The 100 Greatest Home Cooks of All Time
Animation by Cartuna1/94J. Kenji López-Alt
The most influential cook on the internet is a mad scientist who owns eight immersion circulators and uses softball pitching machines to hurl cooked hamburger patties at a wall at 45 mph. His Serious Eats column reaches millions, and his 960-page manifesto had thousands of cooks approaching pizza and pie crust with science. But Kenji López-Alt is just getting started.
2/94Wally “Famous” Amos
He wasn’t always famous, of course. Back when he was 12, Wally Amos was just a kid from Florida sent to New York City to live with his Aunt Della after his parents’ separation. He learned to love cooking in her kitchen and soon mastered his aunt’s recipe for pecan–chocolate chip cookies. The recipe came in handy years later when he was a talent agent at William Morris Agency—he mailed packages of the cookies to performers like Diana Ross and Simon & Garfunkel, hoping to lure them into meetings. With financial support from celebs like Marvin Gaye, Amos launched Famous Amos Cookies in 1975. And the cookies were a hit, so much so that he sold the company in 1988 and moved to Hawaii—taking the cookie’s secret recipe with him.—Khalid Salaam
3/94Theodora Smafield
Fifty-odd years before no-knead bread ascended to top-flight status in the American baking pantheon, there was Theodora Smafield and her “no-knead water-rising twists,” the winning entry in the first-ever Pillsbury Bake-Off, held in 1949. The Bake-Off was initially held at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York, and in its heyday it received tens of thousands of submissions, as America’s cooks—often but not always women—emerged from their humble home kitchens to compete in a contest that glorified their creations. Theodora’s was particularly inspired: She wrapped her cinnamon-flavored dough in tea towels and put them in warm water to rise. She won $50,000 for her invention, though she was referred to in the contest booklet as “Mrs. Ralph A. Smafield.” Theodora, consider the record corrected.—Sam Worley
4/94Pableaux Johnson
The power of feeding people in one’s own home: that’s what Johnson’s weekly Monday night dinners are all about. The Louisiana-born photographer and food writer sticks with New Orleans tradition at these meals, serving Camellia red beans over Louisiana brown rice with cornbread on the side. But his dinners are more about the strangers he assembles—people who mingle late into the night and don’t leave until they’re no longer strangers. Johnson now takes his dinner parties on the road, but if he’s taught us anything, it’s that it’s better to stay at home, cook simply, and invite over a few people you don’t really know.—David Tamarkin
5/94Marion Cunningham
She was the ultimate late bloomer. Born in 1922, Cunningham overcame the phobias and addiction that plagued much of the first half of her life to become a staunch advocate of unassuming, satisfying American home cooking—foods like cream biscuits, pot roast, salmon loaf, and rhubarb Betty. At the age of 50, she was discovered by James Beard after enrolling in a class of his (her first travel outside of California); eventually she became a writer and cooking teacher in her own right, authoring cookbooks such as the revision of the iconic The Fannie Farmer Cookbook and The Breakfast Book. The latter is where Cunningham made perhaps her most important contribution to home cooking: her inimitable yeasted waffles.—Tim Mazurek
Animation by Cartuna6/94Joan Didion
Somewhere among reinventing journalism, crafting cult essay collections, and padding her pocketbook writing screenplays in Hollywood, Didion managed to become a quietly legendary cook and a master dinner party host. If she’s ever known for anything other than her writing, it may be for her curly parsley salad, a Didion original that serves between 35 and 40 literary-luminary friends.
