Listening to even her admirers assess her career now, I’m pretty sure I dodged a cannonball. This was the woman who transliterated cookbooks from Martha Washington, Amelia Simmons, Hannah Glasse and Mary Randolph, the undersung mothers of American cuisine, and who made a mission of giving African-American cooks their due in her 1998 book The Carolina Rice Kitchen.
Even more important, she was the woman who, with her husband, John L. Hess, way back in 1977, indicted the entire food system in The Taste of America. That blistering book plowed the field for the likes of Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser to reap nearly three decades on. Moreover, without the Hesses, today’s urbanites might not be showered with just-picked corn and basil, leaf lard and grassfed beef—because there might very well have been no Greenmarket.
But Karen Hess, who died in 2007 at the age of 88, did not suffer wannabe food scholars gladly, let alone neighborly fools. Descriptions by people who knew her range from the mild “opinionated” to the more bruised-sounding “merciless.” Even her admirers at our market volunteer that she was rough and gruff in her insistence on seriousness with all things food-related. As the oldest of her three children, Peter Hess, says: “She cut an imposing figure. She found her voice and wasn’t afraid to use it.” And she used it to promote real food and honest cooking donkey’s years before the word “locavore” was ever inflicted on the world.
The couple railed about what I call processed crap, about food writers endorsing the same, about travel writers on the take, about the way nutrition nuttiness skewed people’s taste away from fresh food. And they spared no acid in attacking any big name they determined might be contributing to the decline and collapse of kitchen civilization. Craig Claiborne was guilty of “feckless condescension,” Julia Child “calls herself the French Chef though she is neither French nor a chef.” They make Anthony Bourdain come off like a capon by comparison.
“She and John didn’t sit back and wait for things to happen,” Benepe says. “They made things happen.” He describes John as the godfather and Karen as the guardian angel of the Greenmarkets.
Anne Mendelson, whose books include Stand Facing the Stove, a history of Joy of Cooking, notes that before Taste of America, very few food writers “thought it was important to tell good food from bad food, even those of us with a scholarly approach to food. Then Karen started taking it seriously.” Not surprisingly, she was one of the original members of the Culinary Historians of New York, in 1985.
Food historian Andrew L. Smith says Taste was the book that taught Karen Hess to do research using original sources, rather than repeat “fakelore”—instead of working from what others had written about Amelia Simmons and Hannah Glasse, she went straight to the source. The book, he adds, “changed my life—I had a job not related to food, and the heritage standpoint was the major reason I started writing about food.” He is now the editor of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America, which will include an entry on Karen Hess in the forthcoming edition.
She studied voice at what is now Humboldt State University in Arcata, California, (but didn’t graduate) and always dreamed of being a singer. Instead, she met and married John Hess while living in Salt Lake City; after they moved here in 1941, Hess went to work for newspapers, and in 1965 the Times sent them to Paris.
Back in Manhattan, the Hesses bought the classic six at 101st Street and Riverside Drive where they would write their books and live out the next decades, eating once a week in their last years at Gennaro’s on Amsterdam Avenue near 93rd Street.
According to Nach Waxman, owner of Kitchen Arts & Letters, the cookbook mecca on the Upper East Side: “What her legacy really is is that combination of vigorous, almost rigorous adherence to the original text and original cultural circumstances. She was making sure people saw it as it was intended to appear, as it was meant to be read, then presented it in a way that was almost unobtrusive.
Anne Mendelson also says Hess “was incredibly generous to novices like me trying to learn this discipline she pioneered.” But she adds: “She could spend endless time in research libraries; she didn’t understand food writers who had to toil in the New York Times vineyards. She greeted their every error with outrage. She behaved like someone put on this planet to besmirch the unworthy— j’accuse! j’accuse! No one was ever forgiven. If a writer screwed up, she would still be denouncing her 20 years later.
But this summer, weather willing, New Yorkers can revel in Cherokee purple heirloom tomatoes and Tristar strawberries with juice to spare.