Remembering Maida Heatter : Arms Full of Biscotti
When cookbook author Maida Heatter died in June at 102, everyone from top chefs to cookbook luminaries to home bakers to her Bay Harbor Islands neighbors remembered fondly Miami Beach’s queen of desserts. And everyone has a story to tell.
“Maida lived on the water in a beautiful white house about half a block from my house,” says attorney Suzanne Gorowitz Trushin. “Normally, my parents would never let me eat unwrapped treats on Halloween for obvious reasons, but everyone knew of Maida, so her house was the exception. The cookies were chocolate chip – and they were often still slightly warm and gooey. We always made sure to go to her house first, so we would not miss out. OK, maybe we went back twice.”
As a travel and food writer, Lea Lane, has met many famed cooks, including James Beard, Julia Child and Jacques Pepin. “But my first was ‘Toni’s mom,’” she says. “I was in the same high school class as [her daughter] Toni – class of 1960, Beach High.” When Lane visited, Heatter was baking in the kitchen. “It was blue Formica, I do believe. The brownies were delicious and I told my mother ‘Toni’s mom makes the best brownies!’ That was long before she became famous for being a cook or for chocolate desserts in particular.”
Born in Long Island, Maida Heatter started her career as an illustrator, designed jewelry and then entered the professional world of baking. She made desserts for her husband’s restaurant, Inside, on Kane Concourse. “It was wonderful, with brick walls, outdoor seating, a good lunch spot,” recalls Norma A. Orovitz, a former Miami News reporter. “We’d check the desserts for her raspberry-strawberry Bavarians.” When she and a photographer went to do a story on her, Heatter was waiting for them at the front door with individually wrapped brownies.
In 1974, her first cookbook, Maida Heatter’s Book of Great Desserts came out, followed by her Best Dessert Book Ever, Book of Great Cookies, New Book of Great Desserts, Book of Great Chocolate Desserts, Book of Great American Desserts, Brand-new Book of Great Cookies, plus some compilations. She baked and tested relentlessly. South Floridians were her guinea pigs.
“Maida used to come all the time to Nemo, and she never came empty-handed,” says Genuine Hospitality’s Michael Schwartz of the 1990s SoFi hotspot where he and Myles Chefitz were partners. “We were bombarded with biscotti and Palm Beach brownies, everything precision-perfect,” he says. Chef and author Norman Van Aken remembers when Heatter, bearing biscotti, arrived at his cramped office at A Mano at the Betsy Ross Hotel, where he was cooking in the early 90s. She was also armed with an advance copy of an article on his cooking written for Conde Nast Traveler by Random House publishing giant Jason Epstein, whom she had introduced to him a few months earlier.
Bakers are a chatty bunch, always happy to answer a late-night text about a baking emergency or confess to a painful flub. Years ago, Greg Patent, a food writer in Missoula, Montana, wrote to Heatter about Mildred Knopf’s Orange Puff Cake. “The recipe promises a light, airy orange-flavored sponge cake,” says Patent. The cake did puff spectacularly … then collapsed. She answered that she didn’t have experience baking at altitude (Miami’s elevation is 6 feet; Missoula’s is 3,209 feet) and over the years, the two became pen pals. One day, she called to say she and her husband were en route to Alaska and would be staying in Missoula for the night – could they get together? Patent and his wife invited them for sauerbraten and Abby Mandel’s Boule de Niege from one of her cookbooks.“What a thrill to have Maida in our home, eating together, chatting and just enjoying being in each other’s company,” says Patent.
Through her cookbooks, Heatter encouraged pastry chefs and home bakers alike to try her detailed, fool-proof recipes. “Maida Heatter was my baking inspiration,” says Rose Levy Beranbaum, author of award-winning cookbooks. “I discovered her first book, Maida Heatter’s Book of Great Desserts, in the early 1980s and was spellbound by her writing. To this day, no one describes a dessert with greater appeal, that makes one want to stop everything and run right to the kitchen to bake it.”
For a generation brought up on the Food Network and cooking videos, Heatter’s cookbooks – rich in description and illustrations rather than full-color photography – entice with vintage appeal. By the time Miamian Jorge Zaldivar was born in 1985, Heatter had already been inducted in the James Beard Foundation’s Cookbook Hall of Fame. When he reached his late 20s, Zaldivar, a guava farmer and avid cookbook collector, discovered one of her cookbooks and saw “Miami Beach, Florida” under her signature. “It seemed she was known around the world, but not much in Miami,” says Zaldivar, who swears by her graham-cracker crust method.
Michael Schwartz, author of two cookbooks, says Heatter’s recipe writing flies in the face of the current approach geared to short attention spans. “I remember her telling me: use as many words as you can to describe what you’re doing,” he says. “You gotta explain it more.” In every book, she reminds readers to follow directions carefully: “I don’t want you to have any failures.”
Maida Heatter’s chatty headnotes, sensible comments and encouraging words bring her into the kitchen with her readers, reflecting her own cheerful generosity. “For Maida, writing a book was not about showing off,” says Rose Levy Beranbaum. “It was about sharing what she loves with the world and making it a happier place.”
