to newspapers and magazines.

She arrived at the cookbook idea with a group of professional women who called themselves the Hags. They pooled their recipes, with Ms. Bracken making edits and writing the overall text. Problems arose when it came time to find a publisher.

She told The New York Times in 1964: "Male editors were afraid of it because they were convinced that women regarded anything that had to do with cooking very seriously and would not stand for an attitude that was the least bit flippant."

Her husband at the time, a writer named Roderick Lull, was "totally discouraging" of her idea, she later told The Washington Post. "Of course, when the first royalty check came, he had to eat a huge platter of crow — French-fried or oven-baked, because that's the easiest," she said.

Ms. Bracken wrote follow-up cookbooks as well as "The I Hate to Housekeep Book" (1962) and a guide to personal conduct called "I Try to Behave Myself" (1964).

Her other books included a memoir, "A Window Over the Sink" (1981), and a collection of essays, "On Getting Old for the First Time" (1997), the second co-written with the fictional Emily Bracken, whom she dubbed her "verse-addicted companion."

Peg Bracken also wrote columns for newspapers and magazines, including Family Circle, and was a pitchwoman in television commercials for Birds Eye frozen vegetables in the late 1960s and early '70s.

Her marriages to Lull and Mike Smith ended in divorce. Her third husband, artist Parker Edwards, died in 1988.

Survivors include her fourth husband, John Ohman, of Portland, whom she married in 1991; a daughter from her second marriage, Johanna Bracken, of Long Beach, Calif.; three stepchildren, Ann Fragale, of Great Falls, Va., Jim Ohman, of Farmingville, N.Y., and Jack Ohman, of Portland; and 11 grandchildren.