The Communist Ploy of Cooking

As we slice our logs of Pillsbury refrigerator cookies, let's hearken back to the (good?) old days when the home cook's labors were a bit more serious.

Born in the Great Depression, Irma S. Rombauer's original Joy of Cooking bound bush meats and decadent treats into one elegant volume, allowing housewives of all income brackets to feed their families with what they had. While dreaming of Christmas feasts to come, even the poorest country bumpkin could learn to skin and prepare a squirrel and can wild blueberries for the winter. If eggs were available, home cooks knew you could make an angel food cake with eight of the whites and a heavy yellow cake with the leftover yolks. Nothing was wasted or artificial.

Entertaining as well as informative, the original Joy preceded each recipe section with a quaint, conversational preamble. The intro to the "soup" chapter, for example, read thusly:

"In the good old days, when soup 'bunch' cost a nickel and bones were lagniappe, pounds and pounds of meat trimmings and greenstuff were used in the household to concoct wonderful essences for everyday consumption."

Fast forward 70 years to the all-new, revised Joy of Cooking. Gone are the chapters on bush meat and canning, gone are the suggested recipe variations that stimulate creative cooking and exercise problem-solving skills. An apple pie is just a bland, commercial, universally acceptable, unremarkable apple pie. The possibilities of mixing in green tomatoes or cheddar cheese have been lost with the sands of time... but why? It's the Communist Ploy of Cooking. There must be only ONE taste, ONE way to make a pie or casserole, it must be lower in fat and salt than the older way, and if you don't have the resources to make it, you'll have to depend on someone else.

And somewhere along the way, an editor decided the original Joy's snappy language was simply too complicated, too out-of-touch with today's readers. Who cares to look up "lagniappe" in the dictionary when everyone knows what "free" means? Why say GOOD old days when they might not have been so "good" for everyone due to racism or whatever, even though Mrs. Rombauer was obviously not alluding to that.

Behold the revised "soup" intro:

"In the old days, when a 'soup bunch' of vegetables and herbs cost a nickel and bones were free from the butcher, American home cooks routinely made soups from scratch. Today, the smell of soup simmering still symbolizes home cooking."

Politically correct, dulled-down language meant to make our ancestors seem like aliens from another planet. Dumbed-down recipes, deleted tips and tricks, missing sections -- it's no wonder we fell into a recession following this unholy edition's print run. Hold on to your old books, because the dumbing down of the American library has only just begun with the Communist Ploy of Cooking.