When Cooking for Crowds first appeared in 1974, its recipes seemed radical for the times. The book’s author, Merry (Corky) White, was innovative, bold in her palate, and anything but prescriptive in style. As a young caterer, she aimed to turn catering into an art, to go beyond the standard presentation of ho-hum dishes like chicken tetrazzini. She wanted to dazzle her guests, and she insisted that the American palate is far more adventurous than most people make it out to be. Cooking for Crowds propelled readers on an eclectic gastronomic tour of the world, all the while reassuring them that there is no need to be anxious when cooking for a crowd, whether six people or fifty. And no need to be anxious about using unfamiliar ingredients! Corky convinced her readers that they could bake a great cake and enjoy it, too.
To situate Corky’s inspiring book, we must travel back in culinary time and recall the American palate of 1974, before any food revolutions had swept the country. French cuisine still held sway in upscale restaurants across the United States, where affuent diners could demonstrate their distinction by ordering foie gras and escargots—this was la grande cuisine classique, not the nouvelle cuisine just coming into vogue. Nationwide, the landscape was defined largely by French and continental restaurants, or fast-food and family joints. It is hard to imagine that dishes we now take for granted—Greek moussaka, Swiss fondue, Italian pasta primavera—were then considered exotic.
Only after the reforms of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act did hole-in-the-wall ethnic restaurants begin to appear with any frequency. These unprepossessing places promised adventurous eaters an expanded palate, an antidote to the predictable fare of most other restaurants. The general discomfort with foreign foods further eroded when Richard Nixon visited China in 1972. Television networks offered live broadcasts of the banquet Prime Minister Chou En-lai held in Nixon’s honor, triggering a national desire to eat “authentic” Chinese food, beyond the chop suey and chow mein of Chinese-American restaurants. Even so, Nixon’s visible befuddlement at the chopsticks in his hand underlined to viewers how foreign Chinese culinary culture really was.
It took the culinary revolution of the 1970s to definitively change people’s attitudes about foods, both foreign and local. In 1980, the New Yorker’s Calvin Trillin declared Henry Chung’s San Francisco Hunan Restaurant “the best restaurant in the world,” while Gilroy, California, held its second annual festival in celebration of the garlic for which it is famed. Hank Rubin’s Pot Luck restaurant in Berkeley had fomented revolution in the 1960s, followed in 1971 by Alice Waters’s Chez Panisse, whose many talented cooks went on to spread the gospel of good food throughout the country. The epicenter of esculent activity was Northern California—three thousand miles from the East Coast, where Corky White lived—but the shock waves quickly spread.
Those were heady times, and the social and political activism of the sixties was reflected in the ways people ate. The natural foods movement had brought an awareness of fresh food to the table. Palo Alto’s newly opened Good Earth restaurant transformed lackluster brown rice into tasty fare, as did the Moosewood Collective in Ithaca, New York. Celestial Seasonings came out with herbal teas that seemed astonishing (Americans apparently had never heard of tisanes). Anna Thomas’s Vegetarian Epicure lent vegetarianism cachet. But national culinary awareness still lagged, as evidenced by President Gerald Ford’s gaffe at the Alamo, when he publicly bit into a tamale still wrapped in its cornhusk. Our cultural cluelessness was at least somewhat mitigated by several excellent cookbooks that appeared in the early 1970s, all considered classics today: Paula Wolfert’s Couscous and Other Good Food from Morocco, Marcella Hazan’s The Classic Italian Cookbook, and Madhur Jaffrey’s An Invitation to Indian Cooking.
Corporate America did little to encourage the nation’s culinary sophistication. Test-kitchen developers focused on convenience instead. More women than ever were joining the workforce, and many were finding it difficult to get a good dinner on the table after a long day at work. The big food companies stepped in to help them, creating new products like Hamburger Helper (introduced in 1970) and Stove Top Stuffing (brought to market in 1972). Meanwhile, Mrs. Fields and Mr. Coffee wooed the American public with name brands of cookies and coffeemakers. Many women felt torn between ease and sophistication.
