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Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), statesman and U.S. President


He developed an abiding appreciation of French food as American ambassador to France (1785–89) and pursued an informed love of fine food both at Monticello and at the Presidential mansion through the agency of both American slave cooks and French-born chefs. His intense interest in plants and gardening led to one of his most lasting accomplishments: adding new food plants to the American larder through both his own experimental imports and the transcontinental explorations of Lewis and Clark.

Left image by Bettman/Corbis; Right Photograph by John Kernick

Mary Randolph

Mary Randolph (1762–1828), cookbook author


A family connection of Thomas Jefferson’s, she was reported by the culinary historian Karen Hess to have directly introduced Jefferson household recipes into her pioneering 1824 work The Virginia Housewife. Much revised during and after her lifetime, the book presents a surprisingly heterogeneous collection of recipes combining solidly English cooking traditions with French and some Spanish elements and a strong infusion of influences from slave cooks. It remained the great role model of southern cooking until late in the 19th century.

Left image Courtesy of The Library of Virginia

Eliza Leslie

Eliza Leslie (1787–1858), cookbook author


As a young woman, she studied at Elizabeth Goodfellow’s well-known Philadelphia cooking school. Leslie’s magnum opus was the 1837 Directions for Cookery, frequently reissued (under various titles) until 1892. Still unsurpassed among American cookbooks for civilized writing, sound culinary instincts, and attention to subtle detail, it was the most widely used American culinary manual of its day and shaped the tastes of 19th-century cooks from the East Coast to the end of the Oregon Trail.

Image Courtesy of The Library Company of Philadelphia

Sylvester Graham

Sylvester Graham (1794–1851), dietary reformer


Generally acknowledged as the founder of the American whole-grains movement, he entered the Presbyterian ministry in 1826 and gradually developed a belief in unrefined flours as the centerpiece of a vegetarian diet that represented a return to Edenic physical and moral purity. His 1837 Treatise on Bread and Bread-Making launched a durable following for “Graham flour” and “Graham bread.”

Left Image Courtesy of The Granger Collection; Right photograph by Cannon Brown

Amelia Simmons

Amelia Simmons (active 1796), cookbook author


No evidence survives of her existence beyond the name on the title page of American Cookery, published in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1796 (the author calls herself “An American Orphan”) and, in amended form, later that year in Albany, New York. Despite some recipes lifted from an English source, it is the first American-published cookbook to use New World ingredients like cranberries, squash, and local fish and game.

Images Courtesy of Michigan State University

Gail Borden

Gail Borden, Jr. (1801–1874), inventor and food technologist


In 1856, well before pasteurization was invented, Borden patented a process for vacuum-evaporating milk mixed with sugar (as a preservative) under sterile conditions and putting it into hermetically sealed cans. Originally intended as an emergency ration for travelers, his “condensed milk” was supplied to the Union Army in the Civil War and enjoyed great consumer success later in the century as a product probably safer than much untreated fresh milk.

Image Courtesy of NYPL Digital Gallery, The New York Public Library

Lorenzo Delmonico

Lorenzo Delmonico (1812–1881), restaurateur


The scion of a Swiss-Italian family that by 1840 had parlayed a modest New York confectionery shop into a series of admired restaurants, he oversaw the expansion of Delmonico’s into a restaurant noted for palatial ambience and undeviating attention to patrons’ wants, offering the grandest of la grande cuisine to a devoted clientele. Long after Delmonico’s demise during Prohibition, Delmonico’s still represents the pinnacle of American restaurant grandeur.

Left Photograh by Time & Life Pictures/Getty; Right Photograph Courtesy of NYPL Digital Gallery, The New York Public Library

Fred Harvey

Fred Harvey (1835–1901), food-service innovator


Starting in 1876, he began building a series of food concessions along a major Midwest-to-West-Coast railroad line. The “Harvey Houses,” eventually numbering several dozen, became synonymous with clean, well-managed, pleasant, and even gracious dining opportunities in the most remote and cheerless reaches of the long train journey. They also helped establish waitressing as a safe and well-paying job for respectable young women (known as Harvey Girls).

Photograph Courtesy of the Fred Harvey House

Gustavus Franklin Swift

Gustavus Franklin Swift (1839–1903), manufacturer and innovator


He came to the Chicago meatpacking scene in 1875, when the business was slow and arduous. He fashioned a massive yet efficiently integrated system of livestock transportation, slaughtering, and processing that used highly mechanized killing and dismembering techniques, as well as refrigeration of butchering premises and rail cars, to bring cheap, fresh meat and thriftily preserved byproducts to consumers everywhere.

Image Courtesy of NYPL Digital Gallery, The New York Public Library

Harvey Wiley

Harvey Washington Wiley (1844–1930), food-safety regulator and activist


Appointed head of the USDA’s Chemistry Division in 1883, he promptly began exposing widespread food adulteration and the need for a more adequate federal regulatory system. His efforts helped lead to the landmark Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. He also for many years pursued his pure-food campaign as a columnist for Good Housekeeping Magazine.

Photograph by B.M. Clinedinst/ Corbis

Artemas Ward

Artemas Ward (1848–1925), grocer and chronicler of the food trades


In 1874, he began a trade journal called The Philadelphia Grocer, from which he drew in compiling his short work The Grocer’s Hand-Book (1882). Decades later, he refashioned the Hand-Book into the monumental Grocer’s Encyclopedia (1911), an unequaled source of information—not completely outdated even today—on hundreds of food products, covering their lives from farm or plantation to retail shelf.

