The Best from Helen Corbitt's Kitchens (Evelyn Oppenheimer Series, 1, Band 1) - Hardcover

Corbitt, Helen

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1574410768 ISBN 13: 9781574410761

Verlag: University of North Texas Press,U.S., 2000

Inhaltsangabe

Declared the Best Tastemaker of the Texas Century by Texas Monthly

Stanley Marcus declared Helen Corbitt “the Balenciaga of Food.” Earl Wilson described her simply as “the best cook in Texas.” Lyndon B. Johnson loved her stroganoff and wished she would accompany him—and Lady Bird—to the White House to run the dining room.

Helen Corbitt is to American cuisine what Julia Child is to French. Corbitt’s genius was in presentations of new and unusual flavor combinations, colors, and even serving temperatures. She insisted on the finest, freshest ingredients, served with impeccable style. As Director of Food Services for Neiman Marcus, she traveled widely, bringing recipes back to tantalize Texans’ tastebuds.

An Irish red-head born in New York and raised with Edwardian rules and grace, Corbitt lassoed appetites across Texas when she moved there in 1931 from her job as dietitian at Cornell Medical Center in New York City to manage the tea room at the University of Texas. She was lured to the Houston Country Club before operating the tearoom at Joske’s department store in Houston and had started her own catering business when the Driskill Hotel called her back to Austin.

Stanley Marcus “courted” her for eight years until she finally accepted his offer to direct his Dallas store’s lunchtime oasis. She then dazzled celebrities and dignitaries who flocked to the famed Zodiac Room at Neiman Marcus for tantalizing cuisine.

Now, you can savor Helen Corbitt all over again—or perhaps for the first time—through a brand new Helen Corbitt cookbook. In The Best from Helen Corbitt’s Kitchens, Patty MacDonald serves up more than 500 favorite recipes from Helen Corbitt’s Cookbook, published in 1957, Helen Corbitt’s Potluck (1962); Helen Corbitt Cooks for Company (1974); Helen Corbitt Cooks for Looks (1967); and Helen Corbitt’s Greenhouse Cookbook , published after her death in 1978, as well as many never before published recipes, many from her cooking schools.

Vintage photographs spice up a chapter on Helen’s life written from interviews with Stanley Marcus, men and women who attended Corbitt’s cooking classes, her personal friends, and her employees at the Driskill Hotel in Austin and the Zodiac Room at Neiman Marcus.

Corbitt's memory still lives through an older generation of admirers, who will want the book for themselves and as gifts for their offspring to keep her precious culinary heritage alive. Good cooks of all ages will recognize the value of these recipes. Corbitt’s recipes are from an era of honest delectable food.

TheDallas Morning News columnist Dick Hitt wrote that Corbitt was “a no-nonsense woman . . . capable of humor, who often . . . used it as she would a pungent spice: for hinting at the substance of a point . . . a curious combination of elegance and gusto, impatience and painstaking perfectionism, femininity and jaunty zest . . . subtle and imperious, ebullient and unerringly correct. . . . She was a bouillabaisse of a person, part administrator, part hostess, part duchess and part Mother Superior.”

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Patty Vineyard MacDonald, a home economist from Oklahoma A&M married to a West Pointer, has revived recipes combined with biography in Long Lost Recipes of Aunt Susan and Spiced with Wit: Will Rogers' Tomfoolery and More Aunt Susan Recipes. A member of the International Association of Culinary Professionals and American Southern Food Institute, she and her husband live in Hot Springs Village, Arkansas.

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The Best from Helen Corbitt's Kitchens

By Patty Vineyard MacDonald

University of North Texas Press

Copyright © 2000 Patty Vineyard MacDonald
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-57441-076-1

Contents

Foreword, 
Preface, 
Helen Corbitt's Story, 
Recipes:, 
Appetizers, 
Beverages, 
Soups and Stews, 
Breads, 
Yeast Breads, 
Quick Breads, 
Salads and Dressings, 
Poultry and Stuffings, 
Meats, 
Beef, 
Veal, 
Pork, 
Lamb, 
Fish and Seafoods, 
Entrée Sauces, 
Cheese and Eggs, 
Vegetables and Cooked Fruits, 
Potatoes, Grains and Pasta, 
Desserts, 
Dessert Sauces, 
Ice Creams, Ices and Frozen Desserts, 
Cakes and Icings, 
Pies and Pastries, 
Cookies, 
This and That, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Helen Corbitt's Story

With little more than soufflés and sass, Helen Corbitt became a food legend. This brash transplanted Yankee firebrand waged her own revolution on the naive palates of hungry Texans. She once claimed to have brought elegance to the Lone Star State, an imagined slur that caused the Texas food writers to rise up in wrath. "I couldn't believe the food they were eating," she said about her early days in Texas. "Chicken fried steak, I couldn't eat one yet. Everything overcooked, salads over-dressed." Inevitably, her innovations came to define our culinary standards and this outlander, hatched in the northern woods, was eventually named one of the ten most influential women in Texas.

