Maida Heatter and Molly O’Neill, RIP.

Two fine food writers, each of them important to me in very different ways, have died in the past few months.  What better way to remember them than by turning to their writing?

From my very battered 1974 paperback copy of Maida Heatter’s Book of Great Desserts (1964).

Peanut Bars

Thin caramel cookie bars topped with peanuts. As irresistible as peanuts. Easily mixed in a saucepan.
3/4 cup sifted all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon powdered ginger
1/4 pound butter
6 ounces butterscotch morsels
1/2 teaspoons instant coffee
1/4 cup sugar
1 egg
3 ounces salted peanuts, coarsely chopped (preferably the dry roasted type.

Adjust rack to center of oven. Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Line a 10 172 x 15 172 x 1 inch jelly-roll pan with aluminum foils as follows: Turn the pan upside down. cover with a piece of foil large enough to fold down on all four sides and fold the edges just to shape them. Remove the foil. Sprinkle a few drops of water in the pan to keep the foil in place. Place the foil in the pan. Use a folder towel or a pot holder to press the foil firmly against the pan. Brush the foil with soft or melted butter. Place in freezer or refrigerator. (Chilling the pan makes it easier to spread the thin layer of dough).

Sift together the flour, cinnamon, and ginger and set aside.

Place the butter and butterscotch morsels in a 2 1/2 to 3 quart saucepan over moderate heat. Stir occasionally until melted. Stir in the instant coffee. Remove from heat and stir with a wire whisk until smooth. With a rubber or wooden spatula stir in the sugar and sifted dry ingredients.

In a small bowl stir the egg briefly with a fork just to mix and add it to the batter. Stir until smooth.

Turn the batter into the chilled pan and, with the back of a large spoon, spread as evenly as possible. It will make a very thin layer. Sprinkle with the peanuts.

Bake for 25 minutes until top is golden colored and springs back when lightly touched. Remove from oven and cool in pan for only 3 minutes. Cover with a large cookie sheet. Invert and remove pan and foil. Cover with another large cookie sheet and invert again. With a long, sharp knife, cut the warm cake into bars, cutting down firmly with the full length of the blade. With a wide metal spatula, transfer bars to a rack to cool.

From Molly O’Neill’s classic “Food Porn” in the Columbia Journalism Review, September 1, 2003.

ON A BALMY MAY EVENING in 1997, I was at a bookstore in Santa Barbara, California, signing copies of my third cookbook. It wasn’t my best book, and nearly every chapter of it had previously appeared in my food column in The New York Times Magazine. Nevertheless, nearly two hundred people waited to pay me homage — as well as $26.95 for the book.

The magazine was one of the most powerful platforms for food writing in the nation and, to the people in line, I was a rock star. My mother, a sensible Ohioan, was with me that night and she was appalled. She stood near as fans gushed admiration for my prose and recipes.

Finally, as if unable to contain herself another second, my mother interrupted one woman’s compliments and asked: “Do you actually cook that stuff?”

“Of course not,” replied the customer, who looked like my mother, tall, lean, with a white cap of stylishly coiffed hair. “Every week I cut them out of the magazine and promise myself I will cook them. Don’t we all?”

The laughter that erupted was a deep ah-ha-ha-ha. It was a truth-telling sort of laughter, the kind that started rising among women in the late 1960s when, after cooking through both volumes of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, they began reading books like The Feminine Mystique and forming consciousness-raising groups.

The sound of it made me feel like I’d eaten a very, very bad clam.

Some of the most significant stories today are about food. But you won’t find them in the food section, where journalism has been supplanted by fantasy. . . .

In general, entertainment, rather than news and consumer education, has been the focus of food stories for nearly a decade. Food porn — prose and recipes so removed from real life that they cannot be used except as vicarious experience — has reigned.

Maida Heatter’s recipes were never food porn. They were finely honed, just enough headnote to entice (the headnote on the following recipe is one-word–“easy”–, based an upbringing by a mother who was a fine cook, and years of work providing desserts for her husband’s restaurants. In the 70s and 80s, when as the wife of an academic chair and director, I entertained endlessly, her book provided a vast range of appealing recipes, not too fussy, not demanding too much time in the kitchen, unusual enough for jaded senior faculty and administrators, filling enough for hungry graduate students.

Molly O’Neill’s article was a welcome call from someone then at the heart of New York food writing to take food seriously whether as news, education, and as I read it, history, just as I embarked on that journey.

I never met Maida Heatter but believe I would have found the intelligence, good sense, and commitment to hard work revealed in her recipes more than sympathetic.  I met Molly on a couple of occasions.  Having scanned some of the tributes on the web, I know I was not the only one who benefitted from her warmth and generosity.

• ← My Mother Never Had to Go Grocery Shopping
• Thinking about the Land: A Personal Perspective on the Origin of Organic Farming →