Karen Hess, 88, culinary historian
NEW YORK -- Karen Hess, an American culinary historian who brought an academic rigor to the study of recipes, cooking techniques, and ordinary American kitchen practices, died May 15 in Manhattan. She was 88.
She died after suffering a stroke the week before, her son Peter Hess said.
Ms. Hess, known as a kind but combative personality, did not shrink from taking on the icons of American cookery, who she felt presented a false picture not only of the quality of American food and cooking but also of its history.
Her first book, "The Taste of America," written with her husband, John L. Hess, and published in 1977, established right away that the couple would not be joining the chorus of affirmation that had characterized the American food establishment.
"We write with trepidation," the book opened. "How shall we tell our fellow Americans that our palates have been ravaged, that our food is awful, and that our most respected authorities on cookery are poseurs?"
The book went on to lament the loss of pleasure in dining, rue the ascension of the processed food industry, and attack, among others, Craig Claiborne, James Beard, and Julia Child as knowing little about cooking and even less about culinary history.
"Her point was that when they claimed they were talking about history, they didn't know what they were talking about," said Andrew F. Smith, who teaches food history at the New School and edited "The Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink" (Oxford University Press, 2007). "She brought rigor to an examination of culinary history that hadn't been there before."
Ms. Hess was not a trained historian, but she believed in the importance of primary sources and demanded that professional historians apply the same techniques to the study of the household that they did to the study of wars and presidents.
In 1981, she transcribed and annotated "Martha Washington's Booke of Cookery," a manuscript of family recipes that had been used in the Washington family for more than 50 years and revealed numerous details about life in a Colonial household.
"To the best of my knowledge, that was the first real attempt at pulling together a primary source in the field of culinary history and then explaining it," Smith said. "There wasn't anybody out there before her."
Among her other works were "The Carolina Rice Kitchen: The African Connection" (University of South Carolina Press, 1992); an annotated version of "Mary Randolph's Virginia Housewife" (University of South Carolina Press, 1983), a popular 19th-century cookbook; and her annotation of "What Mrs. Fisher Knows about Old Southern Cooking" (Applewood Books, 1995), one of the oldest known African-American cookbooks, originally published in 1881.
