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I saw huge and immediate improvement; “your blood pressure is outstanding!” declared a doctor I was seeing for something else. So I had to stick with it.

For a while, this made me grumpy. It wasn’t just that I had to give up my beloved pretzels. Nor that my cooking suddenly tasted bland — you do get used to less salt, mostly. What annoyed was the fantastic inconvenience of it. I had to cook all my meals, whether I had time or not, without resorting to takeout or popping some frozen dumplings in the microwave.

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I began to feel sorry for myself. Which was, of course, ridiculous, so I eventually resorted to gratitude instead.

At the age of 10, my grandmother began cooking for a family of six, plus farmhands, using a stove that had no thermostat and frequently needed to be emptied of ashes, then refilled with filthy chunks of coal. Her vegetables had to be picked before they could be washed and chopped; her chickens came from the henhouse, unplucked; her nuts came from the trees in the yard, in shells that had to be cracked with a hammer.

Until my grandmother was old enough to take over, her mother had done the same thing without even the convenience of commercial shortening or sliced bread. Her mother had embarked on her culinary career without so much as Jell-O or corn flakes, and her mother’s mother had started out without double-acting baking powder or a rotary egg-beater.

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All this cooking took a great deal of time. In 1900, about 44 man hours — or rather, lady hours — were needed each week to make the meals for a typical middle-class household and then clean up afterward. I, with my food processor and stand mixer and self-cleaning oven, was doing the same in less than 10 hours around a full-time job and feeling put upon because I was spending roughly half an hour more than the typical American household.

And the food I was preparing was in many ways tastier than what my ancestors could manage. Sure, their home-grown fruits and vegetables were delectable, but each was in season for only a few weeks. For longer winter months, they had only a few hardy items from storage, such as potatoes, apples and squash, plus whatever they’d been able to can or dry the previous summer. Cows dried up, fresh meat gave way to salted and smoked — or to alternative proteins such as beans. Undoubtedly, it all got very monotonous........

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