Stanley Marcus, scion of the famous Dallas mercantile family and a renowned taste-maker himself, declared Helen "the Balenciaga of Food," referring to the great post-war Spanish fashion designer known for classic lines and elegance. Earl Wilson described her simply as "the best cook in Texas." She was the 1968 recipient of the solid gold Escoffier plaque from the Confrérie de la Chaîne des Rôtisseurs, the world's oldest gourmet society, founded in 1248. It is unclear how she managed to keep their requisite ancient vow "never to desecrate a roast by cooking it in any other way than on a turning spit." She was also an honorary member of the exclusive gourmet society Confrérie des Chevaliers du Tastevin, which resulted in her assessment "the Châine has more fun."

The professional honor Helen Corbitt most treasured was the Golden Plate Award given her by the Institutional Food Service Manufacturers' Association in 1961. She was the first woman thus honored by her peers. Skidmore College awarded a Doctor of Letters degree to its distinguished alumna and trustee. The University of Dallas presented her its coveted Athena Award, not for her cooking, but for her indomitable spirit and impeccable character. These two attributes served her well, for the road to international fame led from hospital dietetics to conquering Texas, to international travels, authorship and cooking schools and on to directing the restaurants of Neiman Marcus during its most glamorous days.

High Buttoned Shoes and Morals

Helen Lucy Corbitt was born in Benson Mines, New York, in 1906. During her childhood, her father was a prosperous attorney-businessman and her mother had her own dressmaking business, "but we always had good cooks, and mother baked her own bread." Her mother's artistic bent was reincarnated in Helen's unique food presentations, for which she relied on esthetic combinations and contrasts of color, texture and sometimes even serving temperatures. She remembered her proper Edwardian upbringing as a time when quality was a password in food, clothes, discipline and lifestyle.

Looking back, Helen recalled the first dishes she learned to cook were those universal childhood favorites: macaroni and cheese combined with enough egg and milk to bake into an almost-custard and, when she was seven years old, "June Cake," a kissin' cousin to a pound cake. She liked macaroni and cheese with creamed potatoes so much that she prepared that identical dinner every time the cook had a day off. She later reported that her father wouldn't have given even odds that she could make it in the food service business because he was sure that menu was the extent of her talent. "Food was important at our house," she said. "At home in upstate New York we cooked with coal. You know, I don't think pot roast ever tasted as good as when it was cooked in a coal stove." Helen always claimed that she never could best her mother when it came to making chocolate pie.

The Skidmore Coed

Helen earned a BS degree in Home Economics in 1928 from Skidmore College, located in the lovely Victorian spa and thoroughbred racing town of Saratoga Springs, New York. The school, now a prestigious independent liberal arts college with 2,100 men and women studying on its modern campus, was the inspiration of Lucy Skidmore Scribner, who started a school in 1903 to teach young women to sew and cook and to instruct them in the art of gracious living. In her acceptance speech for her Doctor of Letters Degree, Helen said that she had chosen Skidmore a half-century earlier because "it quietly let a few people know it had extremely high standards.... True we were housed in rickety old buildings, mine had a rope coiled under the bed in case of fire. I have no doubt it was used at other times." She credited the school with having shown her how important it is throughout life to learn to distinguish the excellent from the second-rate and to care about the difference.

She had wanted to become a doctor, but after college the Depression detoured her into the dietary kitchen. Her father had lost everything he owned, even the family home. Her first job was as therapeutic dietitian at Presbyterian Hospital in Newark, New Jersey, and a short time later she became administrative dietitian at Cornell Medical Center in New York City. In those days interns received only about ten dollars a month, but they and their families had the privilege of eating in the doctors' cafeteria once a week. The young doctors claimed that Helen's food did more to build that medical center than did the illustrious faculty.

"Deep in the Heart of ... Texas"?

Helen needed a more creative outlet than hospital dietetics and soon she was tramping the streets of New York seeking another job. Nobody but Helen could see beyond her hospital work. The only job offer she snared was to teach large quantity cooking and tea room management at the University of Texas in Austin. She didn't want to accept the job. "I said, 'Who the hell wants to go to Texas?' Only I didn't say hell in those days. I learned to swear in Texas," and "to tell a cockroach from a scorpion." She had a long way to go, but still, a job was a job in those lean years. She soon discovered that her Texas students had learned nothing more than how to make fancy sandwiches. "I had to teach those people how to cook!"

Adjusting to her new home was not easy for this strong-willed young Irish redhead. She hated Texas! After two weeks in Austin, she was asked to do a convention dinner using only Texas products. "What I thought of Texas products wasn't fit to print," she later confessed. Almost in defiance, she concocted for that dinner a mélange of garlic, onion, vinegar and oil mixed in with black-eyed peas. She called it "Texas Caviar," and Neiman Marcus later put it up in cans that Texans ordered by the case [see recipe on page 39].

She was entertaining thoughts of going back home to "God's country," when the Houston Country Club offered her a job that came with an apartment and a decent salary....

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of North Texas Press,U.S.
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2000
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1574410768
• ISBN 13: 9781574410761
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 416
• Herausgeber: Macdonald Patty Vineyard
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar