Evan Hulka
2012-07-12 01:49:21 UTC
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/12/us/marion-cunningham-cookbook-author-dies-at-90.html?_r=1&hp
Marion Cunningham, 90, Home Cooking Advocate
By KIM SEVERSON
Published: July 11, 2012
Marion Cunningham, a former California homemaker who overcame
agoraphobia later in life to become one of America’s most famous and
enthusiastic advocates of home cooking, died on Wednesday in Walnut
Creek, Calif. She was 90.
Mrs. Cunningham, who had Alzheimer’s disease, was admitted to the John
Muir Medical Center on Tuesday with respiratory problems, John
Carroll, a family friend, said in confirming the death. She had been
living at an assisted-care home in Walnut Creek, the small Bay Area
city where she had raised her family.
“More than anyone else, she gave legitimacy to home cooking,” Michael
Bauer, the executive food editor of The San Francisco Chronicle, said
of Mrs. Cunningham. “She took what many people would say was housewife
food and really gave it respect by force of her own personality.”
Mrs. Cunningham’s most enduring trait may have been her ability to
make even novice cooks feel as if they could accomplish something in
the kitchen. Indeed, she took many of them under her wing and drew
from them for her popular book “Learning to Cook.”
She loved to go to the supermarket and peer into the baskets of
startled strangers, whom she would then interview about their cooking
skills. Indeed, she made it her life’s work to champion home cooking
and preserve the family supper table.
“No one is cooking at home anymore, so we are losing all the wonderful
lessons we learn at the dinner table,” she said in an interview in
2002.
It was a theme she focused on in the preface to “The Fannie Farmer
Cookbook,” the classic American volume that she was hired to revise in
the late 1970s.
“Too many families seldom sit down together; it’s gobble and go,” she
wrote, “eating food on the run, reheating it in relays in the
microwave as one dashes off to a committee meeting, another to
basketball practice. As a result we are losing an important value.
Food is more than fodder. It is an act of giving and receiving because
the experience at table is a communal sharing; talk begins to flow,
feelings are expressed, and a sense of well-being takes over.”
Marion Enwright was born in Los Angeles on Feb. 11, 1922, to Joseph
Enwright and the former Maryann Spelta. She grew up as a Southern
California beach girl, in her words, and graduated from high school in
Los Angeles.
In 1942 she married Robert Cunningham, a medical malpractice lawyer,
and moved to San Diego, where he was serving in the Marines. At a time
when men were in short supply for many civilian jobs, she worked in a
gas station for a while. They eventually settled in Walnut Creek,
outside Oakland.
Mrs. Cunningham spent the first half of her adult life mostly raising
her children, Mark and Catherine — who survive her — and tending to
the family’s ranch home in Walnut Creek. And for much of that time she
struggled with agoraphobia, a fear of open and public places. It was
so intense at times that she could barely cross the Bay Bridge to San
Francisco.
She also developed a drinking problem, and once she stopped, she
became known for her love of a good cup of black coffee — sometimes
ordered when everyone else was drinking Champagne.
Prompted by a friend’s invitation in 1972 to go to Oregon to attend
cooking classes led by the renowned food writer James Beard, Mrs.
Cunningham overcame her phobia and headed out of the state for the
first time.
Mr. Beard took to this tall, blue-eyed homemaker, and for the next 11
years she was his assistant, helping him establish cooking classes in
the Bay Area. The job gave her a ringside seat to a period in American
cooking when regional food, organic produce and a new way of cooking
and eating were just becoming part of the culinary dialogue. Her
association with Mr. Beard also gave her the big break of her career,
in the late 1970s, when he passed her name to Judith Jones, the well-
known New York culinary editor, who was looking for someone to rewrite
“The Fannie Farmer Cookbook.”
That project led to seven more cookbooks; her own television show,
“Cunningham & Company,” which ran for more than 70 episodes, sometimes
on the Food Network; and a longstanding cooking column for The
Chronicle.
In 1989 she and a friend started the Baker’s Dozen, an informal group
of San Francisco bakers. It grew to more than 200 members and led to
another cookbook.
Like many others, Ruth Reichl, the author and former restaurant critic
for The New York Times, came to regard Mrs. Cunningham as a mother
figure.
“She was the glue that held the nascent food movement together,” Ms.
Reichl said, “the touchstone, the person you checked in with to find
out who was doing what all over the country.”
Mrs. Cunningham bought a Jaguar with her first royalty check from “The
Breakfast Book,” one of her most enduring cookbooks. The Jaguar became
identified with her, and she would drive it to a different Bay Area
restaurant almost every night, sometimes logging 2,500 miles a month.
Along the way she collected a passel of friends who changed how
America cooked and ate, including her close friend Chuck Williams,
whose kitchenware company, Williams-Sonoma, was just getting started.
One of the people she discovered was a young Alice Waters, who was
cooking organic and local food at a little restaurant in Berkeley,
Calif., called Chez Panisse. Mrs. Cunningham took Mr. Beard to the
restaurant in 1974, and he put it on the culinary map, marking the
beginnings of California cuisine and the modern organic movement.
“She was always my biggest cheerleader,” Ms. Waters once said in an
interview. “I just can see her even now with her coffee and
coffeecake. That’s kind of where she liked to live.”
Plain-spoken and quick with a quip or a gentle jab, Mrs. Cunningham
could cut through the puffery of fancy chefs and food writers. Once,
after a food author spent the day watching her make pie crust, taking
meticulous notes on how many times she cut and stirred, she called Ms.
Reichl.
“He really is crazy, dear, don’t you think?” Ms. Reichl recalled her
saying. “Nobody could make a decent crust following those directions.”
Her humor extended to her cookbooks. In one passage from “The Fannie
Farmer Cookbook,” on how to crack fresh coconut, she suggested
throwing it on a cement patio.
“That’s how monkeys do it,” she wrote, “and they are professionals.”
Marion Cunningham, 90, Home Cooking Advocate
By KIM SEVERSON
Published: July 11, 2012
Marion Cunningham, a former California homemaker who overcame
agoraphobia later in life to become one of America’s most famous and
enthusiastic advocates of home cooking, died on Wednesday in Walnut
Creek, Calif. She was 90.
Mrs. Cunningham, who had Alzheimer’s disease, was admitted to the John
Muir Medical Center on Tuesday with respiratory problems, John
Carroll, a family friend, said in confirming the death. She had been
living at an assisted-care home in Walnut Creek, the small Bay Area
city where she had raised her family.
“More than anyone else, she gave legitimacy to home cooking,” Michael
Bauer, the executive food editor of The San Francisco Chronicle, said
of Mrs. Cunningham. “She took what many people would say was housewife
food and really gave it respect by force of her own personality.”
Mrs. Cunningham’s most enduring trait may have been her ability to
make even novice cooks feel as if they could accomplish something in
the kitchen. Indeed, she took many of them under her wing and drew
from them for her popular book “Learning to Cook.”
She loved to go to the supermarket and peer into the baskets of
startled strangers, whom she would then interview about their cooking
skills. Indeed, she made it her life’s work to champion home cooking
and preserve the family supper table.
“No one is cooking at home anymore, so we are losing all the wonderful
lessons we learn at the dinner table,” she said in an interview in
2002.
It was a theme she focused on in the preface to “The Fannie Farmer
Cookbook,” the classic American volume that she was hired to revise in
the late 1970s.
“Too many families seldom sit down together; it’s gobble and go,” she
wrote, “eating food on the run, reheating it in relays in the
microwave as one dashes off to a committee meeting, another to
basketball practice. As a result we are losing an important value.
Food is more than fodder. It is an act of giving and receiving because
the experience at table is a communal sharing; talk begins to flow,
feelings are expressed, and a sense of well-being takes over.”
Marion Enwright was born in Los Angeles on Feb. 11, 1922, to Joseph
Enwright and the former Maryann Spelta. She grew up as a Southern
California beach girl, in her words, and graduated from high school in
Los Angeles.
In 1942 she married Robert Cunningham, a medical malpractice lawyer,
and moved to San Diego, where he was serving in the Marines. At a time
when men were in short supply for many civilian jobs, she worked in a
gas station for a while. They eventually settled in Walnut Creek,
outside Oakland.
Mrs. Cunningham spent the first half of her adult life mostly raising
her children, Mark and Catherine — who survive her — and tending to
the family’s ranch home in Walnut Creek. And for much of that time she
struggled with agoraphobia, a fear of open and public places. It was
so intense at times that she could barely cross the Bay Bridge to San
Francisco.
She also developed a drinking problem, and once she stopped, she
became known for her love of a good cup of black coffee — sometimes
ordered when everyone else was drinking Champagne.
Prompted by a friend’s invitation in 1972 to go to Oregon to attend
cooking classes led by the renowned food writer James Beard, Mrs.
Cunningham overcame her phobia and headed out of the state for the
first time.
Mr. Beard took to this tall, blue-eyed homemaker, and for the next 11
years she was his assistant, helping him establish cooking classes in
the Bay Area. The job gave her a ringside seat to a period in American
cooking when regional food, organic produce and a new way of cooking
and eating were just becoming part of the culinary dialogue. Her
association with Mr. Beard also gave her the big break of her career,
in the late 1970s, when he passed her name to Judith Jones, the well-
known New York culinary editor, who was looking for someone to rewrite
“The Fannie Farmer Cookbook.”
That project led to seven more cookbooks; her own television show,
“Cunningham & Company,” which ran for more than 70 episodes, sometimes
on the Food Network; and a longstanding cooking column for The
Chronicle.
In 1989 she and a friend started the Baker’s Dozen, an informal group
of San Francisco bakers. It grew to more than 200 members and led to
another cookbook.
Like many others, Ruth Reichl, the author and former restaurant critic
for The New York Times, came to regard Mrs. Cunningham as a mother
figure.
“She was the glue that held the nascent food movement together,” Ms.
Reichl said, “the touchstone, the person you checked in with to find
out who was doing what all over the country.”
Mrs. Cunningham bought a Jaguar with her first royalty check from “The
Breakfast Book,” one of her most enduring cookbooks. The Jaguar became
identified with her, and she would drive it to a different Bay Area
restaurant almost every night, sometimes logging 2,500 miles a month.
Along the way she collected a passel of friends who changed how
America cooked and ate, including her close friend Chuck Williams,
whose kitchenware company, Williams-Sonoma, was just getting started.
One of the people she discovered was a young Alice Waters, who was
cooking organic and local food at a little restaurant in Berkeley,
Calif., called Chez Panisse. Mrs. Cunningham took Mr. Beard to the
restaurant in 1974, and he put it on the culinary map, marking the
beginnings of California cuisine and the modern organic movement.
“She was always my biggest cheerleader,” Ms. Waters once said in an
interview. “I just can see her even now with her coffee and
coffeecake. That’s kind of where she liked to live.”
Plain-spoken and quick with a quip or a gentle jab, Mrs. Cunningham
could cut through the puffery of fancy chefs and food writers. Once,
after a food author spent the day watching her make pie crust, taking
meticulous notes on how many times she cut and stirred, she called Ms.
Reichl.
“He really is crazy, dear, don’t you think?” Ms. Reichl recalled her
saying. “Nobody could make a decent crust following those directions.”
Her humor extended to her cookbooks. In one passage from “The Fannie
Farmer Cookbook,” on how to crack fresh coconut, she suggested
throwing it on a cement patio.
“That’s how monkeys do it,” she wrote, “and they are professionals.”