Month: February 2017

Somewhere along one of my rambling internet research expeditions, Google Books’ agonizing snippet view gave me a glimpse of an interesting cookbook. The title alone hints at its vintage: “America Cooks: Favorite Recipes from 48 States.” 

When I got my hands on a copy my first impression was that, at 986 pages, this was a huge book. Encyclopedic, almost. Of course I flipped straight to the Maryland section. Some of it was contributed by Frederick Philip Stieff himself. What really intrigued me was the writing. It’s a style lost to time, one I can best describe as “post-vaudeville, tongue-in-cheek conversational.” When I found another book by the authors, entitled “10,000 Snacks,” I was not surprised to find contributions by H.L. Mencken, Gypsy Rose Lee and Bernard Sobel.

So who were the authors? “The Browns: Cora, Rose and Bob.” The Mother, Son & Daughter-in-Law trio published over a dozen cookbooks and I began to collect them.

Many months later I returned to my research on the Browns and was surprised to find that a biography had been written about Bob Brown. As it turns out, in addition to globe-trotting and collaborating on the cookbooks, Brown was a poet, a radical, a pulp fiction writer under editor H.L. Mencken, and the inventor of a hypothetical machine that foretold the e-reader.

I reached out to the biographer, who is a UMBC professor, to ask for a little more detail on the author of these quirky cookbooks.

“The Amazing Adventures of Bob Brown: A Real-Life Zelig Who Wrote His Way Through the 20th Century” by Craig Saper, Fordham Press

Can you, for the readers (cookbooks not being the sole focus of your book), put the cookbooks in context of Brown’s career – e.g. what might have brought him to enter that field?

Robert Carlton Brown, who later published as Bob Brown, and his mother Cora, had been interested in cooking, cuisine, and fine wines since they spent a year in New Orleans in 1912. They collected recipes and stories for many years afterward.

In 1926, the Browns (Bob and Rose) sold their international business newsletter business (with editions in Brazil, Mexico, and England); and the profits allowed Bob, Rose, Cora, and Bob’s son to travel the world for two years starting from their home in Brazil. In Africa, Asia, and Europe they collected many more recipes and stories. Even with all these recipes, they did not think to publish a cookbook. After the start of the Great Depression, they needed to publish cookbooks and party guides to make money.

The most successful cookbook of the 30 they published was “Cooking With Wine”, which was responsible for making wine legitimate for middle-class families and not just winos.

The Wine Cook Book (1945 edition)

In the biography, there is mention of some intrigue about Communist sympathies betrayed in the “Most for Your Money” cookbook, which of course seems somewhat far-fetched. But do you believe there is any influence of Brown’s politics on the cookbooks or have any examples of such?

When the Browns returned to the United States in 1932, they were in desperate need to make money, and they also worked to organize writers to get better deals for their work; Bob and Rose also went to live on a commune. The commune was affiliated with a labor college in Arkansas called Commonwealth College, and Bob and Rose taught there for a couple of years. The college had summer tours to the Soviet Union, which the Browns led. The college was threatened to be shut down because of scandalous behavior of the students especially women wearing pants, but the Browns helped start a letter writing campaign that included their celebrity friends, and it took years for the Arkansas legislature to close the college down. The Browns were not members of the communist party, but since before World War I, they were sympathetic to the democratic socialist ideals (Bob staged fund raising parties at New York City’s Webster Hall to help a radical magazine in 1916); if they were alive today, they would support Bernie Sanders, who hardly seems like the threat the “Red scare” suggested when the Brown’s cookbook was published by the Consumers Union, and which one reviewer worried that it was a way to put “Reds in your kitchen.” They were socialists, but they were also trying to make a living by publishing cookbooks.

Most for Your Money Cook Book (1938)

Have you ever tried any of the recipes? Do you have a favorite of the cookbooks?

One of Bob Brown’s great-grandchildren made a short film about the Browns and in it, she is listing the ingredients and showing someone (playing the role of Bob) cooking. I have not tried the recipes but I would be thrilled if someone would, and then post pictures and descriptions of the results. The recipes are a bit more decadent than today’s cookbooks with plenty of butter and booze.

Do you think the publication of those books changed the course of Brown’s life/career subsequently in any consequential way?

Oh my — yes, definitely. They would have starved without the revenue from those cookbooks. Even with the income, Bob was struggling financially in the last years of his life after Rose had passed away. The Browns’ often hilarious and rich stories are in the cookbooks, and in my biography of Bob Brown, I tried to include as many as possible, but there are more. Because they needed money, we got to tag along with them in adventures in eating, traveling, and living in more than a 100 cities around the world.

10,000 Snacks (1937)

Brown’s mother Cora seems like an interesting woman in her own right and it is interesting that he would choose to live/work with her later on in his career, do you have any additional insight/commentary on that?

After both his older brother and father died, Bob was Cora’s only surviving child (Bob’s other siblings had also died as very young children or as babies). So, Cora threw her energies into Bob’s career. He supported her throughout his long career, and he put up funds for her to start a restaurant in New York City in 1915. She wrote for the pulp magazines and was a part of the family enterprise to write cookbook after cookbook. She worried about Bob’s drinking especially during their world travels, and eventually, Bob stopped drinking completely because it was making him ill.

For someone like Brown who spent their early career cranking out pulp by the mile, how do you distinguish his sincere pursuits versus ‘just paying the bills?’

That seemingly easy question highlights a dilemma writers often face. If the Browns were alive today, they no doubt would have a cooking blog, maybe try to start a restaurant, and pitch an idea for a cooking show. They would also work to protect writers’ pay for work against those who expect everyone to work for free online. Bob published at least 8 experimental books of poetry; those were passionate and sincere pursuits, but even then he had to sell some copies to allow him to publish another volume. In reading the cookbooks and “The Amazing Adventures of Bob Brown: A Real-Life Zelig of the 20th Century” you can see the joie de vivre in the Browns’ lives, the fun of their parties, and the luxuriousness of their cooking, drinking, and partying. They were radical libertines and amazingly productive writers! The world was more fun with the Browns, and if the fun put food on the table all the better; as the title of one of Bob’s books exclaims: You Gotta Live!