Peg Bracken was the author of The I Hate to Cook Book (1960), a wittily written recipe book for women who shared her passionate antipathy to domestic-goddess-style food preparation, and the day-in, day-out burden of it all.

“You watch your friends hoarding their pennies for glamorous cooking equipment and new cookbooks called Eggplant Comes to the Party or Let's Waltz into the Kitchen,” she wrote, “and presently you begin to feel unAmerican.” It predated Betty Frieden's The Feminine Mystique by three years and has since sold some three million copies.

Bracken appreciated good food, but not if it was at the expense of time for reading, smoking or drinking Martinis. She gave her recipes such names as “Sole Survivor” and “Stayabed Stew” and focused on easily available ingredients, including spam, baked beans, corned beef hash, cheese, frozen vegetables, fish fingers and canned mushroom soup, which she often used as a sauce. Taste was sometimes compromised for the sake of convenience.

Much of the appeal was in the tone of her writing: “Add the flour, salt, paprika and mushrooms, stir,” she instructed in her recipe for “Skid Road Stroganoff”, “and let it cook five minutes while you light a cigarette and stare sullenly at the sink.”

Ruth Eleanor Bracken was born in Filer, Idaho, in 1918 and grew up in St Louis, Missouri. She described her mother as “a successful club lady” and was in awe of her. After reading English at Antioch College, graduating in 1940, she moved to Portland, Oregon, adopting the name Peg “out of thin air”.

There she worked as an advertising copywriter and produced a syndicated cartoon called Phoebe, Get Your Man with Homer Groening (the father of Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons). Her first book was The 9-Months' Wonder (1958, with Helen Berry Moore), a collection of notes and suggestions “concerning the many wonders involved in the highly personal and funny and wonderful business of having your first baby”.

Bracken joined a lunch-and-bridge group who called themselves “the hags” (all were working women). None of them relished having to cook every evening and so they “pooled their ignorance”, as Bracken put it, each sharing a quick, fail-safe recipe, which formed the raw material for The I Hate to Cook Book. “Stayabed Stew” could cook “all by itself” for five hours — perfect “for those days when you're en negligée, en bed, with a murder story and a box of bonbons.” “Aggression Cookies” were simple but called for vigorous kneading — perfect for “channeling some energies away from throwing bricks”.

The manuscript was rejected by six male editors — Bracken's second husband, Roderick Lull, added, “It stinks” — before it was finally taken on by a female editor. It was stylishly illustrated by Hilary Knight, known for his work on Kay Thompson's “Eloise” books. The first edition sold 85,000 copies in two years, and Bracken became a well-known figure in the US. She toured with a national speaking agency and featured in advertisements for Birds Eye frozen food. The book, she said, had made women realise that “you do not necessarily have to get out the crystal finger bowls when you're having people over to dinner. Other things are just as important, and frequently more so”.

Bracken detested the snobbishness that often accompanied gourmet cooking. “Now once in a while,” she warned, “you'll find yourself in a position where you have to talk about cooking. This is usually a sitting-down position with other ladies hemming you in...Actually, your cooking is a personal thing, like your sex life, and it shouldn't be the subject of general conversation. But women who love to cook often love to talk about it, too, and if you're going to make any sort of showing at all, there are several points to keep in mind. For instance, words. Never say ‘fry' if you don't mean ‘deep-fat fry'. You can say ‘pan fry', ‘pan broil', ‘sauté', ‘brown in butter', ‘sizzle in butter'.”

Other “I Hate to Cook” books followed — among them an Appendix to the I Hate to Cook Book (1966), The I Hate to Cook Almanack (1980) and The Compleat I Hate to Cook Book (1988). She also turned her attention to etiquette, publishing I Try to Behave Myself (1964) and I Didn't Come Here to Argue (1969), which contained such advice as “Good etiquette, for a man, is whatever makes a woman feel more like a woman, without making her feel weak-minded” and “When someone mispronounces a word which you must use shortly thereafter, it's kinder to choose a synonym”.

Among her other books were The I Hate to Housekeep Book (1962), which was particularly good for those who have no formal system or enthusiasm, one piece of advice being to start all one's tasks at once, and But I Wouldn't Have Missed it for the World (1973), about “the pleasures and perils of an unseasoned traveller” (“It's easier to find a travelling companion than to get rid of one” was one of her maxims). She also published a charming memoir, A Window Over the Sink (1981), and a collection of essays, On Getting Old for the First Time (1996).

Her books are no longer in print, but still command affectionate reviews in online forums, with numerous comments along the lines of “I read my copy till it fell apart”.

Bracken wrote columns and features for several American publications, among them The Oregonian, the San Francisco Chronicle, Family Circle and Atlantic Monthly. She considered herself primarily a humorist, and her more epigrammatic lines — “What most of us are after, when we have a picture taken, is a good, natural-looking picture that doesn't resemble us”; “Why does a slight tax increase cost you two hundred dollars and a substantial tax cut save you thirty cents?” — were much quoted. She had a thorough knowledge of cartoons and cartoonists, and a deep love of prose poems. Her own were typically amusing:

It's grim to meet a fellow who

Has quite clearly forgotten you

But, brethren, it is worsa

Vice versa

Bracken was warm and self-depreciating, and by her own account less confident than her writing style suggested. Until shortly before her death she regularly visited blind women to read to them.

Bracken's first marriage, to Mike Smith, and her second, to Roderick Lull, were dissolved. Her third husband, Parker Edwards, died in 1987. She is survived by her fourth husband, John Ohman, whom she married in 1991, and by a daughter, a step-daughter and two step-sons.

Peg Bracken, author of The I Hate to Cook Book, was born on February 25, 1918. She died on October 20, 2007, aged 89