Barbara Kafka, who has died aged 84, was an internationally respected American cookery writer, best known in the UK and Australia for her 1987 bestseller Microwave Gourmet.
In the book she took on several challenges: she argued that the newly popular, but loathed-by-chefs microwave oven was a device for cooking, not merely for reheating food, and her recipes were absolutely precise. She grappled gleefully with the science and technical questions involved – each recipe was an experiment, repeated until whatever problem it posed was solved.
The most able and intellectual of food writers, she also possessed the wit and fluent pen of the poet she longed to be. She enjoyed massive sales; two of her cookery books were main selections of the American Book of the Month Club, though her scrupulous research and testing were so expensive that there was seldom any profit.
As well as books, she wrote food columns for Vogue, Gourmet and the New York Times, and was employed as a consultant by some of New York’s most ambitious restaurateurs; she styled the crockery and cutlery for Windows on the World on the top floors of the World Trade Center north tower, destroyed in 9/11.
Elegant and photogenic, she was a frequent guest on the TV networks, was often mobbed on her many book tours and applauded when she judged the “best restaurant in Australia” competition.
She relished upsetting the culinary apple-cart. In her 1995 book Roasting: A Simple Art (which won the Julia Child cookbook award), she advocated that you crank up the oven as high as possible, open the kitchen window, disable the smoke alarm – and roast a 10-to-14-pound turkey for only an hour. The ensuing controversy raged in the pages of the New York Times for several weeks: some readers had presumed she was only teasing about windows and smoke alarms.
Born in New York and brought up in an enormous Fifth Avenue apartment, Barbara was the only child of Jack Poses, a Russian immigrant who had the US distribution licence for D’Orsay perfumes, and his wife, Lilian (nee Shapiro), the first female lawyer to plead a case before the supreme court. She was educated at private schools in New York and then at Radcliffe College (affiliated with Harvard). The Poses family were benefactors of cultural institutions: when Barbara was at college, her parents asked what gift she would like them to bring her from Europe; she said (and got) “a Braque”.
For a period, Barbara was a child and teenage dancer with the Ballet Russe – a protege of Alexandra Danilova and Léonide Massine – but her ballet career ended mysteriously; she did not talk about it. After graduating with a degree in English, in 1955 she married Ernest Kafka, a Harvard graduate and Austrian refugee from a cultured Viennese Jewish family, and they lived for a few years in St Louis, where Ernest was studying medicine at Washington University, and where Barbara began, but abandoned as boring, a graduate degree in English.
The couple were often in Europe, more at home there than in St Louis; they spoke the languages, knew and liked the food, art, architecture and music, and enjoyed their social life – mostly with artists, dealers and the odd film-maker or politician. In early 1958 they lived in London; while Ernie studied at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, in Queen Square, Bloomsbury, Barbara worked at the British Museum Reading Room, writing entries for the Encyclopedia Britannica. Moving to New York, Ernie pursued psychiatry, eventually becoming a distinguished Freudian psychoanalyst.
Barbara started working at the magazine Mademoiselle and was noticed by the writer and editor Leo Lerman, who recommended her to Allene Talmey at Vogue, but warned Barbara to abandon her ambition to write about art, as that was Talmey’s own province. Knowing Barbara was a great cook, Lerman suggested food as her subject; though unprepared, she spontaneously pitched three ideas, and Talmey bought them all, kickstarting Barbara’s career.
She worked with the cookery writer James Beard, cooking and teaching classes with him, and contributing to his 1976 book The Cooks’ Catalogue. She wrote more than half a dozen bestselling titles herself, including Microwave Gourmet Healthstyle Cookbook (1989), Party Food (1992), Soup: a Way of Life (1998), Vegetable Love (2005) and, later, after developing food intolerances, The Intolerant Gourmet: Glorious Food Without Gluten and Lactose (2011). In 2007 she received the James Beard Foundation’s lifetime achievement award.
She is survived by Ernest, their daughter, Nicole, and son, Michael.
• Barbara Joan Kafka, food writer, born 6 August 1933; died 1 June 2018