7/94Helen Nearing
In her introduction to Simple Food for the Good Life: An Alternative Cookbook, Helen Nearing insists that she isn’t a good cook and couldn’t care less. Yet so much of what she preached then has become the current-day rallying cry of people who couldn’t care about food more. She preached vegetarianism (long before it was mainstream). She believed in whole grains. She encouraged people to eat seasonally and organically. She could be a bit of a crank about cooking—“Eat applesauce or a raw apple instead of an apple pie amalgamation,” she wrote—but her tough love taught an entire generation of hippies how to farm, cook, and eat well. And besides, she was ultimately a softie; when she encountered people who didn’t want to listen to her claims, she always fed them anyway.—Anna Stockwell
Picasa8/94Betty Rosbottom
Outside of the Midwest, she’s not a celebrity. But ask a home cook in Columbus, Ohio, who taught them how to cook, and somewhere on their list will be Rosbottom, who opened one of the most influential American cooking schools, La Belle Pomme, in Columbus in 1976. For the American home cooks who couldn’t take Rosbottom’s classes (or the special sessions taught by the likes of Jacques Pépin and Marcella Hazan), Rosbottom writes books and publishes recipes in magazines. One of those recipes, her Chocolate Ribbon Cake, is the only recipe to run on the cover of Bon Appétit twice.—Joe Sevier
9/94Nathalie Dupree
No matter where in the country you lived, Dupree made it possible to throw a party as if you were hosting from one of the brightly colored and palatial houses on the Charleston riverfront. A founding member of the Southern Foodways Alliance, Dupree wrote a series of Southern home-cooking books, all told with a voice ringing with hospitality. Some, like Southern Biscuits, are definitive single-subject texts on Southern staples. Others, like Nathalie’s Southern Memories, feature everything from pit barbecue to a proper ladies’ luncheon. So it doesn’t matter if you want to throw a backyard bash or a million-dollar wedding; with Dupree, you can always make it Southern.—Tommy Werner
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Gentl and Hyers10/94Julia Turshen
When people talk about Turshen’s 2016 cookbook Small Victories (and they talk about it a lot), they might mention her raspberry jam buns or maybe her turkey meatballs. But usually they talk about the lists at the back of the book: Seven Things to Do with a Can of Chickpeas, Seven Things to Do with Ground Meat, etc. These lists are where Turshen’s expertise and personality meet, the place where she gets to make seemingly off-the-cuff suggestions that—shhh—are calculated inspirations to get people who might be intimidated by recipes into the kitchen. Lists like this aren’t anything new, but the cookbook author who understands their power is.—DT
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Animation by Cartuna11/94Ina Garten
The enviable walk-in pantry. The perfectly tailored shirts. The barn that was built solely for entertaining. So much of Ina’s butter-drenched Hamptons life is unattainable—except, of course, her recipes, which are always down-to-earth enough to feel achievable and impeccably tested so as to never, ever fail.
12/94Ruth Graves Wakefield
Innkeeper Ruth Graves Wakefield chopped up a semisweet bar of chocolate and folded the pieces into cookie batter sometime in the 1930s, creating in the process an iconic American pastry: the Toll House chocolate chip cookie, named after the tourist lodge that she owned with her husband. When the cookies caught fire, she sold the recipe rights to the Nestlé, which printed her formula on its packages of chocolate chips. But like many women of her time (and ours), she never received proper credit or compensation for her work—her payment was a lifetime supply of chocolate.—SW
13/94Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale
In 1982, Robert Fizdale, who for 40 years had been performing in a piano duo with Arthur Gold, was diagnosed with a pianist’s worst fear: arthritis. That forced Gold and Fizdale the musicians into retirement, but Gold and Fizdale the writers, socialites, and inimitable cooks marched on. “The Boys,” as they were widely known, were already the food columnists for Vogue, and they put their words into practice by feeding what appears to be every musician, dancer, and poet then living in New York. Marianne Moore, Frank O’Hara, Elizabeth Bishop, James Schuyler, Jerome Robbins, and George Balanchine—especially George Balanchine—were regular beneficiaries of G&F’s simple but just-elegant-enough meals; 1984’s The Gold and Fizdale Cookbook made it so the rest of us could pull off casual elegance just like them.—DT
14/94Marian Burros
If you celebrate Rosh Hashanah, you’ve likely had Burros’ rich, cakelike plum torte, The New York Times’ most-requested recipe of all time and a staple at so many Jewish new year parties that it may as well be written into the Torah. Requiring just eight ingredients, it may be the simplest thing Burros published during her 27-year career at the Times; it is certainly the most influential.—Becky Hughes
