How home cooking has evolved

Cooking from scratch is an important way to improve our diets and health. It's also one of the greatest dietary challenges most of us face.

Nobody knows that better than Jean Anderson.

Anderson, a Raleigh native living in Chapel Hill, is an award-winning food journalist and cookbook author. Her latest book, "A Love Affair with Southern Cooking," won prestigious best cookbook awards from the James Beard Foundation and the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance.

Anderson has been helping ordinary folks learn how to cook for more than 50 years.

With a degree in food and nutrition from Cornell University, Anderson began her career testing recipes in the 1950s at the Ladies' Home Journal magazine. It was an era when convenience foods promised to save time in the kitchen.

Recipes were developed for specific products in partnership with the food industry, which paid to run ads for name-brand ingredients.

"It was a constant parade of these big food companies through our kitchen," said Anderson.

Convenience foods in search of a recipe included Campbell's soups, Cool Whip, Jell-O, Hellman's mayonnaise, Kraft cheese, Tabasco sauce and others.

"We had a whole bunch of generic terms for the brand name," said Anderson. Examples included "lemon-flavored gelatin" and "hot red pepper sauce."

Anderson has witnessed firsthand how trends in home-cooking have evolved since then. A few highlights:

• The Julia factor. Julia Child surfaced in 1963 with her television cooking show, "The French Chef."

"We all thought she was a joke," Anderson said. "She was comic relief in the beginning, this big, hulking giant with her falsetto voice." Child was clumsy, too, and television at the time didn't edit out the mistakes.

"But she was the first celebrity chef to champion cooking from scratch," Anderson said.

• The age of granola. From the late 1960s through the 1970s, Americans began to travel internationally and become familiar with new foods and styles of cooking.

"Suddenly people were writing colorful books on Italian and other ethnic cuisines," Anderson said.

This coincided with the youth movement. "The whole vegetarian thing surfaced then," Anderson said.

And chefs began to emerge from culinary schools to inspire many of us to spend more time fixing meals.

• The showoff chef. By the 1980s and into the early 1990s, cooking at home became a popular hobby. High-end kitchen appliances and other gourmet kitchen features became more common.

"It was, 'Can you top this?'" Anderson said. "We called it the era of the edifice complex. Chefs would pile food on a plate so high that you could hardly eat it."

The 1980s also brought farmers markets. "Cooking from scratch gathered steam," Anderson said.

• Enter the Food Network. When the cable TV station debuted in 1993, chefs who understood food took their lessons to the masses. The era was short-lived, however.

By 1997, the network was sold, and chefs were replaced with entertainers.

"Rachael Ray, Sandra Lee and Paula Dean are all hustling packaged foods," Anderson said. "It's depressing. We've done a 180."

Now, cookbooks cranked out by ghost writers under celebrity names often include recipes that aren't tested and don't work, said Anderson.

"A Hollywood mentality prevails," she said. "It's all about the bottom line."

So where does that leave us today?

"We're very conflicted," Anderson said. "We have the locavores who seek out farmers markets. It's an enlightened group. These people are well-heeled and well-traveled.

"But the masses follow Rachael Ray," she said.

What does Jean advise for those who want to wean themselves off packaged foods?

A good cookbook written by a reputable author. Anderson's "The New Doubleday Cookbook," for example, includes explicit instructions for people of all skill levels.

Take a good, basic cooking class, too, Anderson advised.

Next week: tips for putting this simple advice into practice.