Helen McCully
Helen McCully | |
---|---|
![]() | |
Born | Helen W. McCully September 1902 Amherst, Nova Scotia, Canada |
Died | 24 August 1977 New York City, U.S. |
Occupation(s) | food writer, cookbook author |
Years active | 1929-1977 |
Known for | mentoring chefs and serving as food editor of McCall's and House Beautiful magazines. |
Helen McCully (1902–1977) was a Canadian food writer, critic and cookbook author from Nova Scotia. She was influential as a food editor of McCall's and House Beautiful and was at least partially responsible for helping to discover the unknown Julia Child in 1960. Besides writing regular columns on food, she used her influence to help promote the careers of many in the food industry, as well as writing her own cookbooks.
Early life
Helen W. McCully was born in September 1902 in Amherst, Nova Scotia, Canada to Ethel Ellen (née Lowerison) and Herbert Read McCully[1][2] Her family was quite prominent, including a great-grandfather, Samuel McCully an early minister who helped found the Baptist church in Amherst and his two sons: her grandfather, Robert, a prominent attorney and her great-uncle, Jonathan, a Supreme Court judge[3][4] and one of the founders of the Canadian Confederation.[5] Her father, Herbert, was a dentist[4][6] and her mother raised the spirited children in an old Victorian mansion at the outskirts of town.[6]
McCully attended Branksome Hall, a private girls' finishing school in Toronto,[5] matriculating with honors in French in 1921.[7] She then continued her education at Dalhousie University of Halifax,[5] studying arts,[8] and followed up with a secretarial course in 1925 at Miss Conklin's Secretarial School in New York City.[9]
Career
The year after her graduation, McCully became a secretary to Marion V. Langzettel, who directed the Froebel League’s school for children in New York City on East 71st Street[9] and within a few years, began working at Andrews, Davis & Platt.[10][Notes 1] She began her career as an advertising copywriter at Lord & Taylor's in New York City. McCully then became a food editor at Bloomingdale's, where she worked from 1947 to 1960.[5] Afterward, she served as the food editor for McCall's magazine[13] for seven years and then spent ten years as food editor for House Beautiful.[14][15][16]
By 1960, McCully had become an icon in the food industry, bringing noted chefs together, serving as a mentor, a contact with peers, and hosting regular culinary salons in her Upper East Side apartment. Though she had a somewhat abrasive manner, McCully was very influential counting among her friends both American and foreign chefs.[17] Helen Evans Brown and James Beard were close friends and colleagues.[18] While running the kitchens for McCall's magazine, she allowed Beard to use the kitchens for his cooking school[13] and helped many chefs gain notice. When Julia Child first envisioned writing articles on French cooking and publishing cookbooks, McCully told her that though the recipes were well constructed, they would seem overwhelming to most cooks.[19] When Child finally agreed that the recipes must be simplified,[20] she still had trouble finding a publisher. McCully read the manuscript for Mastering the Art of French Cooking and gave it to Jacques Pépin, for whom she had become a surrogate mother, telling him she thought it had merit.[21][22] Pépin had only been in the United States a few months, when he met McCully through Craig Claiborne, the noted food editor of the New York Times and she took him under her wing. Pépin was impressed with Child's manuscript, McCully invited her over to dinner for the two to meet, and a life-long collaboration and partnership emerged.[14][23]
McCully was interested in making food preparation practical for busy women and, as did most food writers of her time period, advocated for the use of convenience foods.[24] But, she also recommended trying new types of foods, advocating Chinese food, despite the overall xenophobia and anti-communist sentiment common in her era.[25] Besides her editorial work at magazines, she published several cookbooks.[5] Perhaps her best known were Cooking with Helen McCully beside You (1970), which was recommended by the Chicago Tribune,[26][27] The Other Half of the Egg (1967), written with Pépin[5] and The American Heritage Cookbook (1967), which she edited with Eleanor Noderer,[28][29] an associate from her days at McCall's.[5] The latter was praised not only for its recipes, but for its inclusion of the history of the development of the food industry in America, which was omitted from later editions of the book.[28][29] A two-volume set, Nobody Ever Tells You These Things about Food and Drink (1967) and Things You’ve Always Wanted to Know about Food & Drink (1972) gave practical tips, laced with humor, amid the recipes and included conversions from U.S. measurements to metric, translations for cooking definitions from French, as well as buying guides.[27]
McCully strove to make cooking accessible to anyone who wanted to learn the techniques, giving lectures and demonstrations[15] and at one time, even discussed with James Beard the possibility of teaching cooking classes via correspondence course.[30] She also published an autobiographical children's tale about the year that her mother bought she and her siblings a pony for Christmas. The Christmas Pony (1967) was written in collaboration with Dorothy Crayder.[31]
In 1967, McCully, along with Dorothy Drayder, and illustrated by Rober J. Lee published The Christmas Pony with The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc. The Christmas Pony was a true story about her christmas of 1912 when her mother got for her and her two siblings a pony. The book is dedicated to the memory of her parents.
Death and legacy
McCully died on 24 August 1977 at Beth Israel Hospital in Manhattan.[5] Pépin said McCully's legacy was that she "knew everybody in the country who had a passionate interest in food, and she made it her life’s mission to bring us all together, to encourage us, to boost our careers, and when occasion demanded, to scold us like the children she never had".[17]
References
Notes
Citations
- ^ Canada Census 1911, p. 457.
- ^ Nova Scotia Archives 1897, p. 178.
- ^ Steele & Rogers 1911, p. 30-33.
- ^ a b Nova Scotia Archives 1939, p. 175.
- ^ a b c d e f g h Sheraton 1977.
- ^ a b McCully, Crayder & Lee 1967.
- ^ Sherlock 1922, p. 29.
- ^ Sherlock 1922, p. 71.
