Jane Nickerson & the United States of Arugula
The popular book, the United States of Arugula, includes several references to the New York Times first food editor, Jane Nickerson.
In it, author David Kamp described the 1950s “emergence of a true food establishment in America, a small group of New York-based sophisticates who, via newspaper columns, magazine work, and cookbooks, had national even international reach.” He included in this group James Beard, McCalls’s food editor Helen McCully, Associated Press food editor Cecily Brownstone, Clementine Paddleford of the Herald Tribune and Nickerson. He wrote that the members of this group, “kept one another’s counsel, exchanged gossip, and stood united in opposition to the quick-bake, canned-soup mores of the domestic scientists.”
In that book, Kamp described the initial relationship between Nickerson and Claiborne, based on a profile of Claiborne that Nickerson wrote. Kamp’s version is that Claiborne, back from a Swiss cooking school, called Nickerson and pitched a profile about himself. According to Kamp, “Nickerson took the bait.” This statement is misleading. Nickerson had to write regular stories and had to have been continually looking for story ideas. Writing about a local resident about cooking would have fit the news values of her position. The profile is informative, not puffery.
Nickerson wrote: “Claiborne’s interest in fine cooking began when he was a child in Indianola, Mass. His mother was an outstanding cook in the Southern tradition. He came from a home, where, as he put it ‘elaborate food preparation was not unknown.’”
You May Also Like
