The course of food
Coverage satisfied more than appetites
Before Instagram, there was the newspaper food section and its comehither pictures of plates of pleasure.
Before email, there was the newspaper food section and its send-in-yourrecipe contests, recipe exchanges, letters to the food editor, and “Dear Readers” columns.
Before Yelp, there was the newspaper food section and its dining reviews.
Alas, before the triumphant triumvirate of online advertising, Amazon and Google, there was the newspaper food section and its pages of display advertisements, deals and discounts, and clip-out coupons for foods of all manner.
The newspaper food section isn’t going away, let’s be clear, but it certainly has changed.
While The Denver Post’s food section is still at it, the department had a glorious past.
This is some of its history, in facts and figures, in reminiscences by those still living who crafted it and wrote for it, and in the mirrors it held up to the times it lived through, here, in The Rocky Mountain Empire.
1895-1910
Before January 1901 — when it came to be called “The Denver Post,” plain and simple — The Evening Post (and, for a short while, The Denver Evening Post) had slim pickings in food writing on its pages. But it did have “the women’s pages.” Variously titled “Interesting to Women,” “For the Fairer Sex,” or “Acts & Fancies for the Fairer Sex.” These pages were mostly devoted to, well, devotions (such as reprints of parsons’ sermons), bridal-gown mastery, poems, travelogues, and articles such as “When Milady Dances,” “How a Bride Was Won,” and “About Blushing Women.”
From the turn of the 19th century to the years just after World War II, the women’s pages were the only place to find food writing of any kind. Women’s pages were called the “4-F pages,” since there, and about only there, you could read about family, food, fashion and furnishings.
Early Denver Post cooking advice was scattered through the women’s pages — “Hints from Heloise”-like — as part of larger, more general stories about travel or keeping a home. For instance, from an 1895 travel piece on tips from France: “Always boil soup long and slowly.”
In time, The Denver Post printed stories about food and recipes in other sections of the newspaper, especially on weekends. A stand-alone section would not come for decades.
Into the late 1890s, readers could count on a regular ad — small, in the lower left corner of the women’s pages — from stalwart Royal Baking Powder (“Highest of all in Leavening Power”). The leavening power of baking powder for all those Rocky Mountain Empire homesteaders and Western-going young men (a few of whom baked,
The years after World War II were marked by huge strides in newspaper food writing and larger food sections.
surely) may not have been what they were after at this extraordinary high altitude, but Royal Baking Powder soldiered on with its near-daily ads.
The “foods” advertised in the women’s pages (and throughout the remainder of the Evening Denver Post) were a plethora of concoctions, potions, liquids and nostrums promising to alleviate so many pains, maladies and unwanted bodily functions — including (judging from the frequency of the advertisement for cures) the seemingly ever-present “piles” (hemorrhoids).
1910
The women’s pages, named “Principally About Men & Women” and appearing on Fridays and Saturdays rather than weekdays, began running what we’d recognize as short recipes, such as those for “Sandwich Fillings.”
Grocery advertisements also began to buy up a good amount of real estate in the women’s pages.
In April 1910, The John Thompson Grocery Company advertised “3 lbs dried cherries $1; 1 quart pure fruit jam, 3 jars for $1; and Arbuckle’s Coffee 15 cents a pound.”
In a move not repeated in Colorado grocery stores until just recently, John Thompson also sold beer, wine and spirits: “1 quart 5-year-old Bourbon 75 cents; quarts Coors Export $1.40 a dozen; a full line of best and sour wines $1 to $3.50 a gallon.” (Until the 2000s in the U.S., the word “sour” described wines, mostly white, that were tart, crisp or zesty. It wasn’t a pejorative moniker.)
Down the block from John Thompson, but on the same page in the paper, the Western Meat Co. advertised “Porterhouse steak 17.5 cents a pound; Round steak 15 cents a pound; Lamb chops 20 cents a pound; and Pork roast 15 cents a pound.”
While it looks like a deal, 15 cents is about $3.75 in today’s money. Almost any Wednesday now, Safeway or King Soopers has that beat — big time.
1920
Grocery store ads — and the neverceasing health-related spooks and their ads — moved from weekend women’s pages to Fridays.
Foods became salutary (as many are today) for non-alimentary destinations. “Comb sage tea into grey hair” to darken it, and the like.
