Marion Cunningham (Kim Severson)
Marion Cunningham, a former California homemaker who overcame agoraphobia later in life to become one of America’s most famous and enthusiastic advocates of home cooking, died on Wednesday in Walnut Creek, Calif. She was 90.
Mrs. Cunningham, who had Alzheimer’s disease, was admitted to the John Muir Medical Center on Tuesday with respiratory problems, John Carroll, a family friend, said in confirming the death. She had been living at an assisted-care home in Walnut Creek, the small Bay Area city where she had raised her family.
“More than anyone else, she gave legitimacy to home cooking,” Michael Bauer, the executive food editor of The San Francisco Chronicle, said of Mrs. Cunningham. “She took what many people would say was housewife food and really gave it respect by force of her own personality.”
Mrs. Cunningham’s most enduring trait may have been her ability to make even novice cooks feel as if they could accomplish something in the kitchen. Indeed, she took many of them under her wing and drew from them for her popular book “Learning to Cook.”
She loved to go to the supermarket and peer into the baskets of startled strangers, whom she would then interview about their cooking skills. Indeed, she made it her life’s work to champion home cooking and preserve the family supper table.
“No one is cooking at home anymore, so we are losing all the wonderful lessons we learn at the dinner table,” she said in an interview in 2002.
It was a theme she focused on in the preface to “The Fannie Farmer Cookbook,” the classic American volume that she was hired to revise in the late 1970s.
“Too many families seldom sit down together; it’s gobble and go,” she wrote, “eating food on the run, reheating it in relays in the microwave as one dashes off to a committee meeting, another to basketball practice. As a result we are losing an important value. Food is more than fodder. It is an act of giving and receiving because the experience at table is a communal sharing; talk begins to flow, feelings are expressed, and a sense of well-being takes over.”
Marion Enwright was born in Los Angeles on Feb. 11, 1922, to Joseph Enwright and the former Maryann Spelta. She grew up as a Southern California beach girl, in her words, and graduated from high school in Los Angeles.
In 1942 she married Robert Cunningham, a medical malpractice lawyer, and moved to San Diego, where he was serving in the Marines. At a time when men were in short supply for many civilian jobs, she worked in a gas station for a while. They eventually settled in Walnut Creek, outside Oakland.
Mrs. Cunningham spent the first half of her adult life mostly raising her children, Mark and Catherine — who survive her — and tending to the family’s ranch home in Walnut Creek. And for much of that time she struggled with agoraphobia, a fear of open and public places. It was so intense at times that she could barely cross the Bay Bridge to San Francisco.
She also developed a drinking problem, and once she stopped, she became known for her love of a good cup of black coffee — sometimes ordered when everyone else was drinking Champagne.
Prompted by a friend’s invitation in 1972 to go to Oregon to attend cooking classes led by the renowned food writer James Beard, Mrs. Cunningham overcame her phobia and headed out of the state for the first time.
Mr. Beard took to this tall, blue-eyed homemaker, and for the next 11 years she was his assistant, helping him establish cooking classes in the Bay Area. The job gave her a ringside seat to a period in American cooking when regional food, organic produce and a new way of cooking and eating were just becoming part of the culinary dialogue. Her association with Mr. Beard also gave her the big break of her career, in the late 1970s, when he passed her name to Judith Jones, the well-known New York culinary editor, who was looking for someone to rewrite “The Fannie Farmer Cookbook.”
That project led to seven more cookbooks; her own television show, “Cunningham & Company,” which ran for more than 70 episodes, sometimes on the Food Network; and a longstanding cooking column for The Chronicle.
In 1989 she and a friend started the Baker’s Dozen, an informal group of San Francisco bakers. It grew to more than 200 members and led to another cookbook.
Like many others, Ruth Reichl, the author and former restaurant critic for The New York Times, came to regard Mrs. Cunningham as a mother figure.
“She was the glue that held the nascent food movement together,” Ms. Reichl said, “the touchstone, the person you checked in with to find out who was doing what all over the country.”
Mrs. Cunningham bought a Jaguar with her first royalty check from “The Breakfast Book,” one of her most enduring cookbooks. The Jaguar became identified with her, and she would drive it to a different Bay Area restaurant almost every night, sometimes logging 2,500 miles a month.
Along the way she collected a passel of friends who changed how America cooked and ate, including her close friend Chuck Williams, whose kitchenware company, Williams-Sonoma, was just getting started.
One of the people she discovered was a young Alice Waters, who was cooking organic and local food at a little restaurant in Berkeley, Calif., called Chez Panisse. Mrs. Cunningham took Mr. Beard to the restaurant in 1974, and he put it on the culinary map, marking the beginnings of California cuisine and the modern organic movement.
“She was always my biggest cheerleader,” Ms. Waters once said in an interview. “I just can see her even now with her coffee and coffeecake. That’s kind of where she liked to live.”
Plain-spoken and quick with a quip or a gentle jab, Mrs. Cunningham could cut through the puffery of fancy chefs and food writers. Once, after a food author spent the day watching her make pie crust, taking meticulous notes on how many times she cut and stirred, she called Ms. Reichl.
