Happiness Is Baking with Maida Heatter
Cookbook author Maida Heatter – who never showed up anywhere without her own biscotti or brownies – has died at 102. Miami Beach’s queen of desserts lives on in the kitchens of thousands of home bakers and pastry chefs alike who treasure her hundreds of recipes of cookies, cakes and flourless chocolate tortes, each version more delicious than the next.
“Don’t you ever run out of ideas?” a reporter once asked her. On the contrary, she said – “I run out of time, or butter and eggs – even chocolate – but not ideas,” she recounts in the introduction to Best Dessert Book Ever, her sixth dessert book, which came out in 1990.
Born in Long Island, the longtime resident of Miami Beach started her career as an illustrator and then a jewelry designer. She baked desserts for her husband’s restaurant and got the attention of Craig Claiborne, who encouraged her to write cookbooks. In 1974, Maida Heatter’s Book of Great Desserts was published by Knopf, and within two years, Heatter was teaching classes across the country and befriending many of America’s top chefs, like Wolfgang Puck, Norman Van Aken and Michael Schwartz.
“Maida used to come all the time to Nemo, and she never came empty-handed,” says Schwartz of the 1990s SoFi hotspot where he and Myles Chefitz were partners. When she was re-doing her cookbooks and testing all the recipes, “we were bombarded with biscotti and Palm Beach brownies, everything precision-perfect,” he recalls. Heatter, Schwartz and his family became good friends. “I have fond memories of going to her house eating stone crabs,” he says.
Her hands were full when she showed up at Norman Van Aken’s cramped office at A Mano at the Betsy Ross Hotel, where he was cooking in the early 90s. She brought biscotti and an advance copy of an article on his cooking written for Conde Nast Traveler by Random House publishing giant Jason Epstein, whom she had brought to his restaurant a few months earlier. “She read me the whole article, word by word,” he says. “So giving, so generous.” Van Aken and his wife, Janet, paid a visit to Heatter’s house where they are home-baked cookies. “Then she said, ‘Oh, I’m gonna get the stuff,’ and she came back with Chardonnay.’”
Tools of the Trade: Old Mixmaster
South Florida syndicated food columnist and cooking school instructor Carole Kotkin says Heatter was a frequent guest at Bobbi and Carole’s cooking school in South Miami in the early ’80s. “She was a perfectionist and didn’t trust our equipment – she brought her own Sunbeam mixer for the ‘50s (we had a new KitchenAid), along with her husband, Ralph,” says Kotkin. “She set Ralph to work calibrating the oven temperature.”
The careful attention paid off. All of her cakes and cookies looked and tasted delicious. Heatter’s sage counsel went beyond recipes. “When life gets you down, bake cookies,” she told Kotkin. “I can attest that it works!” Kotkin says.
Inspiring Young and Old
Through her cookbooks, Maida Heatter encouraged young pastry chefs and home bakers to try her detailed, fool-proof recipes. “Maida Heatter’s Book of Great Desserts would ultimately change my life,” writes pastry chef Hedy Goldsmith in her introduction to her own cookbook, Baking Out Loud. Early in her career, Goldsmith chose to bake a Queen Mother’s Cake to impress a kitchen manager. It worked. Later in Miami, while working at Mark’s Place, she met Heatter, who was “beyond kind, showering me with praise during that first meeting,” she writes. Heatter then connected Goldsmith with Michael Schwartz, which led to a longtime collaboration.
For a younger generation brought up on the Food Network and cooking videos, Heatter’s cookbooks – rich in description and line illustrations rather than full-color photography – register vintage appeal. By the time Miamian Jorge Zaldivar was born in 1985, Heatter was already in James Beard Foundation’s Cookbook Hall of Fame. When in his late 20s, Zaldivar, a guava farmer and member of the Rare Fruit Council International, discovered one of her cookbooks. He spotted the words “Miami Beach, Florida” under her signature on the introduction page. “What? This lady’s in Miami Beach?” he thought. “It seemed she was known around the world, but not much in Miami.”
In his zeal to explore Miami’s culinary history, Zaldivar started researching her cookbooks and contributions to the Miami Herald, including recipes like Oranges with Rum and Guava. “She teaches you how to peel an orange, a procedure that’s often overlooked,” he says.
Among his favorite recipes is her graham cracker crust, typically a simple recipe that often results in messy, crumbly wedges of pie. Not Heatter's recipe. “You line the pie plate with foil and she tells you exactly how to press down the crust” before baking. Then you freeze the crust, peel off the foil and gently ease the crust back into the pie plate before filling. It’s extra work, but worthwhile. “The results are extraordinary,” he says. “People ask, ‘How did your crust come out so perfectly?’”
That attention to detail ensures baking success in Heatter’s recipes, which Zaldivar – a passionate cookbook collector – says are often adapted, with shortcuts, by others. But for him, only her cookbooks will do. “Why listen to a song that samples an old song when you really want to listen to an original?”
Foolproof Results
For food bloggers “baking the book” – making every recipe in a cookbook and reporting on the results in a blog – Heatter’s recipes have proved especially inviting. Two of those include Mad About Maida and Maida Heatter Bakeoff.
To Michael Schwartz, who has written two cookbooks, including the just-released Genuine Pizza: Better Pizza at Home, Heatter’s recipe writing flies in the face of the current approach that appeals to readers’ short attention spans. “I remember her telling me: use as many words as you can to describe what you’re doing,” he says. “That’s pretty profound: you gotta explain it more.”
That means detailed instructions every step of the way, such as reassuring a baker about a rough-looking batter – “it will look curdled – that’s OK” – or how best to wrap bar cookies in clear cellophane. As a Miami Beach resident, she was well aware of the effects of humidity on baked goods and offered ways to deal with it. And in every book, Heatter would tell readers to follow the directions carefully. “I don’t want you to have any failures.”
Chatty headnotes, sensible comments sprinkled throughout and encouraging words make readers feel Maida Heatter is joining them in the kitchen, too. “That’s what I remember, her coaching me,” says Schwartz. “It’s as if she’s there with you.”
Happiness Is Baking by Maida Heatter with a foreword by Dorie Greenspan, a collection of her best-loved recipes, was released this spring. More info here.
