A Tricky February

Peg Bracken is of course famous for hating to cook, so I was a bit shocked that the entire month of February in her The I Hate to Cook Almanack (1976) is given over to bread. I know quite a few people who are ready to cook just about anything, but balk at the though of a yeasted bread. Bracken, sensing her readers' surprise, has a rationale for this chapter. The most salient points seem to be that 1.) home cooks generally "don't have to bake bread, and electives are always more fun than requireds"; 2.) "There is no such thing ... as a totally hopeless home baked loaf. If it isn't even good toasted, it will still make good crumbs ... for meat loaf; and if worst comes to absolute worst, it is an adequate doorstop. Shellac it"; and 3.) most of the time needed for making bread is just waiting around for the yeast to work anyway, so it doesn't require as much effort as people might suppose.

I was most intrigued that the list of recipes at the beginning of the chapter promised one that "scrimpeth on calories." How was the book going to manage this? When I came across this recipe, I assumed it was the answer.

Anything with cottage cheese was usually the diet option in old cookbooks, as the protein in the cottage cheese (presumably) canceled out all the calories in the cream. I was wrong, though. While other breads have a rationale for their inclusion (mostly ease of preparation, or, in the case of beer bread, the prospect of finishing off the part of the beer not used in the bread), Dill Cottage Cheese Bread has no explanation. It's just there because Bracken needed something for February 23. 

The diet bread doesn't show up until the end of the month-- the 27th. 

You might notice that this recipe is from Dr. N. and wonder whether that's a reference to the pun-loving fellow we met last month, Dr. Neitzelgrinder. It is indeed. 

Since this is a LONG recipe for a book for reluctant cooks, the steps emphasize just how much of the preparation is hands-off time. Cooks are to "Look out the window or go water the cactus" while the butter melts in step 2, and perhaps go out for "a walk and a little TM or the matinee at the Bijou" while the dough rises. 

It's also fine to shape the dough chunks in whatever way is easiest, even if they end up looking like "undiscovered continents."

It was a bit of a mystery to me as to why this particular recipe, with its quarter cup of butter and several tablespoons of sesame seeds, is the diet one, but apparently the fact that it's rolled so thin is supposed to make big pieces of it seem really substantial. This has no fewer calories than any of the other recipes, (and probably more per ounce than, say, the French bread), but "a book-sized piece of it has the dieter feeling loved."

The trick is to make it seem like much more than it really is-- perhaps the theme for most of the recipes in this book. Here, "more" means both size and amount of work, but the work part applies just about everywhere! I started the chapter feeling as if it was out of place, but by the end, it almost seemed to epitomize the book as a whole. That's a pretty neat trick-- even neater than convincing oneself that this is low-cal bread.