Helen Corbitt and what Texans ate

 

Helen Corbitt

Some of you may remember I’ve been off and on trying for three or four years to write a book about Helen Corbitt, legendary doyenne of food service at Neiman Marcus. My effort didn’t work for a variety of reasons, one among them few people thought my idea was as interesting as I did (hat tip to Travis Snyder of Texas Tech Press who did like the idea). My thesis was and is that she came at an interesting time in the history of food in the US.

A native of upstate New York and a trained dietician, Corbitt came to Texas in 1940 to teach at the University of Texas at Austin. She was dismayed to find, as Prudence McIntosh wrote for Texas Monthly, “no artichokes, no fresh raspberries, no herbs except decorative parsley, only beef (chicken-fried, barbecued, or well done), potatoes (fried or mashed and topped with a glop of cream gravy), and wedges of iceberg with sweet orange dressing. Fruit salad meant canned pears or pineapple with a dollop of mayonnaise and a grating of cheddar cheese. Canned asparagus was a remarked-upon delicacy, as were Le Sueur canned peas.^”

She moved on to the Houston Country Club, then a brief stint at Joske’s department store, and next the Driskill Hotel in Austin. Stanley Marcus began offering her a generous position at Neiman’s long before1955, when she finally accepted.

Meanwhile it was an era when forces were encouraging women to get out of the kitchen, to shortcut cooking, use prepared food and modern appliances, free themselves from the drudgery of the apron. Food critic Poppy Cannon published The Can-Opener Cookbook in 1951; Peg Bracken followed with The I Hate to Cook Cookbook in 1960. During the fifties, manufacturers were busy finding new consumers for prepared food since the military no longer needed as many MREs, and appliance manufacturers came up with appliances that practically prepared the entire meal. Futurists predicted housewives would soon be able to put an entire meal on the table in less than fifteen minutes.

Corbitt’s advice to housewives, however, was “Get back in the kitchen.” (She actually saved at least one marriage with that advice.) She believed in fresh ingredients, tasteful presentation, and careful combination of flavors. That chicken bouillon that is still served in the Zodiac? It took hours of cooking. Her signature dish, marinated black-eyed peas (also called Texas caviar) marinated at least two days before service. There was no instant food in her repertoire. One of her battles in her effort to teach Texans how to eat was the “al dente war”—she believed overcooking sapped vegetables of their flavor and health benefits. Everything from green beans to asparagus should be crisp. In a way, her cooking, rich with butter and cream, paved the way for James Beard and Julia Child.

Corbitt was a feisty, red-haired Irish woman with a temper. Stories abound about her tenure at Neiman’s, her friendships with everyone from President  Lyndon B. Johnson and his Lady Bird to the Prince of Wales, her occasional bursts of temper and outspoken moments.

Corbitt’s legacy lives on in her five cookbooks, which are still in print. Yet today I doubt even Dallas residents, except those of my generation, recognize her name. In her retirement, she traveled and lectured all over the South and Southwest, but she had almost no television presence, as Beard and Child did, and her reputation, while not limited to Texas, was pretty much regional.

I still think her story is interesting, and her accomplishments deserving of wider attention. Hmmm. The books is not going to fly, but I have submitted an article to a historical magazine (that the fifties is historical still boggles my mind). And I’ll keep thinking of ways to tell Corbitt’s story. No, I don’t see a novel in it.

Want to try a recipe? Google Helen Corbitt’s marinated black-eyed peas. If recipes tell you to add a lot of vegetables, move on. Her recipes has peas and onions.

 

Farewell to elegance

 

Marshall Field & Company
State Street, downtown Chicago

Lunch at Neiman Marcus has always been a special treat for me. That demitasse of consommé and the popover with strawberry butter. I once tried to make that and ended with globules of butter floating unattractively in strawberry jam. Clearly, I need the restaurant.

I’ve been doing some research lately on Helen Corbitt, the cook—she never called herself a chef—who oversaw Neiman’s food service from 1955 to 1969 and elevated the food to world class. Inevitably I’ve read a lot about Stanley Marcus and the whole history of that specialty store. So, when the corporations that now own Neiman’s announced almost a year ago that they filed for bankruptcy protection, I felt sad for the demise of yet another of the few bastions of elegance I’ve known in my life.

Years ago, I had a Neiman Marcus charge account, had my hair cut in their salon, dined in Fort Worth Zodiac frequently. For several reasons, I’m not so much of a customer anymore, but Neiman’s will always represent elegance to me. And I find the store’s history as a family business fascinating—sort of the ultimate success of a mom-and-pop store. It was founded in the first decade of the twentieth century by salesman Herbert Marcus and his sister, Carrie Marcus Neiman, and stayed in the family under the legendary Stanley Marcus until the 1970s when Mr. Stanley stepped down as chairman of the board. A series of leveraged buyouts saw it change owners frequently, and my unsubstantiated guess is that prices went up while quality went down. No more the philosophy that any sale was only a good sale for Neiman’s if it was a good sale for the customer. The whole atmosphere changed, and to me became less welcoming.

