7 Quotes by Laura Shapiro

Toward the end of February 1954, James Beard was at work in his Greenwich Village kitchen doing what he most loved to do: cooking delicious meals.

Culinary historians looking back at the first decades of the twenty-first century will be blessed with vast quantities of material to study, thanks to blogs and social media, but all that material will still reflect only the lives of a certain swathe of active and self-promoting food lovers.

It was the early 1960s, and the best-known names in home cooking – Fannie Farmer, Betty Crocker, Irma Rombauer, Dione Lucas – projected a warm and cozy domestic image that was the opposite of what she and David were after.

But what struck me as I followed the paper trail through each life was that while extraordinary circumstances produce extraordinary women, food makes them recognizable.

Tell me what you ate when you were a child, and whether the memory cheers you up or not.

To be a wife was to cook. Not to eat – that was a different matter entirely – but to cook.

At Cornell she had discovered that domesticity had a brain; here, in the beloved, safe home that was entirely hers, she was learning that it had a heart.