Bracken’s banter is still cooking

Portlander’s prose challenges ingrained ideas about domesticity

By Jill Spitznass

The Portland Tribune, May 13, 2003, Updated Oct 30, 2009

Visitors to Peg Bracken’s West Hills home are offered a homemade ginger cookie and then asked to sign the kitchen tablecloth. Later, the slender hostess in the St. John Knits pantsuit will embroider over the name with colorful thread, creating a one-of-a-kind guest book.

Don’t be swayed by the social niceties. Bracken, 85, is not your average “LOL” (little old lady). Her 1960 best seller, “The I Hate to Cook Book,” put forth the then-radical notion that for a lot of women, cooking was a drag.

Wielding wit as dry as a gin martini and as sharp as a paring knife, Bracken offered easy, clever ways to approach the culinary tasks that millions simply viewed as domestic drudgery.

Her fresh, irreverent attitude turned down the heat on women’s self-imposed domestic expectations. And while they weren’t on the same culinary level as James Beard’s, her recipes helped the harried chef of the house create quick and delicious dishes.

In the next eight books, which spanned nearly 40 years, Bracken’s humor and wisdom extended into the realms of housekeeping, travel, etiquette and most recently aging: “On Getting Old for the First Time” was published in 1997.

During a recent interview, Bracken proved that she still possesses the keen perspective and no-nonsense humor that made her name recognizable worldwide. When asked her age, Bracken says dryly: “No euphemisms, please. My birthday’s this month, and I feel great except for a tendency to want to throw up when I look in the mirror.”

Bracken lives with her third husband, John Ohman, father of The Oregonian’s political cartoonist, Jack Ohman.

Signs of the couple’s opinionated mind-sets are everywhere, from the numerous thought-provoking books that lay open to the photo of Attorney General John Ashcroft that’s taped to the refrigerator, a Hitler mustache drawn on his face.

Patience is a virtue

Bracken says friends provided the ingredients for “The I Hate to Cook Book.” She simply stirred it all together.

“It all started with a group of friends that used to get together for lunch,” says Bracken, who was an advertising executive in Portland at the time. “I said, ‘Why don’t you each give me a recipe that’s easy, that you can count on, and I’ll put them together and we’ll exchange them.’”

Another friend suggested the now-famous title, and Bracken knew she was on to something.

“I went to work on the book, but then I hit a speed bump,” she says. “My husband who was also a writer was jealous. He said, ‘You’re wasting your time; who’d want a book like that?’ He didn’t want competition. He wanted to be the only writer in the family.”

After that particularly telling period in their marriage, Bracken says, “I showed enormous patience and waited four more years until I left him.”

The episode led Bracken to believe that perhaps he was right about one thing: “I don’t think it’s great for a couple to be in the same business.”

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