Barbara Kafka, 84; cooking author touted high heat

Barbara Kafka, a popular and sometimes pugnacious cookbook author who touted the utility of the microwave oven and whose recipes for high-heat roasting were considered shocking and even dangerous, died June 1 at her home in Manhattan. She was 84.

She had Parkinson’s disease and other ailments, said her husband, Ernest Kafka.

Kafka, who said she took an interest in cooking “because it was the one thing my mother couldn’t do well,” wrote columns for newspapers and magazines and published more than half a dozen books that collectively sold millions of copies.

Her tastes were eclectic, with recipes for snails and Rice Krispies treats in the same cookbook. She had a consulting firm that helped develop menus and restaurants, including Windows on the World, which was atop one of the World Trade Center towers destroyed in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Mrs. Kafka was known for the lively, no-nonsense style of her cookbooks and her columns for Gourmet – tellingly called “The Opinionated Palate” – Family Circle, Vogue and the New York Times.

“I do try to write in English, I don’t write ‘kitchen’ and I don’t write French,” she said in 2005. “What’s wrong with saying matchsticks instead of julienne?”

She often gave cooking demonstrations with the late James Beard, a cookbook author often called the driving force behind modern American cuisine.