In 1968, while the Republican National Convention arrived in Miami, an enterprising espresso store proprietor named Maida Heatter determined that the excellent manner to attract commercial enterprise could be with an audacious stunt: she tracked down a dealer of elephant meat. She served the G.O.P. Mascot sautéed in an omelet with a facet of bananas and crushed peanuts.
This novelty object caught the attention of Craig Claiborne, who was then the meals editor of the Times; he had visited the restaurant searching out a shaggy dog story and came away exhilarated. Forget the elephant meat: Heatter’s cakes, he determined, were a number of the fine he’d ever attempted. With Claiborne’s encouragement, Heatter started writing recipes for the Times, and her first cookbook, “Great Desserts,” was published in 1974.
Heather died earlier this month at the age of one hundred and, at her domestic in Miami Beach, wherein she had lived for many years, developing and checking out all her recipes in an ethereal kitchen with a view of Biscayne Bay. She became a self-taught baker and a pastry whiz whose smart recipes and charming demeanor won her an adoring target market. Beyond her surprising skill as a baker, Heather was a fashionable social discern and a charmingly shameless self-promoter. Magnificently dedicated to name-dropping, she was thrilled to learn about the glamorous lives that her creations lived once they had been published.
Many of her hundreds of recipes appear, without or with amendment, across more than one cookbook, with headnotes that update the reader approximately who had stated what to whom the cookie or cake in question. “I was introduced to Mrs. Tip O’Neill,” she writes in one of her books. “She heard my call and, without hesitation, said, ‘Palm Beach Brownies.’ ” (The cakes, mint-studded, have become the stuff of in addition legend while she tossed dozens of them, in my opinion, wrapped, into the group on the 1998 James Beard Awards, in which her paintings become inducted into the Cookbook Hall of Fame.) When Saveur profiled Heatter in 1997, the magazine republished her East Sixty-7th Street Lemon Cake, certainly one of her earliest Times recipes. “I pay attention to the fact that Bill Blass and Nancy Reagan asked for it,” she stated.
Likely, Heatter’s most famous recipe is her “Queen Mother’s Cake,” an extraordinarily airy flourless chocolate torte—it bypasses the expected fudge-like density thanks to six oz of exceptional ground almonds. becameinto featured in several of her cookbooks, including her very first, and became a cross-to dessert for the state-of-the-art dinner party set of the nineteen-eighties and nineties. The legend, in line with Heatter, is that the cake acquired its identity after being loved by its royal namesake at the home of an outstanding pianist; she became seemingly so taken with the aid of the confection that she asked for a duplicate of the recipe. “Incidentally, the Queen Mother and I corresponded with each other about this recipe,” Heatter wrote, introducing the recipe for the umpteenth time inside the 1999 reissue of “Great Desserts.”
My favorite Heatter recipe is a version of “Craig Claiborne’s Cheesecake,” an homage to her consumer saint, posted in “Maida Heatter’s Book of Great American Desserts.” Over the years, Heather used the ethereal, lemon-scented confection as a basis for various cheesecake riffs. Her “Bullseye” version includes setting apart some of the fillings and coloring them with bittersweet chocolate, after which she pours the chocolate and original combos into a cake pan in a layered sample that appears like an elegant tie-dye during the cut. I’m a fan of a model first posted in 1997 in “Maida Heatter’s Cakes”: “Polka-Dot Cheesecake,” wherein the chocolate filling is piped in spheres for a result that looks like Yayoi Kusama let loose on the dessert table. It equals elements that are elegant and absurd, and, at the same time, as not exactly an easy recipe, it’s clean enough to tug off in case you’re inclined to accept it as true within Heatter and do exactly what she says.