I’m grateful Fort Worth still has Neiman’s—in a new location, yet—and I can go have a demitasse of consommé and a popover with my chicken salad for lunch. But it isn’t the same. Somehow, I feel quality has become crassly commercial.

I don’t think any such heavy thought occurred to me when Chicago’s Marshall Field & Co. was purchased by Macy’s in 2003 and essentially disappeared. I remember, again, a sense of sadness. I last lunched at the original store with a friend in the ‘90s, and we found the famous Walnut Room, the classic upscale restaurant, a bit shabby. Perhaps elegance doesn’t always last.

But that store on State Street was my childhood playground. My dad, a physician, had his office on the seventeenth floor of the Marshall Field Annex, and you could go under the Wabash Avenue from store to annex. I could roam the store at a fairly young age, and as a teenager, I’d ride the “IC” (Illinois Central commuter train) downtown to Field’s by myself. I could lead you blindfolded to every department in the store, though I was especially fond of the teen apparel section and the restaurants. I liked The Verandah better than the Walnut Room. Then again, I knew where in the budget basement they sold hot dogs and something called a chocolate frosty.

When I wrote The Gilded Cage, about Bertha Honoré (Cissie) Palmer and her husband, Potter, I delved a bit more into the origins of Field’s. The store traces back to a dry goods store on Chicago’s Lake Street, opened in 1857. It went through several iterations, a longtime partner, and at least two devastating fires, before it finally became Marshall Field and Co. in 1881 and later moved into its twelve-story, opulent headquarters at State and Randolph just after the turn of the twentieth century. Want to learn more? Read What the Lady Wants, by Renee Rosen.

Obviously, I learned a lot more about the Palmer House from my research for my novel, The Gilded Cage. Potter Palmer arrived in Chicago in the late 1840s. By the time of the Great Fire, he was a successful hotelier and had just built the Palmer House. It was totally destroyed, but the plans had been saved in an underground vault, and Palmer rebuilt, adding more luxurious detail as he went. Like Field’s store, the hotel catered to the wealthy, fulfilling their every wish from fresh flowers throughout daily to the silver dollars embedded in the floor of the world-renowned barbershop. From writing about the hotel in the late nineteenth century, I felt like I knew it well.

Truth is, I don’t remember ever going to the Palmer House all my years in Chicago, but in late 2016 my four children and I went to the city so I could show them where I grew up. Naturally, after The Gilded Cage, the hotel was high on my list of places to visit. We had lunch there one day and took the historical tour—it’s the only hotel I know of with its own museum inside and a historian on staff. We craned our necks at the ceiling murals and exclaimed in awe over everything from the 24-karat gold Tiffany chandeliers to the souvenir ashtrays in the museum. Want to know more about the Palmer House? Read The Gilded Cage. The hotel also figures in my most recent cozy mystery, Saving Irene.

Maybe it’s a sign of the times, for better or for worse, and elegance is being replaced by comfortable casual, but I will always miss these grand old dames of the past. Next on my list is the Drake Hotel, which as a child I considered the epitome of elegance. My four kids and I stayed there on that visit to Chicago, but I will not go back lest I jinx it. It too was fading just a bit.

Writing in my sleep

 

Texas caviar

“I do not like to write — I like to have written.” That oft-quoted saying has been attributed to everyone from Mark Twain (who I always thought really did say it) to, gulp, Gloria Steinem—really? Well, I have a new twist on it: I do not like to write—but I like thinking about writing.

I can write wonderful things as I lie in bed waiting for sleep or sit at my desk, staring vacantly out at the garden, now just beginning to green up for spring. Plots hold together, characters are clever and interesting, never hackeneyd, their dialog brilliant and original. Things work out so well.

But put me at my computer and tell me it’s work time, and I become Erma Bombeck all over again. I’d rather scrub floors or clean the bathroom than face what for Erma was a blank sheet of paper in her typewriter and what for me is a blank computer screen. All rational thought flees, and I am back to staring out the window wondering how such and such worked so perfectly not two hours ago.

Case in point: I am as some of you may know working on a possible project about Helen Corbitt, doyenne of food service at Neiman Marcus or, as Mr. Stanley Marcus called her, the Balenciaga of food. Her cookbooks are legendary and a compilation published in 2000 gives a brief biography of her. But no one has ever done a real biography, and her archive is readily available though, unfortunately, not in any form that allows me virtual access. Still, I can’t seem to let go of the notion that I should write about her. So she fills a lot of “thinking” and “imagining” hours for me.