“He really is crazy, dear, don’t you think?” Ms. Reichl recalled her saying. “Nobody could make a decent crust following those directions.”
Her humor extended to her cookbooks. In one passage from “The Fannie Farmer Cookbook,” on how to crack fresh coconut, she suggested throwing it on a cement patio.
“That’s how monkeys do it,” she wrote, “and they are professionals.”
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Let me tell you a story about the old days. Way back in the 1980s, people didn’t cook at home very much. The Food Network hadn’t been born, and the notion that college students would host canning parties or intern on a farm was absurd.
Women with a feminist sensibility had fought hard to get out of the kitchen and into the workforce, and they certainly didn’t have a lot of extra time to teach their kids to cook. And men, at least many of them, had yet to fully embrace the joy of cooking.
Thus, an entire generation grew up not knowing how to cook for themselves.
Marion Cunningham, a tall, blue-eyed Californian who always wore her hair pulled back tight, strode into that gap and devoted 30 years of her life to righting the wrong. Christopher Kimball, the editor of Cook’s Illustrated, called her “the Katharine Hepburn of cooking.”
She died Wednesday at 90, after spending the last eight years lost in the fog of Alzheimer’s.
She was my friend, and here’s why she mattered to me and to a whole bunch of us who were lucky enough to sit at her table and eat waffles.
“It’s very tempting when we are old to become a missionary, to see the world as lacking,” she told me when I first met her. She was 77.
“I really don’t want to be guilty of that,” she continued. “I don’t want to be preachy. But I wish there were a national law that made everyone cook steadily for two months. Then, if they don’t like it, they can quit.”
After spending more than a decade helping James Beard be James Beard, she published an updated version of the classic Fannie Farmer cookbook in 1979 and then went on to write columns for The San Francisco Chronicle and The Los Angeles Times. Then she wrote a bunch more cookbooks. They were all dedicated to good-tasting recipes that could be made with supermarket ingredients. She tested them on an electric stove.
One of her last cookbooks was called “Learning to Cook.” It was an attempt to teach the clueless how to make themselves a decent meal. Her targets were people who thought “toss apples in a bowl” meant throwing the fruit across the kitchen.
To these people, “blanch” was the female lead in “A Streetcar Named Desire” and “working quickly” was perhaps the most terrifying phrase a recipe could contain. Substitute cornstarch for flour? Well, why not? They look the same.
Marion understood that kind of thinking, and the fear that comes from not being able to do an inherent if sometimes unrecognized human need. That is, to cook something nourishing and delicious for ourselves.
What she gave to some of us, though, was even deeper. It was a kind of spiritual nourishing, a mothering that was free from strings and guilt and expectations.
On the first day I met her, I walked down the long hallway in her Walnut Creek ranch house, filled with photos of her with Ruth Reichl and Danny Kaye and Alice Waters and Edna Lewis, all hung crooked and dusty in a long series of cheap frames, and sat in her kitchen.
That day, she told me she had quit drinking when she was 50. I was newly sober myself, and I generally walked around in those early days feeling as pink and vulnerable as a baby hamster. I told her as much, confessing my fear of failure at, well, pretty much everything.
“Dear, you seem pretty terrific to me,” she said.
It made me feel better in an instant, the way cooking myself something good to eat does. This was Marion’s super power.
Marion would think those last few paragraphs way too sentimental. So I’ll end my story with this, a poem by David Tanis, a New York Times Dining section columnist and former Chez Panisse cook, who wrote it about Marion for her 80th birthday. He called it “Marion Cunningham’s Rhyming Wisdom: A Partial Listing.”
1. I don’t mind driving near or far
Long as I’ve got my Jag-u-ar.
2. If you don’t find waking up too awful
Come on over for a waffle
3. It’s simple, really dear, not a chore
I make the batter the night before.
4. My friends like fancy salt from France.
I say, give good old Morton’s a chance
5. As for pie dough, there’s no mystery
Crisco’s earned its place in history
6. If only folks would dare to risk it,
Dinner’s better with a homemade biscuit
7. James Beard always liked my cooking
But he added things when I wasn’t looking
8. My dear this cake is quite a treat …
I do think I’d make it a tad more sweet.
https://cookbookoftheday.blogspot.com/2012/07/breakfast-book.html?m=0
Featherbed Eggs
- 6 slices white bread
- Salt and pepper to taste
- 1 ½ cups grated sharp cheddar, Gouda, provolone or Montery Jack cheese, or a combination
- 1 ½ cups milk
- 6 eggs
Butter the sides and bottom of a 9 x 13-inch baking dish. Arrange the slices of bread in the dish, trimming the edges, if necessary. Sprinkle the bread with a little salt and pepper. Sprinkle the grated cheese evenly over the bread.
Combine the milk and eggs in a bowl and briskly stir until the mixture is all one color and completely blended. Pour the milk mixture over the bread and cheese. Cover and refrigerate for at least 6 hours, or overnight.
Baking the Featherbed Eggs: Because the dish will be chilled when you are ready to bake it, start it in a cold oven and turn the thermostat to 350 degrees. Bake for 1 hour, or until the bread custard is puffy and lightly golden. Check at 45 minutes, in case your oven is a little hotter.