Enter Corky White, a Harvard graduate student. She didn’t have access to fields of garlic and artichokes, or to peach and apricot groves (which had not yet been paved over). Even though she was far from the food mecca of Berkeley, Corky shared the Californian spirit of exploration and fun. On a dare, she had begun cooking for Harvard’s Center for West European Studies in 1970, when she needed to save money toward graduate school. Each week, Corky prepared a lunch for fifty, and one or two dinners for twenty-five. As a single mother of a six-year-old, she was juggling a lot, but her daughter proved an expert helper, especially when she was allowed to toss billows of lettuce in bed sheets to dry.
The Center staff typed up all the recipes and made dittoed copies. One day, Erwin Glikes, the publisher of Basic Books, noticed the recipes when he came to lunch at the Center. After his meal, he secretly spirited the collection away, and some days later Corky got a phone call out of the blue: Glikes wanted to turn her recipes into a book. Corky was stunned that an intellectual publishing house would take such an interest in recipes, but the era encouraged visionaries. Erwin Glikes’s plan shows great verve and foresight at a time when the market for cookbooks was much more conservative than it is today. To enhance the book’s design, Glikes asked his friend Edward Koren to do the illustrations. Koren’s charming, often wacky line drawings contribute greatly to the book’s appeal in their animation of the vegetable world and the upending of natural scales. You can’t help smiling when you see two small men laboring to push a mighty rolling pin along.
The recipes for Cooking for Crowds were gathered from many sources—from friends and family, and especially from Corky’s travels. In the 1970s, she traveled several times to Nepal, to trek in the mountains and experience Nepalese food. A high sense of adventure spills over into her book. Corky never really left the community-minded spirit of the sixties behind, and her book conveys a relaxed, unconstrained approach. She wants people to enjoy themselves in the kitchen, to be bold and not worry about perfection. Recipes should not be daunting prescriptions, but guidelines, blueprints that allow for flexibility and experimentation. Above all, Corky believes, recipes should encourage cooks to play with new, vibrant flavors. Her self-assured and reassuring headnotes assuage any apprehension that incipient cooks might have about plunging in, trying new ingredients or cooking methods, or making meals for a multitude. Today’s readers are advised to remember how unfamiliar certain foods seemed in their day. Corky carefully defines “Syrian bread” (pita) and phyllo dough, tahini and tandoor ovens. She introduces readers to a foreign herb called “cilantro”: “Coriander is available in Spanish markets, where it is called ‘cilantro’ and in Chinese markets where it is called ‘Chinese parsley,’ ” she writes. Reading this book today, we can clearly appreciate the evolution of American taste, as well as the shifting meaning of the term “exotic.” If coriander was once defined by its Otherness, we can measure how far we’ve come.
Cooking for Crowds brought the wide world to people’s kitchens—well before such trendy food purveyors as Dean & DeLuca and The Silver Palate took New York City by storm. The book was ahead of its time, too, in its insistence on fresh ingredients, simply prepared, without fuss or pretension. Corky points out “the virtue of avoiding ready-made curry powder” and strikes a conversational tone with her readers when she gently proclaims that “the ‘sameness’ of commercial curry powder is to me quite boring.” Her mission is to convert even the “staunchest” cauliflower and sauerkraut haters into lovers of those foods, and she does so through tempting recipes for cauliflower soup and goulash. She disarms the most nervous of readers (could I ever possibly cook for fifty?!) with charming descriptions: just serve lemon mousse to your guests at the end of a spicy meal, because the bright citrus flavor “alerts the sodden senses.” Corky may admit to having last served Artichokes and Chick-peas Vinaigrette “at a mock Roman orgy, beside an entree of squab with truffed pâté stuffing,” but she hastens to add that the salad would be equally delicious served alongside a charcoal-broiled hamburger at a backyard barbecue.
The ultimate mantra in Cooking for Crowds is that pleasure should reign supreme. Though decades have passed since the book first appeared, it feels fresh. Its exuberance leaps from the pages. And this same exuberance keeps the recipes enticing, even if the times may have finally caught up and the recipes now represent familiar fare. In the end, who can possibly resist Charlotte Malakoff au Chocolat, which remains perfect “for a time when only pleasure matters”? Pleasure is precisely what this fortieth-anniversary edition promises a new generation of readers. And it delivers. I recommend this book to all kinds of crowds.
Darra Goldstein