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I have adored Marian Burros since reading her Pure & Simple: Delicious recipes for additive-free cooking : an elegant & easy cookbook with up-to-date advice on avoiding ingredients that contain chemicals & preservatives back in the 1980s. I still swear by two Burros cookbooks, which remain my forever favorites: 20-Minute Menus: Time-Wise Recipes and Strategic Plans for Freshly Cooked Meals Every Day and Eating Well is the Best Revenge: Everyday Strategies for Delicious, Healthful Food in 30 Minutes or Less. I have lost count of how many times I have given those two cookbooks as gifts — which is the highest praise possible.
But I didn’t love The New Elegant But Easy Cookbook. Burros and co-author Lois Levine revised this cookbook in 1998, noting that the original 1960 edition had too many canned soups and processed foods, and too much red meat, MSG, gelatin salads, Velveeta, and the like. The newer version contains ingredients that, surprisingly to younger cooks, were difficult to procure in the 1960s or completely unavailable, items that are ubiquitous now: cumin, fresh herbs, bok choy, couscous, fennel bulbs, cruelty-free veal, bulgar. Cooking had changed so much in 30 years that the old cookbook was no longer useful.
But the 1998 book has suffered the same fate in an even shorter amount of time. Does anyone have dinner parties with four and five courses? Except for Super Bowl parties and, occasionally, Thanksgiving and/or Christmas, how often does anyone serve up canapés, trifles or intricate desserts? Already in 1998, 60 percent of women were working outside the home; they’re the wives and mothers, like me, who devoured 20 Minute Menus and its 30-minute companion, Eating Well Is the Best Revenge. Today get-togethers aren’t 12 seated around a dining-room table; in fact, the National Association of Homebuilders says that 43 percent of Millennials don’t want a dining room at all. My home has one; in the 13 years we’ve lived here, we have used it to eat in exactly zero times.
I liked some of the recipes in this cookbook, but most were too dated or too much trouble for me.
Burros must be somewhere in her 80s at least, but, if you’re still up for it, please, please, please, PLEASE update this treasure one more time.
But I didn’t love The New Elegant But Easy Cookbook. Burros and co-author Lois Levine revised this cookbook in 1998, noting that the original 1960 edition had too many canned soups and processed foods, and too much red meat, MSG, gelatin salads, Velveeta, and the like. The newer version contains ingredients that, surprisingly to younger cooks, were difficult to procure in the 1960s or completely unavailable, items that are ubiquitous now: cumin, fresh herbs, bok choy, couscous, fennel bulbs, cruelty-free veal, bulgar. Cooking had changed so much in 30 years that the old cookbook was no longer useful.
But the 1998 book has suffered the same fate in an even shorter amount of time. Does anyone have dinner parties with four and five courses? Except for Super Bowl parties and, occasionally, Thanksgiving and/or Christmas, how often does anyone serve up canapés, trifles or intricate desserts? Already in 1998, 60 percent of women were working outside the home; they’re the wives and mothers, like me, who devoured 20 Minute Menus and its 30-minute companion, Eating Well Is the Best Revenge. Today get-togethers aren’t 12 seated around a dining-room table; in fact, the National Association of Homebuilders says that 43 percent of Millennials don’t want a dining room at all. My home has one; in the 13 years we’ve lived here, we have used it to eat in exactly zero times.
I liked some of the recipes in this cookbook, but most were too dated or too much trouble for me.
Burros must be somewhere in her 80s at least, but, if you’re still up for it, please, please, please, PLEASE update this treasure one more time.