I began an introduction which would, I hoped, serve as a road map for a book. But then other projects called me away for almost two weeks, time I spent thinking about two paragraphs that I knew needed to be included. I must have written those paragraphs in my mind a dozen times. So today, I sat down to actually write them. Found I’d put bare hints of them in the text but not done them justice. So now I have to rethink the whole thing. And some people wonder why I go to bed so early!

If you’ve never eaten lunch at a Neiman’s restaurant—I think there is only one now and it’s on the edge of bankruptcy, if not declared—it’s worth a trip to Dallas. No matter what you order, your meal begins with a demitasse of chicken consommé seasoned exactly right with a tiny touch of bite to it and a warm popover with strawberry butter. The one time years ago I tried to make the butter I ended up with little globules of golden butter floating in strawberry jam—not at all like what’s served at Neiman’s. But that custom traces back to Corbitt as does a dish she famously invented when challenged to present a banquet using only Texas produce. She served what we now call Texas caviar: black-eyed peas seasoned with green onions, cilantro, chiles, tomatoes, and garlic and coated with a dressing of olive oil, lime juice, and cumin. Served chilled with corn chips for dipping. Over the years others have added everything from corn to black beans, but Corbitt's purist version had only the peas.

More about Helen another time. I’m fascinated by her cooking and her free-wheeling personality. So I guess I’ll keep writing in my sleep, though this week my project is to do more research on her career in Texas. She was not a native, but neither am I, so I’ll forgive her that.

Escaping into Helen Corbitt’s life

Helen Corbitt

Sometimes writing is a great way to escape. I had nary a thought about pandemics or protests today as I wrote a short piece about Helen Corbitt. She is known as the doyenne of food service at Neiman Marcus. You have to be of a certain age to remember her. She was at Neiman’s when I moved to Texas in the early 1960s, but I was young and green, and Neiman’s was way beyond my budget. Besides I hadn’t yet developed my fascination with all things culinary. Today she is one of my heroes.

Born in upper New York and educated at Skidmore College, Corbitt worked as a hospital dietitian in Newark and New York in the late 1920s. But she was bored. A job hunt was unfruitful until she got an offer from the University of Texas at Austin. Her initial response was, “Who the hell wants to go to Texas?”

She went, taught quantity cooking and restaurant management and ran the University Tea Room, a laboratory school for her students and probably where she developed some of her signature recipes, such as chicken bouillon and popovers with strawberry butter. Eat lunch at Neiman’s today, and you will be served a complimentary demitasse of bouillon and the popover with butter.

The Houston Country Club hired her away from UT, but she didn’t unpack her bags. Homesick, she only wanted to earn enough to go back east. But six months later, she unpacked. She loved cooking fine food for appreciative members of the club. When the club met financial difficulties in wartime, she moved to Joske’s department store—only job she was ever fired from. She and management disagreed.

Back to Austin, where she managed food service at the Driskell, but in 1955 she finally accepted Stanley Marcus’ offer—he’d been calling her for eight years. Like Marcus, she believed in pleasing the most discriminating customer. But she was a spitfire. Marcus liked to wander unannounced into various departments in his store. When he entered the kitchen, she demanded, “Stanley, did I invite you here? No? Please leave and come back when I do.” She once fired her entire crew, only to desperately retrieve them when she realized she had customers to feed. And  when Maria Callas was late for a reservation for thirty people, she made them all stand at the back of the line.

Corbitt retired from Neiman’s in 1955 and went on to a career teaching, lecturing, and writing. She was the author of several cookbooks. The first, Helen Corbitt’s Cookbook, was an enormous success. If you can find a vintage copy today, it’s a treasure—full of sixties food and things we miss today, like jellied salads. Helen Corbitt Cooks for Looks came about because her doctor advised her to lose weight. One of her most interesting projects was to teach a class for select Dallas businessmen. They met in her apartment, kept notebooks, and relished the class. She always said she proved that Texas men wanted more than steak and potatoes.

Corbitt had several signature dishes. Among them, chicken salad with white grapes and Texas caviar. She invented the latter when she had only been in Texas two weeks and was told to prepare a convention banquet using only Texas products. After uttering a profanity, she produced a superb meal. Texas caviar is black-eyed peas in a dressing of garlic, onion, oil, and vinegar. You’ve probably eaten it. Ladybird Johnson particularly loved her flower pot cakes.

Helen Corbitt transformed the way Texans looked at food. Her complaints when she got here were that salads were dull and over-dressed and vegetables where overcooked. She waged what she called the al dente wars, fighting for crisp, fresh vegetables. Her influence is long-lasting, and yet she is unfortunately overlooked in the long list of American chefs. Search out her books, read about this sassy woman, and try to have as much fun as I did today.