The Recipe Detective Sometime in the mid-1970s, Gloria Pitzer was fired from her job as food editor at a local paper because she insisted on giving readers the recipes they wanted, not the recipes her editor felt they ought to want. Still convinced that she was right, she took in ironing until she had scraped up enough to purchase a mimeograph machine, and started sending out a food letter, The Secret Recipe Report. This triumph was built on the brilliant intuition that a lot of home cooks were tired of the recipes offered in most cookbooks and newspaper food pages. What Pitzer understood was that while this was what her readers may have said they wanted, it was secretly what they yearned to escape. It quickly became apparent that she had touched a public nerve.
Cookbooks offering homemade versions of popular restaurant and brand-name foods are nothing new.
What made Gloria Pitzer different was both what she chose to replicate and how she chose to do it. These authors shrink from any association with the shameful thrill of a mouthful of Pringles or raspberry-flavored marshmallow fluff. Consequently her versions are often worse for us than the originals and, sometimes even more expensive to make. Only Dream Whip has so far managed to stymie her, and that probably not for long. Indeed, what to my mind makes Pitzer a true artist is her lack of interest in with what exactly a particular product is made.