A lot of these recipes make sense to me, even if I wouldn't necessarily add them to my own tool belt. When my mom taught me and my brothers to cook, she wrote down her recipes for us, and I still have them. Most of them are of this nature, refined over years of feeding three hungry boys on a middle class wage. Also, she's a scientist by training.

There were quite a few recipes that started with browning hamburger and onions.

And I suspect that during my generation, families that still cooked had a lot of these kinds of meals, usually prepared from memory.

So the cookbook is hardly a shock to my sensibilities.