Tastemaker of the Century—Helen Corbitt
She delivered us from canned fruit cocktail—and gave us confidence that the civilizing pleasures of the table were within our reach.
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The fabulous Neiman Marcus Foreign Fortnights, which the flagship store has recently resurrected, were launched in 1957. These were extravaganzas that took years to plan. Fortnights from France, Italy, Scandinavia, Great Britain, and Ireland brought to town not only the merchandise of those countries but their culture as well, in the form of concerts, art exhibits, film screenings, theater performances, and of course, food and wine. Corbitt was sent abroad to study the cuisine firsthand, and her adventures in foreign kitchens made great copy for her newspaper column, “Kitchen Klatter,” which appeared in the Houston Post and the Arkansas Gazette. Sometimes European chefs were imported to her Zodiac kitchen. In her 1974 cookbook, Helen Corbitt Cooks for Company, she remembers a French chef and his assistants: “They asked for and received everything they wanted except the skin from a sheep’s belly (I didn’t know any sheep) and women (I…didn’t know the right kind).” After they plied her kitchen staff with wine and brandy one day, she reclaimed her throne and declared that for future fortnights, she would research the recipes herself and do what she always did best, adapt the food to Texans’ taste. She knew that we really wouldn’t miss having our spinach puréed through a sheep’s belly.
Stanley Marcus, in a foreword to a posthumous collection of Corbitt’s recipes, wrote of her fourteen-year tenure at the helm of the Zodiac Room: “She was difficult, for she knew the difference between better and best, and she was never willing to settle for second best.” He dubbed her his Wild Irish Genius and the Balenciaga of Food and kept her happy all those years by offering her daily compliments. “Too many chefs today regard themselves first as artists,” Marcus says. “Corbitt created a beautiful plate, but she gave greater attention to how the food would taste.” As a matter of fact, her meatloaf baked in an angel-food-cake tin really does taste better.
Corbitt had what these days we might call healthy self-esteem. She told Julia Sweeney about the time a produce clerk caught her picking out the freshest mushrooms in the back room at the Simon David specialty food store and said, “I’m sorry, but the manager doesn’t allow people back here.” She blithely responded, “Go tell the manager Helen Corbitt is here. I have pickin’ privileges.” Even Stanley Marcus recalls with amazement how quickly Helen could reduce a directive from the boss to a suggestion. In Cooks for Company she admitted that she sometimes forgot that she didn’t own the Zodiac Room. Once, when the two sittings for a Fortnight dinner filled quickly, she decreed a third sitting, forgetting that it would entail keeping the entire store—with its lights, air conditioning, elevator operators, and security guards—open additional hours. She really caught it the next day, she wrote, but from then on there were three sittings. Corbitt’s perfectionism exacted a price: Even though it was packed with people daily, the Zodiac Room never showed a profit. In his memoir Minding the Store Marcus wrote that, when he complained of heavy losses, she replied, “You didn’t mention money when you employed me. You simply said that you wanted the best food in the country. I’ve given you that.”
Soups in the Zodiac Room were always made from scratch, with one exception: the cream of tomato. In a 1972 interview with journalist Francis Raffetto, Corbitt admitted, “I used Campbell’s, with coffee cream and butter to make it like velvet.” New York playwright Moss Hart, having lunch one day in the late fifties with Marcus’ brother Edward, ordered a second bowl and then asked for the recipe. To Marcus’ chagrin, Corbitt refused. She later explained, “We couldn’t tell Moss Hart he ate Campbell’s soup at Neiman Marcus.”
Helen Corbitt cooked for the smartly dressed country club set and for movie stars and socialites slimming at the Greenhouse Spa in Arlington, which she helped to create. She entertained royalty and the dignitaries of many foreign countries, but she also cooked for the secretaries and shopgirls and housewives who sometimes treated themselves to a pastry or a sandwich at the standup counter on the main floor. “Each bite of those little sandwiches was like a gift,” one woman recalls. “They were generously spread, and there was always something surprising in a Helen Corbitt sandwich—a little pineapple in the tuna, a bit of chutney with the turkey—that made your tastebuds come to attention.”