- ^ a b Watson & Home 1926, p. 59.
- ^ Cannon & Birkett 1937, p. 64.
- ^ Broadcasting/Telecasting 1945, p. 58.
- ^ U.S. Census 1940, p. 10A.
- ^ a b Jones 1992, p. 217.
- ^ a b Klassen 2012.
- ^ a b Rice 1977.
- ^ Beard & Ferrone 1995, p. 335.
- ^ a b Pépin 2004, p. 179.
- ^ Beard & Ferrone 1995, p. 50, 126.
- ^ Shapiro 2007, p. 75.
- ^ Shapiro 2007, p. 77.
- ^ Pépin 2004, pp. 181–182.
- ^ Pepin 2009.
- ^ Pépin 2004, p. 182.
- ^ Inness 2001, pp. 158–159.
- ^ Inness 2001, pp. 39–40.
- ^ Levitas 1971, p. 4 (Book world).
- ^ a b Heckart 1972, p. 52.
- ^ a b Field 1966.
- ^ a b Freedman, Chaplin & Albala 2014, p. 160.
- ^ Beard & Ferrone 1995, p. 294.
- ^ Brownstone 1968, p. 56.
Bibliography
- Beard, James; Ferrone, John (1995). Love and Kisses and a Halo of Truffles: Letters from Helen Evans Brown (1 ed.). New York, New York: Arcade Publishing. ISBN 978-1-55970-318-5.
- Brownstone, Cecily (1 May 1968). "Lemon Butter Filling Originated in Canada". Lebanon, Pennsylvania: The Lebanon Daily News. AP. Retrieved 12 November 2016 – via Newspapers.com.
- Cannon, Katharine; Birkett, Eleanor, eds. (1937). The Branksome Slogan. Toronto, Canada: Branksome Hall. Retrieved 12 November 2016.
- Field, Michael (14 April 1966). "Chock Full of Nuts". The New York Review of Books. New York, New York: A. Whitney Ellsworth. ISSN 0028-7504. Retrieved 12 November 2016.
- Freedman, Paul; Chaplin, Joyce E.; Albala, Ken (2014). Food in Time and Place: The American Historical Association Companion to Food History. Oakland, California: University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-27745-8.
- Heckart, Fran (20 July 1972). "The Cookbook that Tells It All". The Daily Herald. Chicago, Illinois. Retrieved 12 November 2016 – via Newspapers.com.
- Inness, Sherrie A. (2001). Dinner roles American women and culinary culture. Iowa City, Iowa: University of Iowa City. ISBN 978-1-587-29332-0 – via Project MUSE.
- Jones, Evan (1992). Epicurean Delight: Life and Times of James Beard. New York, New York: Simon and Schuster. ISBN 978-0-671-75026-8.
- Klassen, Stephanie Rosenbaum (14 August 2012). "Celebrating Julia Child's 100th Birthday: Jacques Pépin Tribute Video + How Julia Met Jacques". San Francisco, California: KQED Food. Archived from the original on 6 September 2015. Retrieved 12 November 2016.
- Levitas, Gloria (14 February 1971). "Cook's Tour". The Chicago Tribune. Chicago, Illinois. Retrieved 12 November 2016.
- McCully, Helen; Crayder, Dorothy; Lee, Robert J. (illustrator) (1967). The Christmas Pony. Indianapolis, Indiana: Bobbs-Merrill Company. OCLC 1991845.
- Pépin, Jacques (2004). The Apprentice: My Life in the Kitchen. Boston, Massachusetts: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. ISBN 0-618-44411-4.
- Pepin, Jacques (4 August 2009). "How Julia Loosened Me Up". The Daily Beast. New York, New York. Archived from the original on 28 January 2016. Retrieved 12 November 2016.
- Rice, William (1 September 1977). "In Memory of Helen McCully". The Washington Post. Washington, D.C. Retrieved 12 November 2016.
- Shapiro, Laura (2007). Julia Child: A Life. New York, New York: Penguin Publishing Group. ISBN 978-1-101-20293-7.
- Sheraton, Mimi (25 August 1977). "Helen McCully Dies; Food Writer Was 75". The New York Times. New York City, New York. Retrieved 11 November 2016.
- Sherlock, Marjorie, ed. (1922). The Branksome Slogan. Toronto, Canada: Branksome Hall. Retrieved 12 November 2016.
- Steele, D. A.; Rogers, Grace McLeod (1911). One hundred years with the Baptists of Amherst, N.S., 1810 to 1910. Amherst, Nova Scotia, Canada: Amherst Baptist Church. OCLC 471478418.
- Watson, Margery; Home, Helen, eds. (1926). The Branksome Slogan. Vol. 17. Toronto, Canada: Branksome Hall. Retrieved 12 November 2016.
- "Agencies" (PDF). Broadcasting/Telecasting. Washington, D.C.: Broadcasting Publications, Inc. 3 December 1945. ISSN 1068-6827. Retrieved 12 November 2016.
- "Census of Canada: Cumberland Sub-Districts 1-45, Nova Scotia". FamilySearch. Ottawa, Ontario, Canada: Library and Archives of Canada. 1911. FHL microfilm #2417683. Retrieved 12 November 2016.
- "Nova Scotia Deaths, 1890-1955". FamilySearch. Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada: Nova Scotia Archives. 20 June 1939. 1-250. Retrieved 12 November 2016.
- "Nova Scotia Vital Records, 1763-1957". FamilySearch. Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada: Nova Scotia Archives. 1911. Retrieved 12 November 2016.
- "United States Census: New York City, Manhattan Borough Assembly District 10 (Tract 59 - part), St. Vincent De Paul School". FamilySearch. Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration. 20 April 1940. digital publication T627. Retrieved 12 November 2016.