With our food culture fixated on ‘chef as singular genius, driver of innovation and change,’ I’ve come to brag about how I prefer to value the contributions of home cooks. I like to tout and uplift cooking born of tradition and love -and yes- sometimes plain old drudgery. I make a show of respecting these unsung heroes and shunning the professionals.
But it’s never quite that simple, is it?
While a small portion of my recipes hail from named chefs and restaurants, perhaps an even bigger segment hail from a different type of professionals: home economists and dietitians. These cooks – usually women – provided countless recipes to corporate cookbooks and newspapers. They disseminated recipes through cooking classes. They also contributed quite a lot of recipes to community cookbooks.
I often don’t know I’ve chosen the recipe of a home economist until I’ve made the recipe and embarked on my research.
Mrs. Lyman C. Whittaker contributed this recipe for Rock Chowder to the 1976 “Ladies of St. Mary’s Cook Book,” a cookbook put out by the church of the same name on Duke of Gloucester Street in Annapolis. The book subtitle boasts “colonial flavor,” and many of the recipes are for local favorites like crab cakes, and this rockfish chowder. I was surprised that the recipe author was not originally from Maryland.
Mrs. Whittaker was born Gertrude Marie Speck in East Moline, IL on July 11, 1917. The Specks were a very socially prominent family, and young Gertrude received mentions in the paper throughout her youth for birthday parties, music and dance recitals, and Catholic clubs. The family had a cottage on Campbell’s Island in the Mississippi, where Gertrude frequently entertained friends. Honestly, the coverage of Gertrude’s social life in Illinois newspapers at times borders on gratuitous. The the Moline “Dispatch” even mentioned when she came home for the holidays in 1939.
Moline Dispatch, 1943