• • •
Not many women with such a profound case of the jitters around food would have decided to write a four-hundred-page cookbook; and to give Helen credit, she resisted at first. Early in 1962 she was waiting for the publication of Sex and the Single Girl and conferring with her publisher, Bernard Geis, on what she should do next. Her first thought was to follow up her advice for single girls with a book of advice aimed at men—How to Love a Girl—because the prospect of becoming famous as an expert on sex and relationships appealed to her. Geis was more interested in a book about lesbians, however, so she duly called a few doctors to question them about the topic. They told her, she reported, that lesbianism was “one of the most difficult human aberrations to treat—virtually impossible.” It didn’t occur to Helen to seek out any actual lesbians, and the notion faded away. For a while she considered a book based on the work of Dr. George Watson, who specialized, as she put it, in “treating emotional problems through diet.” Helen was a grateful patient of Watson’s and later featured him in a Cosmopolitan article, but she couldn’t persuade him to collaborate on a book.
Ultimately she chose a near repeat of her first book and produced Sex and the Office, a guide to the possibilities of the workplace as an arena for flirtation, dating, and having affairs. The book came out in the fall of 1964 with an ambitious first printing of seventy-five thousand copies, but it proved to have much less appeal than Sex and the Single Girl. The haste and lack of editing were apparent, and Helen’s chirpy narration became tiresome as she went on and on about the erotic potential of lunch dates, “peek-a-boo necklines,” and office decor. Sales were disappointing, but she was under contract for one more project with Geis, and this time he wanted her to try a cookbook. Helen was dubious, but Geis was sure they could make money if they came up with a “lulu of a cookbook,” written for the Single Girl readership and packed with “sexy innuendos.” Neither of them envisioned Helen as the author—she didn’t have the skills or the desire to write recipes, and she was already engrossed in Cosmopolitan—so they hired a professional cookbook writer named Margo Rieman to produce the recipes and the text. Helen would step in later and contribute whatever she wanted by way of personality, and the two would share credit equally as coauthors.
As it turned out, Helen hated being ghostwritten. She liked Margo’s recipes well enough, so much so that she gave her a column in Cosmopolitan called “The 5-Minute Gourmet,” but she couldn’t stand disappearing from view in a book published under her own name. Deep in the job of transforming Cosmopolitan, she was reveling in her all-but-patented prose style, and the new circulation figures proved that readers loved it, too. There was no need to retreat from the spotlight just because she didn’t have any professional expertise in the kitchen. And she was very fond of the creature known as “Helen Gurley Brown”—it was getting to be second nature.
Helen attacked the manuscript as energetically as if recipes were sex tips and her readers were desperate newlyweds. Queries about ingredients, quantities, timing, and directions flew off to the editor of the book, and pages went back and forth covered in scribbles. She was anxious about rice—why on earth was it showing up so often when she herself never ate it? The recipe better be “the best in the world!” She was anxious about boiled shrimp, which also appeared often, sometimes with a basic recipe affixed and sometimes not. Fix it! In the end she rewrote the entire text, and the book became Helen Gurley Brown’s Single Girl’s Cookbook. As Helen put it in the introduction, “Margo allowed me to take her wonderful recipes—which numerous reliable people have said are some of the best they’ve ever used—and present them to you in my words.”
Helen Gurley Brown’s Single Girl’s Cookbook was published in 1969—her fourth book in seven years and the only one she ever wrote that wasn’t based on her own life or some fantastic riff on it. Perhaps for that reason, much of the text was sensible, even useful, to a degree unknown in the rest of her writing. Typically Helen wrote as if she kept a mirror propped up on the typewriter by way of research, but the cookbook was far more demanding. She had to project herself into a different frame of mind, absorbing details on topics she rarely thought about. “It is for new-girl cooks,” she told her editor, and she was determined to give them recipes that would be so clear, manageable, and reliable that nobody could fail. This, of course, was a traditional mandate for a cookbook, but it was a novelty for Helen. All her teaching thus far had been aimed at helping women refashion their bodies and tune their emotions according to fantasies she herself provided. Now she had to help them focus outside themselves, directing their minds and hands toward a goal that couldn’t be reached by charm alone. For once, she had to work in the real world.
The book began with basic recipes requiring minimal technique, such as hamburgers, green salads, béchamel sauce, and lamb chops, and then expanded into a more elaborate repertoire including yeast rolls, chicken Kiev, vitello tonnato, and roast goose. Helen included lists of pantry staples and kitchen equipment; she had separate chapters on cheeses, eggs, and Thanksgiving dinner; there was a cocktail section; and there was a chapter on what to serve the man you don’t want around anymore (liver, kidneys, and sweetbreads). Many of the recipes were arranged in menus, with carefully worked-out game plans letting the cook know when to start marinating the fruit in Cointreau, when to trim the asparagus, when to make the sauce for the veal, when to finish the asparagus, and when to summon everyone to the table. In its own way, the book was an old-fashioned kitchen bible. The instructions were clear to the point of obsessive, and no anxious cook could possibly feel abandoned in the kitchen. (“Tear off two sheets of wax paper about 12 inches long and lay one of them on a flat surface. Sprinkle with about 1 teaspoon of flour and spread this around with your fingers. Place ball of dough in center of floured paper and pat it out to a flattish circle about 1/2 inch thick. . . .”)
This extraordinary degree of precision was applied to every recipe in the book, from scrambled eggs to “Pressed Beef in Red-Wine Jelly.” Any cookbook writer would have been proud of such an achievement, but for Helen it was only the beginning. Which was unfortunate, because she had little else to bring to a cookbook, once she had insisted on perfect clarity throughout. Helen was too nervous around food to develop a coherent gustatory approach, and the book suffered from the same mood swings that characterized the recipes in Cosmopolitan. A cook who mastered the homemade pastry for cocktail-sized savory turnovers, for instance, was advised to fill them with canned deviled ham. One dinner menu, “for the girls,” included a throwback to 1950s faux-fancy entertaining that had the cook spreading undiluted cream of mushroom soup on slices of white bread, rolling them up, and baking them. But on the very next page came another dinner menu, also for the girls, featuring a recipe that could have come from Gourmet—bagna cauda, a warm dip made with butter, olive oil, garlic, and anchovies, served with crudités. The hummus recipe (“Garbanzo Dip”), which called for a little fresh mint, was well ahead of its time; the candied yams were free of marshmallows; and “Mama’s Noodles” were made by hand. In an era when many food writers confined themselves to familiar, easily obtainable ingredients, Helen called for oxtails, veal knuckles, and cardamom pods; and she advised her cooks to invest in good knives, peppercorns, real butter, and a wire whisk. Meanwhile she put a package of dry onion-soup mix into her hamburgers, she made an hors d’oeuvre with canned Vienna sausages heated in bottled barbecue sauce, and for a summer dessert she mixed maraschino cherries, crushed pineapple, and miniature marshmallows into cooked rice.
But if the recipes ran amok, the voice was pure Helen. Throughout the manuscript she splashed the italics, the endearments, and the innuendos that had become the fundamentals of her written personality. “This darling cookbook” . . . “These dear little blender breakfasts” . . . “Go! Go! Go! We have confidence in you!” “Let other girls broil him a steak and slice a few tomatoes; he can do that himself. You’re out to rapture him with golden Chick
en Paprikash gurgling in its pot and maybe even capture him by the time he’s through the Lemon Chiffon Crème.”
Bernard Geis bought national advertising and mailed out a mortar and pestle with every review copy, but Helen Gurley Brown’s Single Girl’s Cookbook never attracted the excitement or even the respect Helen had hoped it would win. Maybe it was the mishmash of recipes, maybe it was the haze of flirtatious prose, or maybe women just didn’t trust Helen as a cook to see them through. Women who liked personality-drenched cookbooks were buying The Graham Kerr Cookbook, by the Galloping Gourmet, which was based on Kerr’s TV series and became the best-selling cookbook of the year. And women who wanted to learn to cook bought Craig Claiborne’s Kitchen Primer, also published that year, which explained in simple steps how to prepare very good versions of classic dishes. The reviews were positive but perfunctory: Publishers Weekly called the book “lively and practical,” and the Chicago Tribune noted “clear directions and some very easy-to-get-down recipes.” Other reviewers joked about the writing, and one complained that there was no layer of pecan halves on top of the pecan pie. Helen never again published outside her comfort zone.
• • •
A writer from the National Catholic Register once asked Helen if Cosmopolitan encouraged women to think of themselves as sex objects. “I hope so,” said Helen. “It’s wonderful to be a sex object. I can’t think of anything more agreeable.” But it was 1981 when she fielded this question, and she didn’t sound girlish any longer; she sounded out of touch. During the next couple of decades, other women’s magazines ran stories on AIDS, rape, and sexual harassment, but Helen couldn’t bear the idea of associating sex with anything negative. She had put the sexual revolution at the center of her career, and as far as she was concerned, a bed with a man in it was still a precious thing. “I think date rape is highly overrated and exaggerated,” she told a reporter, and when she was asked how she would deal personally with someone who sexually harassed her, she said, “Flattery, flattery, flattery. ‘You’re fabulous and so attractive . . . but I don’t like it when you rub up close to me.’” By the time she turned seventy, newcomers such as Allure and Marie Claire were competing vigorously for readers and advertisers she had once controlled with ease. In January 1996, Hearst announced a change at the top of the magazine. Helen would surrender her job to Bonnie Fuller, the editor of Marie Claire, and accept a new title: editor in chief of Cosmopolitan’s international editions. “Age gets all of us,” Helen told Modern Maturity—not a magazine she would have courted back in her prime—but she continued working nearly to the end of her life, at a salary of $2 million a year, turning out three more books on the typewriter that had served her faithfully. She never switched to a computer.
