Word: irma
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...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...
...self-puffery but a simple statement of fact. A Joy of Cooking without a Rombauer or Becker at the helm seemed inconceivable, like Johnson's Dictionary without Dr. Samuel Johnson. For what mother and daughter remarkably accomplished was to filter a vast array of information through a personal style. Irma Rombauer's subtitle for the original 1931 Joy was A Compilation of Reliable Recipes with a Casual Culinary Chat. Her text justified this advertisement. Here was the author on serving alcohol to guests: "Most cocktails containing liquor are made today with gin and ingenuity. In brief, take an ample supply...
...rewritten Joy could realistically hope to capture the characteristic Rombauer-Becker tone. But neither could it be published at all without the permission and involvement of a family member, namely Ethan Becker, 52, Irma's grandson and Marion's son. As an owner of the copyright, he could authenticate a sequel with his imprimatur...
Soul Food is also feeling like a hit. The weekend it opened, all eyes were on DreamWorks' $70 million first feature, The Peacemaker (George Clooney! Nuclear terrorism!). But when the box-office numbers were tallied, a little-heralded African-American family drama named Soul Food (Irma P. Hall! Sweet-potato pie!) had not only grabbed the No. 3 position with $11.2 million in ticket sales but had also scored the highest per-screen average of any film in wide release: $8,363. And by last Thursday, Soul Food had taken in $3 million more, bringing its gross to more than...
...that it pushes emotional buttons with all the subtlety of a poke in the baby-back ribs. It could be a distillation of some unaired black soap opera, so predictable are the plot contrivances--adultery, pregnancy, illness, missing money--and so cartoonishly are the characters drawn. Mother Joe (Irma P. Hall) is warm, loving, doomed. One daughter, Maxine (Vivica A. Fox), is heart-smart and, since she's a mother, a font of family wisdom. Another, Teri (Vanessa L. Williams), a successful lawyer who has subsidized most of the family's extravagances, is, of course, the villain of the piece...