Alice Richardson, Redux

     Oh the sociology of the kitchen!  Writing about popularity of The Joy of Cooking, Ann Mendelson observes "The Depression did not initiate the departure of the hired cook from American households...but it speeded up the process for middle class families." Both The Joy of Cooking and Just A Minute can be read as persuasive essays aimed at convincing middle class women that cooking was neither an impossible nor a menial task.
    The two cookbooks converged in 1961, when Alice was asked to edit the latest edition of what was by then the work of both Irma S. Rombauer and her daughter Marion Rombauer Becker.  According to Mendelson, Alice was remembered by the Rombauer-Beckers as "Having had several martinis before lunch and gone to sleep afterward," and they didn't find her of much help. As my copy of Joy is a later edition, there is no clue there.
     I do know that I was taken with her apartment in New York. In the narrow entrance hallway, she'd had someone paint a trompe d'oeil scene.  She was an editor at Look Magazine and wrote a book about hair and make-up which ought to be useful for anyone making movies about Manhattan in the 1960s. She placed my sister and I in a feature about permanents for children in Look that also involved Liza Minelli. On the tip of Long Island, near Montauk, she and her husband built a beach colony of modern design and furnishings, and there they retired.
     One more thing about the biscuits: Alice and my grandmother favored using a mix of bacon grease and butter instead o Crisco!
   
   

The Subject Was Biscuits

     What began as reflections on my mother's cooking has turned to ferreting out the identity of cook book author, copywriter, editor and family friend, Alice Wilson Richardson.  The subject was biscuits.  In my experience, the taste for biscuits at every meal runs deepest in the South.  My Texas-born-South-Carolina -bred grandmother's approval of Alice's friend chicken and Alice's tendency to include biscuits in her menus hinted at shared roots.
     Internet sleuthing turned up the next clue, in a New York Times obituary. It was a connection I'd never made. Turns out that Harriet Sappington, a movie actress and one of my grandmother's dearest New York pals, was Alice Wilson Richardson's sister.  Factoids like that are key to successful Ancestry.com research, and sure enough, I found Alice and her family. She was born in Florida and grew up in Baltimore!  (To put the icing on the cake in a surreal fashion, her baby book, with locks of hair and baby pictures intact,  turned up for sale on Alibris. )
     This explains her comment "The more proficient you become, the more you will be able to measure to taste in the Southern Mammy tradition." My grandmother was so reliant on "The Help" that she could barely boil water.  Alice, moving to a northern city,  pioneered working women's cooking as entertainment.
     I'm still puzzled about the biscuits.  She doesn't offer a recipe for them. "Make biscuits from prepared mix, following instructions of box." Biscuit recipes are simple, consisting of flour, sugar, salt, baking powder, shortening and milk or water.  So why a mix?   Necessity! Turns out, according to The Williamsburg Cookbook, from that venerable Virginia city, that homemade biscuit mixes were born before boxed biscuit mix. Mrs. Booth's Biscuit Mix produces 4 1/2 cups of mix, which you keep in the refrigerator. To make 6 biscuits, you measure out a cup of the mix and add enough milk or water to moisten. (Mrs. Booth's mix uses 3 cups self rising flour: 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder: 1 Tablespoon sugar: 1 cup shortening combined with pastry blender.)
     The biscuit mysteries solved, I'll next turn to Alice's most famous undertaking, and how she brought me my 15 minutes of fame at an early age.