The news of Helen’s death set off a controversy that would have delighted her. Boomers and millennials, journalists and academics, her critics and her admirers—everyone jumped in to argue about whether or not Helen Gurley Brown had been a feminist. Helen certainly thought she was. She published Cosmopolitan’s first article on the women’s movement in 1970, a piece by Vivian Gornick, who was at the start of her literary career and already one of the best-known feminist social critics in New York. Gornick’s essay had appeared a year earlier in the Village Voice, and Helen, who may have sensed that terms like “pippy-poo” would not do any favors to a story hailing the feminist revolution, worked over the prose with a relatively restrained hand. She did drop the title chosen at the Voice: no piece running in Cosmopolitan was ever going to be called “The Next Great Moment in History Is Theirs.” Helen’s version became “The Women’s Liberation Movement!” But a single astute article could not outweigh an editorial philosophy focused exclusively on pleasing the male; and feminist attacks on the magazine kept up for decades. Even so, Helen always spoke positively about the movement. When an interviewer wanted to know her reaction to “militant feminism,” she said she approved of it and was grateful to the rabble-rousers. “I think the militant feminists are the ones who got us this far,” she said. “If they had been Southern belles the whole thing would not have happened. I give them total credit.” Equal pay, equal opportunity, birth control, abortion, affordable child care—there was nothing in the feminist agenda she didn’t support with her whole heart, except what she insisted on seeing as hostility toward men. “And perhaps that’s where we and Women’s Lib part company,” she wrote in 1970. “We are pleasing men not because they DEMAND it or to get anything material from them but because we adore them, love to sleep with them, want one of our own, and there aren’t enough to go around!”
Helen was nearly fifty when she made this declaration—too old to change a belief that had sustained her personally and was giving her a glorious career. She still enjoyed being a girl; in fact, she had no idea how to be a woman, and she didn’t want to find out. Gloria Steinem, who was always Helen’s favorite feminist, begged her once to say something strong and positive about herself—not coy, not flirtatious, but something that reflected the serious, complicated person who was in there, under the wig and makeup. Gloria had glimpsed that person and wanted her to speak out. Helen tried her best, she really did. “I’m skinny!” she exclaimed. “I’m skinny!”
Afterword
Ever since I began working on this book, I’ve been aware of all the food stories that will never be told. The women in these pages were prominent in their time, and they’re still visible in ours; but most women don’t live that way. They never attract public attention, they don’t leave boxes of their personal papers to delight historians, and unless they happen to be unusually captivated by cooking and eating, they don’t write food memoirs. 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. What about everyone else? I’m thinking about women who don’t contribute to online recipe forums, who would be astonished at the idea that anybody was interested in the spaghetti they put in front of the family the other night, who think home life belongs at home, not out in public. And what about mediocre cooks, reluctant cooks, wildly conflicted cooks? What about the legions of women in every generation who believe that the whole topic of food is unimportant? Theirs are the food stories I wish I knew.
Here’s one I do know, because it’s my own. Maybe it seems jarring for a food writer to class herself with the innumerable silent women I’ve just mentioned, the ones who never bother to notice their relationship with food or simply back away from the whole subject. But my food story takes place well before I started writing professionally about life in the kitchen. I had always been fascinated with food, but there came a moment when I realized I was obsessed with it. No, I didn’t have an eating disorder. I had a cooking disorder.
Perhaps you’re familiar with the way culinary memoirs often devote a few pages to the author’s lifelong obsession with food. She’ll explain how she grew up with a discerning palate, a wondrous instinct for inventing recipes, a sense of joyful adventure at the very thought of a meal to be prepared. Well, my obsession was marked by none of those helpful attributes; I don’t have them even now. When I was obsessed—a feverish few months that began shortly after I got married—the pleasures of cooking were not only absent, they were inconceivable. Cooking for fun? Why not gravedigging for fun? I flailed away in the kitchen day after day for reasons entirely unrelated to dinner. I was trying to be married, that was all, and I didn’t know any other way to go about it.
Cooking never bothered me until after the wedding. Living with Jack beforehand, I cooked whatever I felt like making, we ate it uncritically, and that was that. But once we were actually married, this excellent system collapsed without warning. It was as if another woman had suddenly shown up and seized control of the kitchen. I never encountered her anywhere else; but every day, when it came time to think about dinner, she ma
terialized at my side and stayed right there at the kitchen counter with me, anxiously paging through recipes. Where on earth did they come from? I had never cooked such things in my life; they had names like “Skillet Supper” and “Italian Salad Boat.” Students of witchcraft would have identified her immediately as a diabolical familiar—the devil, that is, in a very good disguise—but unfortunately I didn’t know any students of witchcraft. It took a while before the grim truth began to seep across my consciousness. Here in my own home, brutally determined to undermine my convictions, my politics, my instincts, and my sacred honor, was a wife.
What She Ate Page 24