Barbara Kafka: American chef who wasn't afraid to turn up the heat

Barbara Kafka was a popular and sometimes pugnacious cookbook author who touted the utility of the microwave oven and whose recipes for high-heat roasting were considered shocking and even dangerous in her native America.

Kafka, who has died aged 84, said she took an interest in cooking “because it was the one thing my mother couldn’t do well”. She wrote columns for newspapers and magazines and published more than half a dozen books that collectively sold millions of copies.

Her tastes were eclectic, with recipes for snails and Rice Krispies treats in the same cookbook. She had a consulting firm that helped develop menus and restaurants, including Windows on the World, which was atop one of the World Trade Centre towers destroyed in the terrorist attacks of 9/11.

Kafka was known for the lively, no-nonsense style of her cookbooks and her columns for Gourmet magazine – tellingly called The Opinionated Palate – Family Circle, Vogue and the New York Times.

“I do try to write in English, I don’t write ‘kitchen’ and I don’t write French,” she said in 2005. “What’s wrong with saying matchsticks instead of julienne?”

She often gave cooking demonstrations with the late James Beard, a cookbook author often called the driving force behind modern American cuisine.

Her books, such as Roasting: A Simple Art (1995), Soup: A Way of Life (1998) and the 700-page Vegetable Love (2005), were more than straightforward collections of recipes for the home cook. They were explorations of regional cooking traditions, family lore and a lifetime of kitchen discoveries.

“I cook with endless curiosity,” she said in 1996. “That’s how recipes evolve and change. I’m saying, ‘What would happen if... ’ ”

Kafka had her breakthrough in 1987 with Microwave Gourmet, a book inspired by her daughter.

“She gave me a microwave when I went to medical school,” Nicole Kafka has said. Once, while talking to her daughter on the phone, Kafka said she had to start boiling water for artichokes.

“I said, ‘That takes me five minutes in the microwave,’ ” Nicole Kafka recalled.

The next day, Kafka bought her own microwave and cooked an artichoke.

“It wasn’t fibrous, it wasn’t waterlogged, it had all its flavour, its colour was better, and it didn’t leak water onto the plate,” she told Newsweek in 1987. “It was a better artichoke.”

With as many as 13 microwaves stacked in her kitchen, she spent three years experimenting with recipes for everything from risotto to chicken pate to brownies. Microwave Gourmet, the first full-scale cookbook of its kind, went on to sell hundreds of thousands of copies.

“I got these really weird reactions from food people,” Kafka said in 1990. “That book was the most uncultivated food thing I could do. It was like tearing up your library card.”

Some chefs scoffed, saying the microwave was not a legitimate way to cook, and others were aghast at some of Kafka’s methods. Most infamously, she ignored manufacturers’ recommendations and used the microwave for deep-fat-frying.

Although only four of the book’s 600 recipes called for deep-frying, the “Kafka controversy” divided the culinary world. Some said it was irresponsible and hazardous to heat oil in a microwave, especially in a glass vessel that could break.

Home cooks would have no problems, Kafka said, if they carefully followed her instructions. Besides, she added, deep-frying was safer in an enclosed microwave oven than on a kitchen range.

With “Roasting,” Kafka ignited another kitchen brouhaha by recommending that vegetables, poultry and meats be cooked in an oven heated to 500F. (She helpfully suggested that the kitchen windows be opened, in case of smoke.)

Previously, most recipes had called for slow-roasting at 325 to 400F, with frequent basting to keep the poultry or meat from drying out.

“People are afraid of high heat,” Kafka told the San Jose Mercury News in 1995. “It takes some nerve to say that other, long-recommended temperatures are wimpy, to say to do it this way. But people have been taught to be chicken about temperature!”

She maintained that her high-temperature method cut cooking times in half and eliminated the need for basting. A turkey or chicken roasted at 500F would have a crisp, golden skin – Kafka despised the word “crispy” – and would be moist and succulent inside.

“People have accused me of using roasting as a gimmick,” she said in 1996, “but I can tell you, I’ve been cooking this way since the beginning of time.”

Not everyone was persuaded.

“I hate it, I just hate it,” Julia Child, the longtime cookbook author and TV host, said of Kafka’s poultry recipes in 1996. “All that smoke! And then you can’t really tell if the bird is done.”

Without criticising Child directly, Kafka held firm, saying high heat would not necessarily lead to a smoky kitchen: “Either your oven was dirty to begin with, your pan was too big, or the chicken was too close to the top of the oven.”

Born Barbara Joan Poses, in New York, her father was a perfume-company executive; her mother was a labour lawyer.

As a child, young Barbara observed the family’s cook at work in the kitchen and often dined out with her parents. She graduated in 1954 from Radcliffe College, a women’s college then affiliated with Harvard University, with aspirations of being a poet.

After her marriage in 1955, Kafka worked at Mademoiselle and Vogue magazines in New York. Her growing interest in food led to her first writing assignments, and she often contributed to Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar.

While working with Beard in the 1970s, Kafka edited The Cooks’ Catalogue, a comprehensive guide to kitchen equipment. Her first book under her own name, American Food & California Wine, appeared in 1981.

Survivors include her husband, Ernest Kafka, a psychiatrist and two children, Nicole Kafka and Michael Kafka, all of New York; and two grandchildren.

After childhood sensitivities to dairy and gluten reappeared, Kafka published her final cookbook in 2011, The Intolerant Gourmet, emphasising tasty dishes that could be made without grains, cheese or milk.

“I think the hardest thing about going on a gluten-free diet was being deprived of sandwiches,” she wrote. “I still haven’t gotten over it.”

In 2007, she received one of the food world’s highest honours, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the James Beard Foundation. She received the foundation’s Cookbook Hall of Fame award in 2015.

Kafka had little patience for fussy culinary trends and often said that simple foods, prepared well, were the best.

“When in doubt, roast a chicken,” she wrote. “When hurried, roast a chicken. Seeking simple pleasure? Roast a chicken.”

Barbara Kafka, American chef and author, born 6 August 1933, died 1 June 2018

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