Business & Tech
At Stone Barns, Author Amanda Hesser Describes 150 Years of Recipe Publishing
Once New York Times readers became aware that Hesser was working on a book about Times' recipes, she was deluged by recommendations for four years.
Amanda Hesser, former New York Times food editor, devoted six years of her life to cooking her way through the New York Times’ recipe archive creating what may one day become a cookbook classic.
In The Essential New York Times Cookbook, she describes more than 1,000 of the paper’s best recipes, many dating back at least two decades and some being over 100 years old. The recipes are arranged chronologically.
In a special program conduced on May 14 and arranged by the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, Hesser described how readers' correspondence and e-mails helped her and her assistant, Merrill Stubbs, whittle more than 10,000 recipes down to a more manageable 1,400 possibilities—all of which were cooked, tasted and evaluated.
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Many of the letters had enclosed the senders' tattered and soiled original recipes cut from the Times and as the collection grew, Hesser and her assistant began referring to it as the "stain" file.
Hesser also answered questions from a single panelist Gabrielle Langholtz, Editor of Edible Brooklyn and Edible Manhattan, as she explained how the cookbook's content was influenced by the reader's comments. By coincidence, both Hesser and Langholtz had received 2011 James Beard Foundation awards a week earlier for their achievements in the cooking profession.
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One of the most popular recipes to be printed in the Times, Hesser said, was created by David Eyres and published in the April 10, 1966 edition for oven-baked pancakes—also known as German pancakes or Dutch babies.
But the most recommended item is the purple dessert — plum torte – praised by 265 readers. Oddly enough, it contains a mistake; the ingredient list wrongly calls for a tablespoon of cinnamon—that should be a teaspoon.
Desserts outranked most other types of dishes in terms of numbers of recommendations by readers.
Hesser is also the author of Cooking For Mr. Latte: A Food Lover's Courtship with Recipes and The Cook and the Gardener. Both books received Literary Food Writing awards from the International Association of Culinary Professionals.
The 960-page The Essential New York Times Cookbook weighs 4.5 pounds. It was published in October, 2010 by W.W. Norton & Company.
