Every couple of years, I get a call that goes something like this: “I’m down-sizing but I can’t throw away my recipe collection. Would you like to have it?”
I have always said yes. When I first started writing about food here in 2000, I brought my mom’s collection of Helen Dollaghan’s food sections with me as a reference. We now have several complete sets of the special sections Helen edited from the 1960s into the ’80s. We have yellowed, folded newspaper clipping accompanied by letters in spidery cursive describing why the enclosed recipe was a favorite. “They are history!” as a reader named Pat N. said with her donation.
But nothing is permanent, not even a newsroom. We are moving from the sixth floor to a smaller newsroom on the eighth floor in the same building. When the paper moved in 2006, I put together a timeline of food here at The Denver Post. The earliest food coverage I could find in the paper was an 1895 column called “For the Fair Sex,” with French soup-making tips.
Helen was food editor from 1958 to 1993, and that kind of legacy leaves its mark. Every week, the features staff meets in the Helen Dollaghan conference room. She died just a couple months after her last column, which featured a recipe for chicken and asparagus. She tested her recipes in her Arvada home kitchen and never had a test kitchen at the office.
A few weeks ago, I dismantled our test kitchen, which was really a catering kitchen (no oven), but it served as a testing and staging area for everything but baked goods, which I tested at home. Its two big bookcases held classics, local books and the latest trends (I have two new books on cooking insects).
The books will be donated to the Denver Public Library. I can’t bear to put the clippings in the recycling bin, so I plan to take them home or share with sentimental co-workers who value “vintage” paper.
Moving is stressful. It dredges up up memories (remember when Kyle Wagner was the dining critic?), forgotten recipes (who can forget Orange Crush Cake?) and a few tears.
Taking the time to sit on the floor and leaf through decades of Food sections has helped me to see that we have honored Helen’s legacy. We helped people find lost recipes, make better nutritional choices, get dinner on the table and bake at high altitude.
Reporters and editors all around me are tossing notebooks and files into recycling bins. As my colleagues prepare to move, I am packing as well. And these cardboard boxes signal a more permanent change: I am leaving The Post to work with the communications team in the College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at Colorado State University, my alma mater in Fort Collins, where I live.
My career at the paper began with a column about my grandmother’s chocolate pie, so it seems fitting to end with pie recipes, along with a few other faves from the archives.
From the test kitchen, to my kitchen, to yours, I hope you have been inspired to gather around a table to share a meal with people you love. That’s a legacy I’d be proud to share.
Kristen Browning-Blas: 303-954-1440, kbrowning@denverpost.com or twitter.com/krisbb