Franey’s two 60 Minute Gourmet books were another important part of my auto-didactical acquisition of cooking skills. I haven’t used them in a long time, but when I was first cooking in college and just afterwards I loved to work from them.
The recipes were simple and had few ingredients, without requiring a complex or specialized pantry or complicated preparation techniques. (You could tell that they’d been test-kitchened to conform to the title’s promise.)
I used to cook his “shrimp margarita” recipe fairly often (basically shrimp marinated in lime juice, then quickly sauteed in tequila, butter and shallots, slices of avocado warmed in the butter, cream in the butter, served over rice). Somewhere along the way I stopped making it, though.
Re-reading the first book I’m kind of surprised at how monotonously French it is—half the recipes in the book are “cook a protein in butter and garlic or shallots, add cream, serve” or nearly so. But it really shows you Franey’s very particular place in culinary history: he was a link between Julia Child’s evangelism to home cooks, mostly women, that they could cook elaborate and technically complex food in a satisfying way that would entertain and impress friends and family and the subsequent branching of American home cooking into a much wider range of techniques, inspirations and ingredients at the same time as there was a pressure for more casual and more quickly prepared meals as more families had both parents working, often for longer hours.
The cuisine-for-entertainment followed the path laid out by The Silver Palate and then Martha Stewart; Franey on the other hand was one of the people thinking about how to adapt cooking to the needs of professional households (a need that was also increasingly met by higher-quality prepared foods than the TV dinners of previous decades). Later cookbooks that worked that niche were either in a more homey and vernacular American vein or drew on other cuisines than the old cream-and-butter core of classic French cookery, which is what makes the first Franey book seem so old-fashioned to me, I think.
Among the oddities as I look at it today: there’s almost no cold dishes or salads; almost the entire book is built around meat, including a really substantial chapter on veal alone. (Franey was known for his veal cookery; he and Craig Claiborne wrote an entire cookbook devoted to veal.) You can just barely begin to see the impact that South Asian and Middle Eastern cuisine was having—there’s a few recipes with really weak or timid uses of spicing drawn from those cuisines—and there’s really nothing that draws on Japanese or Chinese influences. It’s evident what constituted a meal at that point, as there aren’t really any recipes that are built around serving two or three small plates together, in the style of tapas or mezze platters: this was about an entree and a side.
Franey had an interesting career—he transitioned out of formal French cuisine into cooking in a more self-consciously popular way via working for Howard Johnson’s and then via a sustained collaboration with Claiborne, including his New York Times work. I’ve never forgotten a really fun experiment the Times did with Franey in 1987 where they sent him out for a week to jump on shoppers and ask if he could come home with them and cook dinner for them with whatever they had in their pantries. This led, among other things, to Franey having to use garlic powder for the first time in his life. I have a hard time imagining people agreeing today so easily to participating (most of Franey’s targets didn’t know who he was)—I remember feeling on reading that it was sort of the home cook version of your mother telling you to wear good underwear just in case you were in an accident and the EMTs had to undress you, that from that point on I was always slightly haunted by thinking, “what if Pierre Franey suddenly wanted to cook from my kitchen? Would I have enough in my pantry to make him happy?” But you could see in that column the genesis of reality-show cooking competitions, too, a dawning idea of culinary skill expressed through improvisation, not recipe.
I was tempted to do the old margarita shrimp recipe, but I know that one by heart and we know we like it. So I’m going to do a recipe for flounder stuffed with crab. When I noticed the recipe title, I was thinking “how on earth could that be a 60 minute recipe? Isn’t that going to be fussy?” Turns out “stuffed with crab” means “put one flounder filet on a tray, put crab with breadcrumbs over it, put another fillet on top of that and broil it with butter, shallots and wine”. Which does sound like a quick and simple prep. We will see.
I was going to say that a recent version of "Guess Who's Coming to Cook Dinner" was the Food Network's "Door Knock Dinners" show, but that was the late '90s which actually isn't that recent. The only episode I watched was the one with Iron Chefs, who were in NY to battle Bobby Flay, went out to some suburban house. Although I could imagine the tv show being more staged than the NYT experiment.