Blame Rachael Ray.

Suddenly, it’s cool to cook quick.

The Food Network celebrity and author of a slew of cookbooks has transformed cooking from an all-day affair into a 30-minute revolution.

Culinarians balk, but it is now perfectly acceptable to rely on packaged, jarred or canned, items to pull together a tasty dinner in a flash.

The trend is not new. After all, women in the 1950s turned to convenience foods. In its latest incarnation, though, it’s not enough to be quick. Dishes have to be impressive and tasty.

Instead of condensed soups, ranch dressing and packets of dried onion dip, cooks are embracing supermarket specialty items such as canned artichoke hearts, jarred chutneys and cans of cannelli beans and fire-roasted tomatoes.

Even Williams-Sonoma sells jars of veal, chicken and beef demi-glace.

“What’s happening is there are a lot of people getting back on the bandwagon for cooking. They’re looking at their family’s nutritional needs and cost and a lot of it is guilt,” said Kathy Wickert, cooking school coordinator at the Giant Cooking School in Camp Hill, Pa.

Making your own pesto is always cost-effective, but jarred pestos are available in the supermarkets, Wickert said.

“If you can purchase that one part of the meal, it’s a lot easier,” she said.

The latest batch of cookbooks proves the point.

The category is booming with books such as “Homemade in a Hurry,” “150 Things to do with a Roasted Chicken,” “Quick Fix Vegetarian” and Martha Stewart’s “Great Food Fast.”

Perhaps the most surprising one in the bunch comes from a woman who, until now, had always focused on made-from-scratch cuisine.

Nancy Silverton, whose “A Twist of the Wrist” was published recently, has worked at Spago as a pastry chef and owns La Brea Bakery in California.

Her cookbook focuses on quick meals made using premade gourmet ingredients such as jarred puttanesca sauce, canned French petite peas and tandoori paste.

The idea for the book dawned on her after she began to see a shift in Americans’ mealtime patterns. They were cooking less and depending more on takeout fare from restaurants and supermarkets.

At the same time, an increasing number of jarred, canned and packaged products, such as marinated tuna from Spain, jams from France and olive oils from Italy, became readily available.

Silverton has pulled together 137 recipes, including a seared beef with canned cannellini beans and jarred olive tapenade.

“The goal of my so-called mission,” she writes in the book’s introduction, “is to show people a way to create satisfying meals with a minimum of effort and time so that they will be encouraged to cook at home more often.”

“Homemade in a Hurry” echoes a similar culinary sentiment. Its author, Andrew Schloss, writes: “Homemade has changed. The new crop of ingredients is not just a way to get food on the table; rather, they provide an opportunity for home cooks to rediscover the joy of cooking.”