Rombauer, Irma S. (1877–1962)

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Rombauer, Irma S. (1877–1962)

American author of The Joy of Cooking. Born Irma von Starkloff in St. Louis, Missouri, on October 30, 1877; died in St. Louis on October 14, 1962; younger of two daughters of Hugo von Starkloff (a physician and surgeon) and Clara (Kuhlman) von Starkloff; educated at boarding schools in Switzerland; briefly attended Washington University; married Edgar Roderick Rombauer (a lawyer), on October 14, 1899 (died February 1930); children: Marion Rombauer Becker (1903–1976, an author); Edgar Rombauer.

The author of America's classic cookbook, Irma S. Rombauer privately published the first slim edition of The Joy of Cooking in 1931. After selling 3,000 copies, she revised and enlarged the volume, adding additional recipes and the step-by-step method which, along with its chatty style, became one of the book's unique features. Another was its money-back guarantee. Published in 1936 and updated many times since, it is still standard issue in kitchens throughout America, particularly for beginning or uncertain cooks. "I started out with The Joy of Cooking," said renowned chef Julia Child . "It always has sensible ideas that other books don't have. And I always felt that Mrs. Joy was at my elbow helping out."

Of German heritage, Rombauer was born Irma von Starkloff in 1887 in St. Louis, Missouri, the daughter of Hugo von Starkloff, a successful surgeon who had come to the United States from Stuttgart, and Clara Kuhlman , who had immigrated from Germany and in 1873 had assisted Susan Blow in founding the first public-school kindergarten in the United States. When Rombauer was 12, her father was appointed U.S. consul in Bremen, Germany, affording her the opportunity to see much of the world at a young age. She received most of her education at boarding schools in Lausanne and Geneva, and briefly attended the school of fine arts at Washington University after returning to St. Louis in 1894. "I was brought up to be a 'young lady,'" she later recalled, "heaven save the mark! I played the piano poorly, embroidered and sewed, painted on China, and entertained 'callers.' As a family

we travelled extensively … filled our hours with opera-going, gallery-visiting and letter writing. All utterly delightful and almost useless from a practical standpoint."

It was not until her marriage in 1899 that Rombauer fully realized the gaps in her practical education. Her husband Edgar, a lawyer and an avid camper and camp cook, guided her around the kitchen. Gradually, Rombauer became more interested in food and cooking, trying out new recipes on her family, which grew to include a daughter Marion Rombauer Becker and a son Edgar. As she gained confidence, Irma began entertaining more, eventually becoming one of St. Louis' most delightful hostesses and finest cooks. Rombauer was also active outside the home, joining a variety of the city's civic and cultural organizations.

In 1930, Rombauer's husband Edgar, who had suffered from manic depression, committed suicide. Her children, now grown and starting families of their own, persuaded Irma to compile a cookbook of the dishes that had so delighted them while growing up. Eager for diversion, she turned to the task, using as a guide an earlier compilation she had put together for a cooking course she had given at her church. The first Joy of Cooking, which Rombauer paid to have published, contained 500 recipes interspersed with the author's casual and witty culinary chat. An example was Rombauer's advice on serving alcohol to guests: "Most cocktails containing liquor are made today with gin and ingenuity. In brief, take an ample supply of the former and use your imagination."

The second expanded edition of the cookbook, published by Bobbs-Merrill in 1936, was hardly a runaway bestseller, but sold well and steadily. In 1943, the publisher revised the book again, incorporating another of Rombauer's books, Streamlined Cooking, which she had published with only moderate success in 1939. The new edition of Joy flew off the shelves, setting sales records that only Fannie Farmer 's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book had previously reached. Its enormous success in the competitive cookbook field was due in part to its inclusion of basic information on such things as meal planning, table settings, trussing a bird, and filleting a fish. Another selling point was Rombauer's method of listing the ingredients as the mixing process proceeds.

The book was revised a third time in 1951, when Rombauer's daughter Marion, who had assisted her mother previously, became its co-author. In later years, Rombauer gradually turned over most of the responsibility of the cookbook to her daughter, although she was always ready to answer a query or to acknowledge (in longhand) a letter from a fan. In 1943, newly married Trish Hooper phoned Rombauer in a panic. The inexperienced bride was having five people over for dinner and had bought seven packages of spaghetti to feed them, thinking that she would need that much because it was so thin. When it appeared that the boiled spaghetti might start flowing out the door, she called Rombauer. "She was wonderful," Hooper told Time magazine some 54 years later. "She told me to put as much spaghetti as would fit into the largest bowl I owned and then pour sauce over it. What wouldn't fit in the bowl I was to pile around the base of my rosebushes." It was "good mulch," Rombauer said.

Rombauer wrote a third cookbook, Cookbook for Girls and Boys (1946), but like Streamlined Cooking, it was never as successful as Joy, which by 1953 had sold over 1.3 million copies and made Rombauer a rich woman. Despite her wealth, she continued to live a simple life, dividing her time between an apartment in St. Louis and a hideaway home she built on a ten-acre wooded lot in Pevely, Missouri. Rombauer suffered a stroke in 1954, and died of a heart attack in 1962, leaving The Joy of Cooking in her daughter's hands.

Marion Rombauer Becker continued to supervise revisions of the cookbook every ten years or so, purging it of dated information and attempting to keep up with modern innovations. Food critic James Beard took exception to at least one revised edition, complaining that Marion had deviated too far from her mother's intent. "[I]t included far too many French and Italian recipes, and robbed the book of some of the delicious Rombauer humor and personality," he wrote. "Irma Rombauer is one of the great women of American cookery and deserves to be known in her original state of joy."

Following Becker's death in 1976, the cook-book's copyright became the property of Ethan Becker (youngest son of Marion and architect John Becker), who became embroiled in a lawsuit with then-publisher MacMillan over profit rights, among other issues. The legal wrangling went on until 1994, when Simon & Schuster, which had purchased MacMillan, ended the impasse. Bringing Ethan on board for another expanded revision of the book, which had not been updated since 1975, Simon & Schuster hoped to boost sales (already doing well at 100,000 per year) by adding contemporary standards of nutrition and allowing for changing lifestyles. Three years in the making, the new Joy was launched in November 1997, containing a record 2,500 recipes, most of them extensively revised versions of old standbys, like tuna casserole, and new additions, such as Buffalo wings, grilled pizza, dim sum, and tapas. The result, according to Publishers Weekly, is a cookbook that "advances that tradition with distinction and some calculated flair."

sources:

Candee, Marjorie Dent. Current Biography 1953. NY: H.W. Wilson, 1953.

Gray, Paul. "Ode to Joy," in Time. November 10, 1997.

Green, Michelle, and Cindy Dampier. "Relighting the Fire," in People. November 17, 1997.

"Letters to the Editor," in Time. December 1, 1997.

McHenry, Robert, ed. Famous American Women. NY: Dover, 1983.

Sicherman, Barbara, and Carol Hurd Green, eds. Notable American Women: The Modern Period. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1980.