Karen Hess, 88, Dies; Culinary Historian Who Challenged Standards
By ERIC ASIMOV
Published: May 19, 2007
The New York Times
Karen Hess, an American culinary historian who brought an academic rigor
to the study of recipes, cooking techniques and ordinary American
kitchen practices, died Tuesday in Manhattan. She was 88.
She died after suffering a stroke the week before, her son Peter Hess
said.
Ms. Hess, known as a kind but combative personality, did not shrink from
taking on the icons of American cookery, who she felt presented a false
picture not only of the quality of American food and cooking but also of
its history.
Her first book, “The Taste of America,” written with her husband, John
L. Hess, and published in 1977, established right away that the couple
would not be joining the chorus of affirmation that had characterized
the American food establishment.
“We write with trepidation,” the book opened. “How shall we tell our
fellow Americans that our palates have been ravaged, that our food is
awful, and that our most respected authorities on cookery are poseurs?”
The book went on to lament the loss of pleasure in dining, rue the
ascension of the processed food industry and attack, among others, Craig
Claiborne, James Beard and Julia Child as knowing little about cooking
and even less about culinary history.
“Her point was that when they claimed they were talking about history,
they didn’t know what they were talking about,” said Andrew F. Smith,
who teaches food history at the New School and edited “The Oxford
Companion to American Food and Drink” (Oxford University Press, 2007).
“She brought rigor to an examination of culinary history that hadn’t
been there before.”
Ms. Hess was not a trained historian, but she fervently believed in the
im****tance of primary sources and demanded that professional historians
apply the same techniques to the study of the household that they did to
the study of wars and presidents.
“She always believed that history was written in our daily lives, not
just in battles won and court cases, which was how traditional
historians had always written things,” said John Martin Taylor, a
cookbook author who has chronicled the food of the Carolina Lowcountry.
In 1981 she transcribed and annotated “Martha Wa****ngton’s Booke of
Cookery,” a manuscript of family recipes that had been used in the
Wa****ngton family for more than 50 years and revealed numerous details
about life in a Colonial household.
“To the best of my knowledge, that was the first real attempt at pulling
together a primary source in the field of culinary history and then
explaining it,” Mr. Smith said. “There wasn’t anybody out there before
her.”
Among her other works were “The Carolina Rice Kitchen: The African
Connection” (University of South Carolina Press, 1992); an annotated
version of “Mary Randolph’s ‘Virginia Housewife’ ” (University of South
Carolina Press, 1983), a popular 19th-century cookbook; and her
annotation of “What Mrs. Fisher Knows about Old Southern Cooking”
(Applewood Books, 1995), one of the oldest known African-American
cookbooks, originally published in 1881.
Karen Lost was born in Blair, Neb., a Danish community, on Nov. 11,
1918. Her name was pronounced CAR-inn, in the Scandinavian fa****on. She
majored in music at San Jose State University in California, when it was
a teacher’s college, and she met her future husband in San Francisco,
where he was a longshoreman. Later, Mr. Hess, who wrote for many years
for The New York Times, was posted in Paris for nine years in the late
1960s and early ’70s. It was there, Peter Hess said, that she became
particularly interested in food.
Mr. Hess died in 2005. In addition to her son Peter, she is survived by
another son, Michael Hess of the Bronx, and a daughter, Martha Hess of
Ossining, N.Y.
Was she herself a good cook? “All children like to think their mother’s
a good cook,” Peter Hess said, “but she really was.”
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