Barbara Kafka: Always ahead of the culinary curve

For more than 30 years, Barbara Kafka has been telling people — in no uncertain terms — how to cook in the moment.

In every book, in every appearance, she urged American home cooks to be bold, fearless and confident. Even more, she championed trends. Not the ones that made food fashionable. The ones that made it healthier, better tasting and easier.

"She helped create, but also translate trends in food for everyone at home," says the Beard Foundation's executive vice president Mitchell Davis, referencing "Microwave Gourmet," Kafka's 1987 book that got Americans cooking everything from risotto to pudding in their microwaves. "She managed to speak to a lot of people about how to make really good food, how to make it simple, but without compromising in any way."

Along the way, Kafka wrote six cookbooks, all award winners or bestsellers, and in 2007 she won the James Beard Foundation's Lifetime Achievement award. She taught cooking with Beard himself, collaborated with Jacques Pepin, won the respect of Juila Child.

Now Kafka's seventh book, "The Intolerant Gourmet," makes her a pioneer again, propelling the 78-year-old into the gluten- and lactose-free territory usually dominated by 20- and 30-something bloggers and Tweeters.

It was a world she entered out of necessity. After years of dormancy, childhood food sensitivities to dairy and gluten (a wheat protein) resurfaced and forced her to rethink the way she ate.

While many books in this genre take the substitution approach — "Here's what I want to eat, how can I make it?" — Kafka did the opposite: she set out to make delicious foods that just happen to live within new parameters.

The result? Dishes like mussels with hen-of-the-woods mushrooms, West Indian curried hash, and tandoori chicken, foods that few would consider a hardship.

"She gives weight to these niches," says Corby Kummer, a senior editor at The Atlantic magazine and a longtime friend of Kafka's who pushed her to write the latest book after his stepdaughter was diagnosed as gluten-intolerant. "She carves out territory and then other people follow in her wake.No matter how many books come and go, hers are there."

Kafka was an unlikely cook. Born into a wealthy New York family, her father was in the perfume business, her mother was a well-known New Deal lawyer who had been among the first women to graduate from New York University's law school. Lillian Louise Poses — Kafka's mother — did not cook. Ever.