2000s Archive

Time is On Our Side

Originally Published July 2000
Are you sure you’re too busy to cook? Laura Shapiro searches for what’s really keeping us out of the kitchen.

Home cooking in America has always been subject to fetishes of one sort or another—how else to explain bite-size, jellied Reuben sandwiches? (Hors d’oeuvre, circa 1973.)

But there’s one fixation with a grip on our collective culinary psyche so strong it amounts to a stranglehold: the notion that there’s no time to cook. The “60-Minute Gourmet,” a startling concept when The New York Times introduced it some 25 years ago, now conjures a life of unimaginable leisure. Today cooks can race from 30-Minute Meals to 20-Minute Menus to Meals in 15 Minutes to The No-Time-to-Cook Cookbook. Even the Pillsbury Bake-Off Contest now mandates that all recipes be quick and easy: This year’s $1 million winner, Cream Cheese Brownie Pie (cream cheese and brownie mix in a ready-made pie crust), takes only 15 minutes to hurl together.

I know, I know: Everybody’s busy, everybody works until 6 or 7 or 8 p.m., so let’s be grateful for microwavable, precut, fresh-chilled, canned, frozen, and ready-to-eat everything. But…et tu, Bake-Off? This is cruel.

It’s also completely wrongheaded. Yes, we’re busy, but at 6:30 p.m. the chief obstacle between us and dinner isn’t time. Anyone who can broil a piece of fish or heat water for pasta can get dinner on the table at least as fast as it would take to phone for mu shu pork and wait for delivery. The problem, of course, is fish. Or pasta. Or that rotted head of lettuce in the back of the refrigerator. In short, the problem is shopping, which is also a time problem but, theoretically at least, a manageable one. If you can somehow plan ahead and keep the kitchen stocked, you can probably cook dinner most nights.

This analysis does leave out two important variables, namely skill and its crucial corollary, skill under pressure. Suppose you arrive home from work exhausted and raving. You may well start staggering around the kitchen trying to make dinner, but unless you know what you’re doing and can cook with your brain shut down, sooner or later a pan of garlic suddenly scorched black is going to get pitched into the sink with a scream. Remember, this is not really a time problem.

So how come we blame time whenever we reach for a box of instant macaroni and cheese? Time was first demonized half a century ago, just as housekeeping was getting easier than it had ever been. By then American women had access to running water and electricity; new ranges, refrigerators, and automated gadgets of every sort were coming on fast. But this was also the moment when the food industry, in a giant wave of postwar productivity, was developing all kinds of ingenious processed foods, many with no obvious rationale. (You try writing the ad copy for frozen breaded lima-bean sticks.) Housekeeping authorities had been invoking the concept “no time to cook” for years, but generally in the name of domestic emergencies, especially ones triggered by the arrival of unexpected guests. Now daily life itself became the emergency. “Baby fussing? Dinner to get?” ran an ad for Minute Rice. “How to make dinner…and the double feature too” suggested an ad for Swanson TV dinners. It was an agreeable self-image—so busy, so beset, so modern. Twenty years later, when two-career households were the norm and people really did need to get a fast meal on the table, many had forgotten or never learned that macaroni and cheese is a cinch to make from scratch, and tastes a thousand times better that way.

Cooking does seem impossible some nights. Okay, most nights. But the solution is more cooking, not less—that is, more planning, more weekend stews and chilis, more of all that stuff that women’s magazines and newspaper food sections have been begging you to do for years. It’s no longer necessary to define a quick meal as something produced with a can of soup, a package of frozen vegetables, and a handful of cornflakes. Many recipes for high-speed cooking these days are so rigorous about fresh ingredients, you could serve them to Alice Waters. Full disclosure: I made a vat of soup on the weekend once, and we were sick of it by Tuesday. On Wednesday we had take-out mu shu pork. But at least I didn’t blame time.

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