Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, March 6, 1991 TAG: 9103060301
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JIM AUCHMUTEY COX NEWS SERVICE
DATELINE: BIRMINGHAM, ALA. LENGTH: Long
But do the women gathered around the Southern Living test kitchen table heckle these hot-buttered bombs? Do these tastemakers, who cook and sample every recipe that appears in the magazine, ever admit the rude truth that some dishes just stink?
"We wouldn't say that," replies test kitchens director Kaye Adams in the melodious Southern accent that seems to drift through the magazine's offices like elevator music. "We'd say, `What exactly is in this, dear?' Or, `Isn't this interesting?' But we'd never say it stinks. We are ladies."
Not just any ladies. These ladies tend the hearth for the nation's most successful regional magazine. Southern Living, which began publishing 25 years ago in February, has attracted 2.3 million subscribers to its cheerful picture of a region enjoying a perpetual deck party. Of all the ingredients of the party mix - decorating, gardening, travel - the most popular, judging from reader mail, is food.
Every month, 2,000 to 4,000 recipes land in the magazine's office on a wooded ridge south of Birmingham. Each is dated and filed by hand. If a dish is used, the contributor gets $10 and a stack of cards with the recipe printed on them to give to friends.
The mind boggles at the calorie count of the regional recipe swap squirreled away in Southern Living's archives. There are 28 categories just for cakes. Dipping into the dip file, you find a fruit dip from Brenda Pogue of Fredericksburg, Md., an egg dip from Marie Bilbo of Meadville, Miss., a dill dip from Shona Ward of Tallassee, Ala., and scores more - some typed, but many handwritten, with salutations like this one from Texas: "Dear Jean, here is a favorite of mine . . . yum, yum!"
That would be Jean Wickstrom Liles, senior foods editor and head of a 16-member staff that does everything from write stories to help plan readers' wedding receptions and give emergency advice to cooks phoning in the middle of a recipe that isn't working. (One staffer, who specializes in frosting cakes for the cover, is known as "Queen Swirl.")
Liles, in her 40s, is a gracious, soft-voiced woman who, after 18 1/2 years in the test kitchen, somehow has remained petite. ("She can outeat anyone, and she's tiny," a co-worker says.) Liles has been fascinated with cooking since she was 5 and would gaze longingly at the picture of the General Mills home economists in the Betty Crocker cookbook her mother kept in their suburban Birmingham kitchen.
"I thought, `Gee, that looks like the most wonderful job,' " she says.
Now she's in that picture, the master of her home ec heaven. Like so many Betty Sue Crockers, most of her charges have home economics degrees from Southeastern Conference schools such as Auburn, Alabama and Ole Miss. All white, most married with children,they're a fair reflection of the core of Southern Living's overwhelmingly white, middle-class subscribers.
"We do not feel that we are trendsetters," says Liles, whose readers are quick to slap a wrist when they think the magazine is straying. Just the other day a woman called and wanted to know why her favorite publication was getting so carried away with yogurt.
It's hard to imagine Southern Living getting carried away with anything. The magazine sets its table for busy women who don't mind using canned vegetables and other conveniences that food sophisticates might consider pedestrian.
"Southern Living is the Junior League cutting edge," says Nashville writer John Egerton, author of "Southern Food." "They have one foot in a traditional kitchen and the other in an experimental kitchen. The main thing that distinguishes them is sheer volume. They've run so many recipes and put out so many cookbooks. If it's been done, it's been in Southern Living."
Indeed, there is a long tradition of food writing at the magazine's parent company, the Southern Progress Corp.
Recipes from farm wives were a familiar feature in the Progressive Farmer, the publication that launched the enterprise in 1886. After its "Country Living" section was spun off to form Southern Living in 1966, Birmingham started serving cookbooks as fast as congealed salad at a church supper. Oxmoor House, the company's book division, has produced more than 75, with sales of nearly 2 million a year.
