Call it half-homemade or semi-scratch or, as one cookbook author does, convenience cuisine. Whatever you call the latest twist for putting dinner on the family table, it still means one thing: Home cooking is undergoing a radical change.
Some argue that it’s gone retro, back to the early ’70s when, like today, we were dealing with a weak economy. Their evidence: Slow-cookers, which rely on inexpensive cuts of meat, are back in style and so are casseroles made with canned soup.
But others insist that home cooking is headed for a future where packaged foods rule and “from scratch” will just mean “not takeout.” They cite surveys that say we’re cooking less, cooking faster and craving convenience. As food trend researcher Harry Balzer put it, “One hundred years ago, every household could kill a chicken for Sunday dinner. A hundred years from now, will anyone even know how to make spaghetti and meatballs?”
Whether we’re moving forward or backward, the change in what’s considered home cooking can be seen in the rash of new and upcoming cookbooks:
– Popular cable TV personality Sandra Lee has a hit with “Semi-Homemade Cooking,” which relies heavily on brand-name packaged goods and unabashedly boasts that “nothing is made from scratch.”
– The best-selling “Fix It and Forget It” series by Dawn Ranck of Harrisonburg, Va., and Phyllis Good of Lancaster, Pa., takes advantage of the rebirth in popularity of the slow cooker (an appliance that was first introduced in the early 1970s). No-frills recipes gathered from readers all over the country make liberal use of cans of soup, jars of sauce and seasoning packets to provide “substantial home-cooked food (for) cooks who are gone all day.”
– Casseroles are suddenly classy again in “Crazy for Casseroles” (Harvard Common Press) by James Villas, former food and wine editor of tony Town & Country magazine. He decries many of the convenience-food casseroles of the ’70s, but still includes several classics, admitting that they really do taste better with a can or two of creamy condensed soup.
– Anne Byrn, the woman who taught us how to do semi-scratch baking with cake mixes in her best-selling “Cake Mix Doctor,” is coming out with “Dinner Doctor” (Workman) this fall. “Readers were e-mailing me, begging for quick ideas for making dinner as well,” she says. Her book will include a chapter on “’60s and ’70s comfort foods” like casseroles her mom used to make.
– And due out this month: “Almost From Scratch: 600 Recipes for the New Convenience Cuisine” (Simon & Schuster) by Andrew Schloss. Schloss, a veteran cookbook author who also helps develop recipes for food companies, contends that magazines, cookbooks and food writers have been slow to catch on to what’s happening most weeknights in American kitchens.
“It’s like the way cream of mushroom soup became popular as a sauce ingredient 50 years ago,” Schloss says. “Today we have that ingredient potential with so many more products that are even easier to use than condensed soup.”
Simple solutions
The buzzword in home cooking today, says Schloss and others, is simplicity. The fewer the steps the better and that goes for ingredients as well. The reason for this is also simple: We’re overwhelmed by all we need to do each day. We’re desperate to save time. Mostly, we’re just too tired.
Half of all heads of households in America say they are too weary to put much time or effort into evening meal preparation, according to the newest survey by the research firm ACNielsen. For those aged 18 to 44, the fatigue factor is even higher: 60 percent say they’re so busy and in such a hurry during the day that fixing dinner had better be a no-brainer.
Even Martha Stewart, who built her reputation on meticulous, time-consuming recipes, is getting into the act.
Her new magazine, Everyday Food, which debuted recently, is for the harried home cook who just needs to get dinner on the table, but wants something better than frozen or packaged.
Everyday Food is designed to be as unlike its big sister publication, Martha Stewart Living, as possible: It’s small, about the size of TV Guide; it’s sold at grocery store checkout stands; there are no pictures of Martha — or of anyone else, for that matter. The recipes are pared down–four ingredients for mustard-glazed salmon, for example–and even include some shortcut ingredients like canned beans, frozen corn and store-bought ravioli.
This is Stewart’s idea of the new home cooking: simple, easy and relying almost exclusively on fresh, rather than processed, ingredients. But is this really how we’re cooking?
Not exactly, says Balzer, vice president of the market research firm NPD Group in Rosemont. His firm has tracked Americans’ daily eating and cooking habits since 1980 and the data show that nearly a third of households are serving a frozen or ready-to-eat main dish, up from just 21 percent 10 years ago.
Speed demons
We’re still preparing many of our meals at home; a Food Marketing Institute study reports that 85 percent of consumers prepare home-cooked meals three times a week, which is a 10 percent increase over 2001, but in the last 10 years we have slashed both the time we’re spending on cooking and the number of dishes we’re preparing. Half of our meals are prepared in 30 minutes or less and half of all main meals consist of just one dish, according to both FMI and NPD surveys.
Plus, Balzer says, we hate to use more than one appliance. Less than a quarter of the meals we prepare at home require more than one appliance, down from nearly 40 percent in 1990.
He would argue that it is this desire for one dish/one appliance–and not nostalgia for the disco ’70s–that has given new life to the slow-cooker and, by extension, to slow-cooker cookbooks.
Food companies are obviously paying attention to these trends. A recent TV commercial shows a smug woman pushing a shopping cart with nothing in it but a Betty Crocker Complete Meals box. This is the cake-mix theory of dinner preparation: Open a box, stir things together, and you’ll feel as if you’ve been cooking. Six varieties of these all-in-one meal kits have been introduced, including a chicken and biscuits version that contains canned chicken and vegetables in a sauce, a seasoning packet and an envelope of Bisquick mix to make biscuits.
However, the fact that these products are aimed specifically at women is significant, and smart, says NPD’s Balzer. He points out that while the role of women may have changed outside the home, “most of the cooking still falls on the shoulders of Mom. It’s still, for her, a 28-hour day, which is why she’s constantly looking for ways to make it easier.”
