How rich people used the food processor to help shift around the tedium in their cooking routines

As I read through Jean Anderson's Processor Cooking (1979), I suddenly remembered the year I posted recipes from Gourmet (The Magazine of Good Living) from 1977.

Why? Well, partly it was because I remember seeing a TON of ads for Cuisinart food processors in those magazines, and partly because this cookbook is so damn pretentious. There is not a mention of canned soup, all the aspics begin with plain gelatin (rather than lemon-flavored), and those aspics take pages and pages of instructions, requiring ingredients like dry white wine and court bouillon. Hell, to Jean Anderson, caviar is just a salad dressing ingredient.

One thing Anderson is NOT pretentious about, though, is her knife skills. The main selling point of the book is that the food processor makes chopping a thing of the past. While I understand the desire not to spend a lot of time chopping, sometimes I think she must be exaggerating how terrible her knife skills really are just for the sake of convincing readers of how useful the food processor really is. I mean, check out the headnote before the recipe for Zucchini-and-Green-Bean Salad with Tarragon.

"I used to cut the squash by hand-- a good hour's work." The recipe calls for a pound of zucchini. One pound! That's not all that much. I have terrible knife skills. If I wanted to get on a cooking competition show, they'd veto me the second they saw my knife skills because I was taught to cut most veggies by holding them up and cutting toward the pad of my thumb. (I remember being terrified by it when mom and grandma taught me, but once I knew the sharpness of the knife and the denseness/ hardness of the food, it was super-easy, fast, and usually pretty safe if I didn't get distracted.) In short-- I have no knife skills, and even I would be hard-pressed to take a full 15 minutes, much less AN HOUR, to cut up a pound of zucchini. There's no question the food processor would be faster and more precise, so I just don't get why Anderson goes all-in on making cutting sound so time-consuming-- especially when many of the recipes rely on time-consuming steps that can't be hurried along with a food processor anyway.

The recipe requires cooks to remove the ham rind, trim the fat covering, and create an intricate pattern of X-shaped cuts all over the surface of the ham by hand, all before getting to the "tedious" part of stuffing each individual X-cut with the processor-chopped herb mixture.

The Eastern Shore Stuffed Ham is nothing compared to the Veal Sandwich Roast with Roquefort-Pecan Filling, though.

After simmering the roast and processor-chopped vegetables for an hour and a half, cooling everything back down to room temperature, and making the nut-and-cheese filling, the cook has to painstakingly cut the entire roast into uniform quarter-inch slices-- something that definitely can't be done with the food processor! (If it takes her an hour to get through a pound of zucchini, I wonder how long a time commitment it will be to cut up a three-pound roast! The thing might be rancid by the time Anderson gets done with it.) Then both sides of each slice have to be spread with filling. The roast has to be reshaped and tied up with string and simmered for an hour more before making the gravy and finally serving the roast. For someone who keeps proclaiming how much easier the food processor makes her life, Anderson seems to find ways to thwart those time savings and add an extra bit of tedium at every turn! Maybe rich people just had to make their own problems, and the food processor was a good way to do it...