Word: cookbooks
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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First, procure a copy of America's best-loved cookbook and shred it thoroughly. Add to the mix one cookbook scion, one volatile editor and a panel of food experts from across the country. Season with $5 million. Stir in large cups of envy, greed, backbiting and publishing gossip. Let simmer over high heat for three years, producing plenty of hurt feelings and howls of outrage from some of the food experts. Should serve 500,000 helpings and maybe a lot more if garnished with big, crisp publicity lettuce...
...reveals anything valuable about their culture--and surely it does--then the dog-eared, gravy-stained pages of the old Joys are an invaluable resource for future historians. With 14 million copies in print, it is not cookbookery's commercial champion; that title belongs to the Betty Crocker basic cookbook, which has moved roughly 60 million copies. But Joy earned pride of place as the one indispensable kitchen reference source, and a fail-safe graduation or wedding present besides. It told beginning or uncertain cooks how to, among everything else, set a table, fillet a fish and turn a squirrel...
Updating Joy may prove monstrously profitable, as well as an idea whose time has come. Actually doing so proved monstrously tricky. For aside from its encyclopedic thoroughness, much of the cookbook's perennial appeal has stemmed from the distinctive, comforting, we're-all-in-this-together voices of two women: Irma Rombauer, who wrote and self-published the original Joy in 1931, and her daughter Marion Rombauer Becker, who first served as her mother's helper and later assumed full custodianship of the ongoing endeavor. Dying of cancer, Marion concluded her acknowledgments to the 1975 edition in a valedictory manner...
...dollars provided a satisfactory answer for all the parties involved. Ethan is hence listed on the cover and title page along with Irma and Marion as the author of the Joy of Cooking. But how many verses, people in publishing and in the intensely competitive world of chefs and cookbook writers wondered, often loudly, did Ethan really sing for his supper...
...Jane Fonda? I occasionally wonder as I consider taping over my Prime Time Workout cassette to record ER. She's been basking happily the past six years in the shadow of her mogul husband Ted Turner (vice chairman of Time Warner), watching the buffalo roam and writing a cookbook (perhaps the only one with a section on eating disorders). Now, however, she has left the deer stand (she hunts with Ted) and returned to the klieg lights. What lured her was a pressing need--to reduce teen pregnancy--and an enemy, conservative Republicans who attached strings to $250 million...