I am currently reading the book, Appetite City which is a culinary history of New York City. Included in the book is the story of Craig Claiborne – the longtime food editor and critic at the New York Times beginning in the 1950s. (He took over from Jane Nickerson who wrote about food news in rationing and then post-World War II era.) This is the author’s take: “From scratch, Claiborne created serious newspaper food journalism and elevated food to the status of news. This innovation coincided with big changes in consumer journalism. Editors gradually woke up to the fact that readers cared just as much about soft subjects like home…

I just received my copy of Associated Press Food Editor Cecily Brownstone’s 1972 cookbook. She begins with a section called “Confessions of a Food Editor.” It was written in a Q-and-Q format. One of the questions was: “Where do you get your recipes?” She responded: “From the same place Fannie Farmer (whose cookbook was first published in 1896) got hers – from the cooks of her own period and those who went before plus her own ingenuity. When I was till new to the food business, I once complained that all recipes stem from the same basic rules and so a food writer must inevitably rely on those. When Irma…

This past week I interviewed Tina Daniell – the daughter of Milwaukee Journal women’s page journalist Constance Daniell. Tina mentioned that her mother had worked on the Breta Griem cooking show “What’s New in the Kitchen?” on WTMJ in the 1950s. (Griem is on the left in the above 1954 photo.) It was on the air from 1949 until 1962 and has been described as one of the oldest cooking shows in the U.S. Griem also wrote the above cookbook which I just ordered. I am curious to see how she defined Midwestern food compared to Jeanne Voltz’s defining food of the South. I am curious about what has been…