Even before she retired from Neiman Marcus in 1969, the indefatigable Corbitt was expanding her legacy, lecturing all over the country and writing cookbooks—her first, Helen Corbitt’s Cookbook (1957), had more than 27 printings and sold more than 300,000 copies. Her cookbooks, now out of print, are a staple of every Texas cook’s library. Worn-out copies, dog-eared and grease-splattered, are often rebound. Women who have cooked from her books all their lives light up with gratitude when her name is mentioned. “She taught me that I could entertain in a small apartment or in my kitchen without hired help,” says a friend who used to have a catering business (“Just throw a clean white cup towel over the dirty dishes in the sink!” Corbitt suggested in one of her lectures).
Corbitt-trained cooks have their favorite recipes: the poppy-seed dressing for fruit salad; the pancake stack, ten to twelve very thin fourteen-inch pancakes, spread either with lemon-cream butter and hot blueberry sauce or with butter, maple syrup, and a little ham gravy, stacked, and sliced for serving like a pie; or perhaps the queen of desserts, caramel soufflé with English custard sauce. Of the latter, wrote Corbitt in Cooks for Company, “You may halve the recipe, but why? Regardless of how few guests you have, it will all be eaten.”
The generous party spirit, awash in butter, cream cheese, eggs, and mayonnaise, that pervades her first two cookbooks (the second, Helen Corbitt’s Potluck, was published in 1962) inevitably gave way to the low-cholesterol, low-cal recipe collections, Helen Corbitt Cooks for Looks (1967) and Helen Corbitt’s Greenhouse Cookbook (1979). Corbitt, like the rest of us, was fighting her own weight and cholesterol, and she refused to be limited to grapefruit and cottage cheese. Gone are the jaunty comments “Men will really love this” or “When you’re feeling extravagant…,” but a number of good cooks swear by her simple roast chicken stuffed with grapes.
With missionary zeal, Corbitt shared her expertise. She taught cooking classes to benefit the Dallas Symphony, raising more than $150,000. She also taught a more intimate class of close friends and their daughters in the store, charging only for the food used in the demonstrations. The notes from those sessions are now being passed like heirlooms to a third generation. And she taught a rather exclusive cooking class for fourteen men—some doctors and businessmen, an oil man, a lawyer, a stockbroker, and a liquor-chain vice president—on Wednesday nights in her duplex on University. Corbitt, who never married, clearly enjoyed her male following, and her cookbooks are most often dedicated to them. She liked that men asked questions and wanted to know the “why” of certain procedures. “She also liked that she could give us hell without worrying that she’d hurt our feelings,” recalls one of her male pupils, who still cooks her osso buco. She believed men were more adventurous in their food tastes and were held back by wives who just didn’t want to learn to cook new things. Had she lived to see it, she would be especially saddened by women today who take the same pride in not cooking that women of a previous generation took in their inability to type or take shorthand. She was a hardworking professional who understood that to make a savory beef stew, a busy working woman might have to brown the meat one day and simmer it the next, but she believed there was pleasure to be found in cooking for people you loved. “The dining room is one of the last outposts of civilization,” she wrote in Cooks for Company. “Let’s keep it that way.”
Helen Corbitt died of cancer in 1978. In the last year of her life, her good friend Father Don Fischer (now monsignor), then a young chaplain at the University of Dallas, took her the Eucharist daily. “It was a great gift to be able to bring spiritual food to such a lover of food,” he says. “Even in her weakening condition, she always felt she should offer me something when I came to see her. I tried to beg off but finally said, ‘Okay, but make it just something very simple.’ She made me the best peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich I’ve ever had. I know the bread was probably homemade. She spread it with butter, then a generous amount of peanut butter and marvelous preserves. I went away thinking that if that was what peanut butter and jelly was supposed to taste like, I had been a very deprived child.”
In Texas, B.C., most of us were.
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