Searching for Marian Tracy Information
Marian Tracy was a New York City newspaper food editor and the author of many cookbooks. Despite her prominence in the 1940s through the 1970s, little information is available about her. Her obituary was only a few paragraphs long. I hope to write a paper about her career.
This is what I have learned so far:
Marian Coward Tracy attended Miami University of Ohio and Randolph-Macon Women’s College. She was the food editor for New York World- Telegram and the Sun in the 1950s.
Tracy was the editor of the 1952 cookbook Coast to Coast, which featured the work of many food editors. She wrote: “The recipes in this collection have been gathered from all sections of the country by those local and vocal experts, the newspaper food editors, who have put these traditional and often half-forgotten recipes into a workable idiom for present-day cook, unfamiliar with the terse and sometimes cryptic instructions of our ancestors.” I spoke about the cookbook at the 2014 Food Studies Conference.
Here is a 1978 article about Tracy’s interest in “real food.”
She wrote many cookbooks—including several with her husband, Nino, who died in 1942. The most popular was Casserole Cookery, which was reissued more than ten times. In one version, there was an introduction written by Pulitzer Prize-–winning poet and social critic, Phyllis McGinley. She described the cookbook author as “the prophet of a new gospel—immensely stylish.”
I have this 1948 copy of her cookbook. It was her eighth printing of the book. Tracy came up with the idea after working at a bookstore and listening to customers constantly requesting a cookbook for casseroles, which was nonexistent. Also, as she told Associated Press Food Editor Cicely Brownstone, “I learned to take shortcuts in cooking because my husband took long cuts.”
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