Grocery and meat prices appeared not to rise much at all.
1930
On Friday, April 11, many of the women’s pages were devoted to food, with seven of them replete with advertisements for grocery and home-keeping products.
A few days earlier, on April 3, a headline read: “Good Cooks Invited to Send Original Recipes for Contest.” For each selected recipe, “A dollar will be paid to the contributor.”
Pork prices may have had a slow rise during the first half of the 20th century, but recipe prize money held steady. In April 20 years later, the newspaper still awarded a dollar daily — yes, daily — “for the best reader recipe appearing.”
This sort of recipe solicitation would be frowned upon today, but it began something that became a trademark for the food sections of The Denver Post: It established a conversation, a give-andtake with the newspaper’s readership that often melted into the intimate.
Over the years, readers of The Denver Post’s food sections have asked cooking questions of The Post’s writers, and of each other, and each exchanged flurries of recipes.
Hundreds of columns have profiled both regional professional chefs and home cooks. In short, the food section became a handheld chat room, a printed social network, long before (and continuing through) the rise of digital social media.
1940
In The Denver Post’s food writings over the years, pies ruled. In 1958, on her accession as the newspaper’s food editor, Helen Dollaghan’s first column had a recipe for pie. Kristen Browning-blas, food editor from 2002 to 2014, began and ended her stint with columns on pies.
In the early and mid-1900s, many of those daily recipe prize dollars were pieeyed for pies, such as that on April 5, 1940, for “Dainty Pies With Luscious Fillings.”
On the same page, the “Old Black Joe Cake from Missouri” did not win the dollar prize. Progress.
1950
This was a signal year for food coverage in The Denver Post. Early that year, Helen Messenger Cass moved from her “women’s department” desk at The Post, writing on society and other 4-F topics, to become the newspaper’s first full-time food writer and editor.
The years after World War II were marked by huge strides in newspaper food writing and larger food sections (which were due in large part to an evergrowing number of new food items, many, but not all, the new “processed foods,” and newly invented ways and means by which to prepare them — and the enormous number of advertisements aimed at promoting them).
Cass wrote under the byline of Helen Messenger and popularized a food column in the Sunday Empire magazine titled, “Munching Through Denver With Messenger.” In it, she pioneered something that her successor, Helen Dollaghan, would develop into an art form: profiles of local cooks or chefs spotlighting their recipes and cooking methods.
1955-58
Helen Dollaghan Vogel shared floor space in the women’s department with Helen Messenger Cass, taking over food writing for The Post in 1955, when Cass left the newspaper to raise her children.
On Sept. 20, 1958, the editors named Vogel food editor, and she began writing under a byline that would become dear over the years to thousands of readers: Helen Dollaghan.
Typical of what she would do in hundreds of pieces written from 1958 until her retirement as in 1993, Dollaghan’s first column, on Sept. 21, 1958, profiled a home cook, “Mrs. Jack Reed of Denver,” and her magic touch with premixed pie fillings.
1950-70
Babies weren’t the only thing booming during these years; so were sections in newspapers. The Denver Post spawned weekend “magazines” titled Empire, Roundup, Contemporary and This Week, in which recipes would appear round-robin style, one week in Roundup, the next in This Week.
Guest or wire columnists on food, cooking or recipes also peppered the same pages, some famous, such as Clementine Paddleford. All of these recipes and writings had to tread water in a sea of wedding announcements, gardening tips, TV listings, arts coverage, travel writing, hobby advice, “For Women Only” columns (yes, called such), Ann Landers’ advisements, and — at long last — space devoted to writing about healthy eating, by Frederick J. Stare, M.D.
During all of it, Helen Dollaghan wrote her food columns, eventually gaining a bit more print space when the newspaper went to a full broadsheet format. Still, on April 1, 1970, of the two pages of broadsheet devoted to food that day, one half was for her column and two and a half held food ads.
1974
On Dec. 4, The Denver Post — and “Helen Dollaghan, Food Editor” — debuted “Food and Western Outdoors,” the newspaper’s first stand-alone weekly food section.
1980
In the 1980s, The Denver Post’s food section and its satellite magazines grew sizable with food, wine and restaurant coverage, some of it from wires services like The New York Times.
