Yesterday we said goodbye to Maida Heatter, a baking legend and inspiration to legions of cooks, and the author of recipes for some of my favorite things in the world to eat. She was 102 years old. She passed away peacefully at home, and left behind a magnificent legacy.
We titled her last bookHappiness Is Baking, a phrase lifted from something she once wrote about the pleasures of making, sharing, and writing about cookies. Today, I’m thinking of Maida and her family. I’m also thinking about the happiness of the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people who have eaten one of Maida’s treasures with giddy delight, smiles shining through the crumbs on their faces.
I feel very lucky to have been involved with Maida’s last book, as the editor who worked with her sister-in-law Connie Heatter and my team at Little, Brown to pull it together. But she was involved in my very first books as an editor, too, and I’ll be carrying her lessons forward long into the future.
In fact, I owe my career as an editor of cookbooks in large part to Maida. I must have been twenty-five when I first encountered her written voice—not in one of her own cookbooks, but in a cookbook style guide calledRecipes Into Type. Now long out of print, the book was pressed into my hands by a generous copy editor when I was assigned my first cookbook to edit.
At the time, I only knew that I loved to eat and to cook and to read, and that in my world, food touched everything. I was thrilled to combine my major passions in life and to work on books that depended on the acuity of both my brain and my belly. But I had no idea what I was doing. I wasn’t even really sure whether cookbook editors had to test the recipes themselves—and if so, would I be reimbursed for the groceries? Soon it was made clear to me that authors tested their recipes, or hired experienced help to do so, and that such testing was the backbone of a solid cookbook. That made sense. But still: what made good recipewriting?
I found my answer inRecipes Into Type.Early on in the book, there’s a page with two columns in it. One listed the method of a recipe for macaroons fromThe Joy of Cooking,a marvel of brevity with its clipped and voiceless instructional style, designed to help fit a bazillion recipes into a single book. The other column listed the method for the same recipe, but written by Maida.
Maida’s instructions were about five times as long, but instead of keeping you hopping like a drill instructor, her words built a world around you. Her writing made me feel Iunderstoodwhat was happening in the recipe, with cues to prevent a cook from getting lost in the middle of the adventure and plenty of detail borne from serious experience.
In other words, she remembered to include the one essential ingredient that so many other recipe writers forget:you, the cook.
That’s a lesson that I have never forgotten, and which I bring to the editing of every book I work on—whether it has to do with food, or not.
I raced off to search for Maida’s books and discovered that they were only available in used editions, and that the primary books had gone out of print. Like a good junior editor, I came back toRecipes Into Typeand scribbled on my bookmark: “Maida Heatter reissues???” But for various reasons, I ran into a dead end.
Years later, over lunch with the literary agent Janis Donnaud, Maida’s name popped up. I can’t recall who mentioned her first, but Janis had been representing Maida for years! I remembered my little bookmark inRecipes Into Typeand we found a way to bring Maida back into print. Working with Connie Heatter, we assembled a collection of 100 crackerjack recipes, written with Maida’ssignature flair, and paired them with gorgeously retro-modern art from the illustrator Alice Oehr and a foreword from another baking hero of mine, Dorie Greenspan.
We published that book in April, and it was the joy of a career to see the woman who inspired my own career start to inspire yet another generation of bakers.
Thank you, Maida, for setting me off on my own journey—and thank you for letting me participate in yours.
Michael Szczerban (@foreverbeard) is the editorial director ofVoracious, an imprint of Little, Brown and Company that publishes visual books driven by appetite and curiosity. He is also the editor of Epicurious'sCOOK90: The 30-Day Plan for Faster, Healthier, Happier Meals.
