Practically Cookless!

The promise of escaping kitchen drudgery was (and still is) a potent one, so I was not surprised to find McCall's Practically Cookless Cookbook from 1974. I was, however, a little confused about what counts as "cookless," especially when I came to the page that featured this beauty:

This concoction of flatworms atop aquarium gravel seems as if it was cooked to me. So how would one go about not cooking this pie? (Or "pie," as I prefer to scare-quotedly call it?)

Just cook sliced onions and sausages in butter. Add lima beans and then cream-of-leek soup mix. Dump in a pie shell and bake for half an hour. I was having trouble figuring out how something that needed to be cooked on the stovetop and then baked was cookless, but the title is PRACTICALLY Cookless. The modifier gives away the game: the recipes are very much cooked, but if you pretend really hard because the title promises the recipes are easy, then they don't seem like so much work. The title has a placebo effect on the recipes.

Or maybe threatening to heap lima beans and onions in a pie crust for dinner was a way to ensure the family would opt to go out to eat instead. They couldn't title a book Recipes to Threaten Your Family With So You Can Get a Goddamn Night Off Once in a While, so Practically Cookless Cookbook was a euphemism.