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Every time I go to this thrift store near where I grew up, there’s one section that boggles my mind: The microwave cookbook section. Microwave cookbooks! The store’s book area is packed with ‘em (some published as recently as 1990!). I walk on by the stacks of cheaply-produced “vintage” books and marvel about what kind of recipes must be inside—for those of us that grew up microwaving pizza rolls, Velveeta cheese and Lean Cuisines (not all together; my diet growing up was gross, but not that gross), the idea that some happy homemaker of yore needed to be taught how to use a microwave seems absurd.
And yet … a little bit of googling reveals that Betty Crocker still offers a microwave recipes section of its website, and microwave cookbooks are still being published today! Oh my.
“Microwave recipes and how-to articles appeared in magazines, and cookbooks brimmed with practical information on how to cook in microwave ovens,” writes Andrew F. Smith in Eating History: 30 Turning Points in the Making of American Cuisine. “Beginning in 1972, dozens of popular microwave cookbooks appeared. They covered everything from preparing ethnic foods—Japanese, Chinese, Mexican, Italian and French—to cooking all types of fruits, vegetables and meats.”
I know microwaves are still in widespread use (about 90 percent of U.S. households have microwaves, according to the most recent data), though I’ve definitely noticed an anti-microwave trend amongst my friends over the past few years. There was a point in time when I couldn’t have imagined living without one—how the heck were you supposed to warm up leftovers otherwise?—but after ditching the appliance cold turkey a few years back, I realized anything that could be warmed up in the microwave could (duh, I know; forgive my culinary neophyte-ism) also be warmed up on the stove, and generally tasted better that way, too. Do you still own/use a microwave?
The only thing with which I will concede stovetop defeat is popcorn; making popcorn on the stove really is such a production, isn’t it? The newscaster in this video agrees with me:
That’s a November 1986 broadcast of Tampa Bay’s morning show, featuring Marie T Smith, author of what is surely the saddest title ever created, “Microwave Cooking for One.” Here she demonstrates her recipes for microwaved cheeseburgers and stuffed shrimp. I like how no one on set will actually eat the cheeseburger, and that Smith’s microwave was $600 when she bought it, but now (she adds chirpily) you can buy one for $250! Smith’s legacy is still going strong—there’s a website and even a Facebook group still advocating the “so much more you can do with your microwave oven.”
