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Tastes & Teflon. Today, when weight watching is a national pastime, the gargantuan fare of yesteryear is hard to digest, even in imagination. First to use an element of scientific method in home cooking was Mrs. D. A. Lincoln, whose 1883 Boston Cook Book introduced accurate measurements, explained, for instance, that a piece of "butter the size of an egg" was equal to 2 oz., or one-fourth of a cup. But it remained for one of her students, Fannie Farmer, who borrowed freely (and without credit) from Mrs. Lincoln, to make her precepts into national guidelines with The Boston Cooking School Cook Book, published in 1896.
By present-day standards, some of Fannie's recipes seem barely edible. "Lamb is usually preferred well-done," wrote Fannie, who recommended cooking it for an hour and 45 minutes; nowadays, lamb is preferred pink, and an hour generally does the trick. As for string beans, Fannie said to boil them for three hours; the current advice is ten to 20 minutes.
As late as the 1920s and 1930s, American cooking was still a homely affair, and a reform was long overdue. The great shift in U.S. home cooking did not take place until the end of World War II rationing. The postwar travel boom brought millions of U.S. tourists back from Europe with their tastes broadened and sharpened by what they had eaten there. At the same time, a host of kitchen aids, from dishwashers, pressure cookers, blenders and Deepfreeze units to the latest nonstick Teflon pans, were taking the drudgery out of cooking.
For most brides, the guide during the transitional years was Irma Rombauer's Joy of Cooking, a primer that marked a distinct advance upon Fannie
Farmer, tackled such subjects as how to poach a fish and how to cope with broccoli. Published in 1931, it had sold, by the time she died in her native St. Louis in 1962, 6,000,000 copies, second only to the Better Homes & Gardens Cookbook (11,500,000).
Now leading the trend toward better eating is a new hierarchy of gourmet cooking teachers. Among the current leaders:
> Dione Lucas, 57, considered the doyenne of fine cuisine in America. Trained at the Cordon Bleu in Paris, she opened a Manhattan branch in 1941, wrote The Cordon Bleu Cook Book, and was one of the pioneer TV chefs in 1947. Her specialty was omelets, and for a while she held forth at her own restaurant, the Egg Basket; now she fills in by doing the cooking at the Ginger Man, a fashionable pub near Lincoln Center.
> Craig Claiborne, 46, Mississippi-bred food editor of the New York Times, a discriminating one-man Guide Michelin to restaurants not just in Manhattan but throughout the nation, and editor of the 717-page The New York Times Cookbook (over 100,000 copies). "I love American cooking," says Claiborne, and he is writing a book on regional U.S. cooking to prove it. The recipes in the Times, some taken from hostesses whom Claiborne writes about, are so good that many women leave their cookbooks behind when they go on vacation, rely on the Times's menus almost entirely.