The American illustrated cook book of budget meals by Marion Howells

Waters first met Cunningham in 1974, when she brought Beard to dinner at Chez Panisse.

“She could appreciate every conceivable food, the way she could connect with every conceivable person.” “Marion was a traditionalist, but an enlightened traditionalist,” said Alice Waters, founder of the Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley. In spite of her attachment to familiar foods and simple recipes, Cunningham won the affection of dozens of younger, celebrity chefs whose more exotic tastes leaned toward smoked pheasant and lambs ear lettuce. “If Beard was the father of American cooking, Cunningham became its mother,” former Gourmet magazine editor Ruth Reichl wrote in The Times in 1992, when she was the newspaper’s food editor. She got her start late in life as a protege of James Beard, the chef and writer revered for championing the American culinary tradition.

At a time when Americans were embracing all kinds of foreign cuisine, Marion Cunningham’s love and respect for American food helped ‘The Fannie Farmer Cookbook’ once again earn a place in kitchens across America.”Ĭunningham, who had Alzheimer’s disease, died Wednesday at John Muir Medical Center in Walnut Creek, Calif., said Clark Wolf, a food consultant and longtime friend. “She was someone who had an ability to take a dish, savor it in her mouth and give it new life. “ Marion Cunningham epitomized good American food,” Judith Jones, her longtime editor at Knopf, said in a statement Wednesday. Published in 1979 and revised in 1990, “Fannie Farmer” regained its place as a classic, selling close to 1 million copies, and brought the shy, silver-haired Cunningham wide admiration as a cookbook writer, syndicated columnist and teacher with her own television show. Her devotion to standard American fare made her a venerated figure in the food world whose revised edition of “The Fannie Farmer Cookbook,” a basic text for home cooks since 1896, brought her philosophy back into the mainstream. Not only that, she worried that such traditional American dishes as roast chicken, iceberg lettuce salad and strawberry shortcake would become endangered species. Marion Cunningham’s crusade to preserve the nightly supper hour came of her concern that without it children would never learn table manners or the give and take of dinner conversation.

The American illustrated cook book of budget meals by Marion Howells