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!
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