Feisty Cookbook Writer Karen Hess' Old Co-Op Sells for $1.9 M.
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Manhattan Transfers
It isn’t a wild surprise that Karen Hess, who died last year at age 88 after a lifetime of crotchety but widely admired culinary writing (“How shall we tell our fellow Americans that our palates have been ravaged,” one of her book’s introductions went, “that our food is awful, and that our most respected authorities on cookery are poseurs?”) left behind an amazing and odd kitchen at 285 Riverside Drive.
“She got, I think it was, a Garland--a huge restaurant stove--and no one could figure out how they got it in there, she couldn’t even remember,” her daughter, Martha, told The Observer. “We got it out, I think they broke it apart though. It was dead by then--huge, just huge.”
She said her mother’s Lady Baltimore cake-baking binges, Southern cooking experiments, and her bread and rice stages all took place in “that funky Upper West Side prewar kitchen.” The apartment was apparently bought in 1972 for $35,000 in cash, and it sold late last month for well over 50 times that amount--$1,911,000, according to city records. The listing was with Tamir Shemesh.
Hess and her late husband, Peter, took out two walls in the co-op, which opened everything up to the bank of windows facing the river. Their 1977 book The Taste of America became a left-of-center landmark, and she went on to annotate versions of the 19th-century Mary Randolph’s Virginia Housewife and What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking.
16 Park Avenue
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"Feisty Cookbook Writer" Karen Hess was a friend of mine. Her husband and collaborator on the book you quote was the late John L. Hess, former New York Times reporter in Paris and New York, and a food writer of considerable ability in his own right. While they were certainly curmudgeons, they made many positive and important contributions, including crucial early support for the greenbelt/farmer's market movement. In addition, as I discussed with both of them, their approach was not conventionally leftist, but combined the deep cultural conservativism that later took the slogan "slow food," with a leftish populism that would never settle for an elitist solution. Karen's last project, as yet unpublished, was a compilation of more than 700 recipes associated with Thomas Jefferson and his children and grandchildren. One cannot understand Jefferson without viewing from both the left and right eyes, so to speak. And that is the story for Karen and John Hess. I am glad their apartment has left a fine legacy for their children -- every decent tomato a New Yorker eats this summer is part of their legacy for all of us.
Mark Zanger
Restaurant Critic for the Boston Phoenix as "Robert Nadeau." Author of _The American History Cookbook_ (Greenwood, 2003).
www.historycook.com
Karen Hess was also famous for her remark about Julia Child- "Neither French, nor a chef."
I concur with Mr. Zanger's comments and more directly point out that the author of this article was hardly meticulous (her husband was John L. Hess; Peter is one of her sons) in research and over zealous in her adjectives of Mrs. Hess' work. I never met Mrs. Hess, but have read all of her books and treasure them among the most in my collection. She not only introduced her readers to forgotten, but important, American women cooks & writers (Eliza Leslie, Mary Randolph, etc.), but also ex-patriates such as Richard Olney and British writers such as Elizabeth David and David's rediscovery of Eliza Acton. For shame in attempting to turn an intelligent, important, and courageous historian into a fiesty and shrewd real estate investor. I would be more interested in when and if we can expect an issueance of the book on Thomas Jefferson's household cookery collections. Thank you, Helen Robison, Palo Alto, California (engineer by training)
The Hess' "The Taste of America" is one of the most scattershot, mean-spirited and, worst-of-all, generally unconvincing (other than food available in the supermarkets of the mid-1970s was rather tasteless) tomes concerning American history that has ever received decent publicity. That it was co-penned by a longtime "Times" reporter (and quite briefly its restaurant critic) certainly helped it garner initial attention; then notoriety due its incredible negativity and insults to the culinary saints of the time. You get the impression that Craig Claiborne might not have shared his considerable Times expense account with the Hess', that James Beard might have somehow snubbed them at a social event, and that they felt very jealous that Julia Child was not only very popular, but very proficient, to each earn such poisonous words.
But, most of all it is the uneven scholarship and reporting of "The Taste", in addition to the off-putting tone, that makes me unlikely ever to pick up another one of her books. Reading "The Taste" today, it compares very poorly with "American Food: The Gastronomic Story" by Evan Jones that covers somewhat similar material, which was published a couple of years earlier in 1975. Assessing her career, polemist rather than historian is the term that "The Independent" in the UK used to refer to the self-promoting Hess. It is seemingly much more accurate and deserved.