THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, November 11, 1995 TAG: 9511110568
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B5 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: THE NEW YORK TIMES
LENGTH: Short : 46 lines
Helen Duprey Bullock, a historian who specialized in preserving the nation's architectural, romantic and culinary heritages, died Nov. 1 at her home at the Thomas House retirement community in Washington. She was 90.
In a long and varied career, Bullock maintained a singular focus. Whether working as an archivist in Colonial Williamsburg in the 1920s and '30s, cataloguing Thomas Jefferson's papers at the University of Virginia and the Library of Congress in the 1940s or serving as a historical architectural specialist and information officer at the National Trust for Historic Preservation in the 1950s, '60s and '70s, she kept her sights on early American history.
She also brought a certain homeyness to history.
If others, for example, saw the elements of colonial history as a process that might begin with a parliamentary affront and end in a fiery speech in the House of Burgesses, Bullock tended to see the process as something that might begin with sugar and eggs and end in a chess pie.
``History isn't just great political events,'' she said in 1955. ``You can feel it in fabrics, taste it in cooking and see it in architecture.''
She was best known for her scholarly work on colonial recipes and food preparation.
Widely regarded as the nation's leading authority on open-hearth cooking, she wrote widely in the field and served as a consultant to historical culinary projects like ``The First Ladies Cookbook'' and ``The American Heritage Cookbook.''
Her Williamsburg cookbook became the bible for the preparation of food in Williamsburg exhibitions, at least until the 1980s, when it was discovered that Bullock, an eminently practical woman, had taken certain liberties with the original recipes.
Having discovered that 17th-century cooks, lacking ingredients like baking powder and vanilla, had often prepared dishes no discriminating 20th-century diner would eat, she sensibly adapted them to modern tastes and ingredients.
KEYWORDS: DEATH OBITUARY by CNB