Along with 14 pages of advertisements, the Wed., April 2, 1980, food section carried stories that covered cooking as a single person, in a microwave (separate stories), and on other newly available appliances; nutrition and “Food for Thought,” both written by separate health professionals; a Q&A on leftovers with Craig Claiborne; “James Beard on Food”; a lengthy wine column; how to grow bean sprouts; how to decorate Easter eggs; how to make a bunny cake; full-on news stories on eating and living in Boulder; and on Soviet shoppers’ new predilection for Americanstyle white bread.
1982
On Feb. 7, Empire magazine printed a recipe for “Chicken with Apricots.” On Monday morning, cooks called in to report that the recipe was dangerous — and not by ingestion.
One said that it blew the door off of her oven. It turned out that some readers had taken the liberty to add (“oh, a little more won’t hurt”) extra apricot brandy and to cover the fowl with foil, making for a ticking chicken. With great affection, the recipe came to be called “Coq au Blam.”
1990
The Wednesday, April 4, food section — now titled “Colorado Cooking” — was only eight pages total. The day’s 14 pages of food advertisements were to be found in separate booklets from Albertsons, say, or King Soopers, along with more multipage coupon books, with banner ads, for most everything for the home kitchen, bath or bedroom.
In the food section proper, the lead column was Dollaghan’s “Cooking with Helen.”
1990s-2000s
Dollaghan retired in June 1993, but remained writing on food and recipes for The Denver Post until 1998. She died two months after turning in her final column; it included two recipes for asparagus and a reader request for a yogurt dessert.
In October 1993, John Kessler, a graduate of a top cooking school on the East Coast and a writer of restaurant reviews for Westword, became the Post’s food editor, if not in name (he was always called simply “food writer”), then in fact.
It was a big change from the days and style of Dollaghan.
“One of my first page one (of the food section) columns was near Christmas, ‘101 Uses for the Fruitcake,’ ” he said. “Leg weights, a door stop. It was pretty different. Some people were horrified. ‘We just want our real food back.’
“I tried to certainly change up to appeal to a younger readership,” Kessler said. “I remember feeling Helen was so great and such a grandmotherly person, but it wasn’t the food that I wanted to cook.”
Kessler wrote for the food section for four years, leaving in July 1997 for great success in Atlanta.
His Denver-era food writing is marked by not only the freshness or exuberance of youth, or his skills learned in cooking school, but also by how broadly it reached into (and taught about) the cooking of other countries, including the many markets for ingredients to that cooking that were accessible in Colorado.
The second longest-serving food editor of The Denver Post, after Helen Dollaghan, was Kristen Browning-blas, who served from 2002 to 2014.
“I wanted the food section to feel like a conversation between two people who love food,” she said. “That’s certainly how it felt between Helen and her readers.”
Browning-blas was no throwback to earlier years in cooking, however. “I can’t remember if it was 2003 or 2004, but I was at the Association of Food Journalists conference in Boston with Kyle (Wagner, then the Post’s food critic).”
“We sat down one day and just mapped out how the food section should be,” she said. “That cooking and dining out shouldn’t be separated (in two sections, on different days). The food section should reflect the culture of food. So we moved the restaurant reviews to the Wednesday food section.”
Browning-blas was tireless in polishing The Post’s food section. In 2006, the section won a James Beard Foundation award for the best newspaper food section in its circulation category.
The idea that the food section is a conversation between the editor and the readers of the section was kept by the last of the food editors or writers for The Denver Post included here, Tucker Shaw.
Shaw was food editor from 2008 until 2011, although he prefaced (and even overlapped) his work as food section editor by being the newspaper’s restaurant critic from November 2005 until October 2010.
“I was extremely lucky in my time there,” Shaw said from his home in Boston, where he is now executive editor for Cook’s Country. “There was a lot of action in Denver at the time; Denver was coming into its own for food. People were actively interested not just about food, but also about news about food and people making food.
“I had an endless amount of material,” he said. “To me, food is the commonest common ground; everybody is into food whether they are a ‘foodie’ or not.
“I loved hearing from lifelong subscribers to the paper. A lot of people would share heirloom recipes; they influenced a lot of what I wrote. Those recipes were an incredible window into someone’s life.”
Former Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News food writer
Bill St. John can be reached at bsjpost@gmail.com.