It's not surprising that food would play such a crucial role at a Southern lifestyle publisher. After all, this is the region that gave the world gumbo and fried chicken and black-eyed peas and sweet potato pie and enough other delicacies to fill a groaning table from here to obesity. In a land that has known more than its share of hunger - a place where folklorists note that there are more terms for corn bread than Eskimos have for snow - food exerts a powerful hold.
In his book "American Cooking, Southern Style," Eugene Walters tells a story of two great Southern writers, William Faulkner and Katherine Anne Porter, dining in a fancy Paris restaurant:
"Everything had been laid out to perfection; a splendid meal had been consumed, a bottle of fine Burgundy emptied, and thimble-sized glasses of an expensive liqueur drained. The maitre d' and an entourage of waiters hovered close by, ready to satisfy any final whim. `Back home the butter beans are in,' said Faulkner, peering into the distance, `the speckled ones.' Miss Porter fiddled with her glass and stared into space. `Blackberries,' she said, wistfully."
The importance of food was immediately obvious to Nancy Woodhull, a 45-year-old New Jersey native who last fall became editor in chief of Southern Progress. Since coming to Birmingham, she says in an acrid Jersey accent, she's put on 10 pounds sampling barbecue. Seeing so many cooks, she suddenly is feeling long-suppressed domestic stirrings.
Woodhull says she never felt the urge to fiddle in the kitchen during her career at the Gannett Co., where she was a founding editor of USA Today and was so career-driven that she impressed her boss, corporate shark Allen Neuharth. "But since I've been here, oh god, I've already asked for two recipes to take home," she says. "Food's contagious."
It's certainly palpable in the test kitchens two floors below Woodhull's executive suite. Southern Progress cut no corners on food facilities when it opened a new headquarters in 1989. There are 24 test kitchens, split evenly among Southern Living, Oxmoor House and Cooking Light, which was started in 1987 and has 900,000 subscribers.
Opening the glass door to this maze, you are greeted by a humid breeze of vague apple-cinnamon origin. The kitchens are the size of shotgun houses, each one appointed with two Sub Zero refrigerators, double GE ovens and two KitchenAid dishwashers. At every turn, there's a smiling woman in a pink apron mixing batter or peeking at casseroles. It's like falling asleep and waking up in a house full of June Cleavers.
But there's nothing silly about what's going on here. Like Good Housekeeping, Southern Living won't give its seal of approval to anything that hasn't been tested. On Mondays, two home economists buy $600 to $800 worth of groceries to make the two dozen dishes that need to be tested or photographed each day. The rest of the week, each cook is assigned four or five recipes a morning, fixes them and presents the victuals at a 12:30 taste test that attracts all the food staff - as well as stomach-patting male editors who have nothing to do with food copy - to a long table set with pitchers of iced tea.
The women take small samples: a dab of chicken tetrazzini, a slither of basil pizza, a smidgen of potato cheese scallop. They say little as they savor the tiny forkfuls, eyes up in concentration.
Next come desserts. Each tester gets a plate from a glutton's dream, heaped with three different cakes and lemon pie.
Finally, after 45 minutes and enough courses to confound the average palate, it's time for judgment. "Apple cinnamon breakfast?" Adams, the test kitchen director, announces from the head of the table.
"I had to reduce the applesauce in the middle," says the woman who cooked it. "It was getting too wet. Applesauce is wet; it's the nature of the beast."
"The flavor was nice," Adams concludes, "but I found the wetness objectionable."
Back for retesting.
And so it goes for half an hour, each dish gently criticized, some sent back for retesting, others passed and given a numerical grade.
And what of those troublesome biscuits?
"Why don't we just use the recipe we sent Willard?" suggests assistant foods editor Susan Dosier.
Willard, of course, is weatherman Willard Scott, a Virginian whose melon shape attests to his great passion in life. Apparently, the test kitchen staff sent him a biscuit recipe that he told "Today" show viewers was the best he'd ever tasted. Praised by Willard! It was a shining moment for the women at Southern Living.
"The man loves to eat," one of them says. "It must be a joy to cook for a man like that."
by CNB