Image Courtesy of NYPL Digital Gallery, The New York Public Library

John Kellogg

John Harvey Kellogg (1852–1943), physician and dietary reformer


As head of the Seventh Day Adventists’ Battle Creek (Michigan) Sanitorium, Kellogg (together with his wife, Ella) developed a vegetarian dietary approach strongly influenced by Sylvester Graham’s advocacy of whole grains. It was the experiments with crushed-grain mixtures conducted by Kellogg and his brother Will that led to the modern proliferation of flaked breakfast cereals.

Left Image Courtesy of The Kellogg Company; Right Photograph by Corbis

Fannie Farmer

Fannie Farmer (1857–1915), cooking-school teacher and cookbook author


At the age of 36, she became principal of the celebrated Boston Cooking School. In 1896, she published The Boston Cooking-School Cookbook, which has remained in print ever since (with a thorough makeover and a change of title, to The Fannie Farmer Cookbook, in 1979). The book’s influence as a model for rigorous cooking instruction long outlasted the culinary fashions that it first embodied.

Photograph by Bettmann/Corbis

Milton Hershey

Milton Snavely Hershey (1857–1945), chocolate manufacturer

After establishing a successful caramel-candy business, he turned his attention to chocolate —then somewhat challenging and expensive to manufacture—in 1900. He designed and built a grandiose company town in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania, and, in 1905, began making milk chocolate on a scale that allowed the product to be sold nationwide at an unprecedented low price, ushering in the genre of popular American chocolate bars.

Left Image Courtesy of The Hershey Company; Right Photograph by Bettmann/Corbis

Upton Sinclair

Upton Sinclair (1878–1968), novelist and political activist


In 1906, he published The Jungle, a portrayal of victimized immigrants enduring barbarous conditions in Chicago meatpacking plants. The aspect of the novel that seized the popular imagination was the sickening filth from which meat reached American tables. Public outrage resulted in funding for a federal meat-inspection program and helped secure passage of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act, which established the Food and Drug Administration.

Left Photograph by AP Photo; Right Photograph by Bettmann/Corbis

Clarence Birdseye

Clarence Birdseye (1886–1956), inventor and food technologist


While working in the Canadian region of Labrador for the U.S. government, Birdseye became interested in the effects of sudden exposure to extreme cold on animal and plant tissues. After refining a quick-freezing method (which minimally impaired the texture of foods) and developing specialized packaging for freezing retail-sized portions, he founded a frozen-fish company that in 1929 became the Birds Eye division of General Foods—paving the way for the development of the massive frozen-food industry.

Left Photograph by Bettman/Corbis; Right Photograph Courtesy of Birdseye

Earle MacAusland

Earle R. MacAusland (1891–1980), magazine publisher


In 1941, he launched Gourmet: The Magazine of Good Living, and from the first, the venture struck a chord among a loyal readership. The aura that it conveyed under him suggested an exclusive club where Anglophilia and Francophilia mingled with a courtly brand of American patriotism. He also oversaw a postwar redefinition of Gourmet’s mission to address a growing audience of travelers with increasingly cosmopolitan sensibilities. His success paved the way for an entire genre of American food magazines.
Howard Johnson

Howard Deering Johnson (1897–1972), food-service innovator


From an ice cream business in Quincy, Massachusetts, he went on during the Depression to establish a sprawling, highly visible restaurant franchise. Each franchisee had to employ the same distinctive architectural style and uniform menu. Johnson’s coup was to exploit expanding highway travel at a decisive moment, acquiring exclusive food-service rights along several state turnpikes and later purchasing strategic spots at highway exits.

Photographs by Time & Life Pictures/Getty

Clementine Paddleford

Clementine Paddleford (1898–1967), magazine and newspaper columnist


A Kansan transplant to New York, she wrote a shoppers’-and-cooks’ column for the New York Herald Tribune (1936–1966) and a similar but more expansive column for Gourmet (1941–1953). She was known for an indefatigable passion for chronicling all imaginable culinary highways and byways of the age, and for a wildly effusive, metaphor-crammed prose style that readers found either lyrical or laughable.

Photograph by Time & Life Pictures/Getty

Raymond Kroc

Raymond Albert Kroc (1902–1984), food-service innovator


As a salesman for a commercial milkshake mixer company, he visited a California hamburger restaurant owned by Richard and Maurice McDonald in 1954. He was struck by the larger possibilities of their operation (already franchised in the Southwest). As franchise agent to the McDonalds, whom he bought out in 1961, he began a nationwide (later international) expansion that decisively transformed the role of fast food in American lives.

Left Photograph by Time & Life Pictures/Getty; Right Photograph by AP Photo/Rich Kareckas

James Beard

James Andrews Beard (1903–1985), food writer and cooking teacher


Starting in the 1940s as a freelance magazine contributor, cookbook author, and frequent consultant/spokesman for food manufacturers, he eventually acquired a towering reputation equally founded on his many and wide-ranging books, the expansively genial personality conveyed in his public appearances, and a longtime championship of American ingredients and cooking, notably those of his native Northwest Pacific Coast.

Photograph by Time & Life Pictures/Getty

Ancel Keys

Ancel Keys (1904–2004), nutrition researcher


During World War II, Keyes developed K-rations, which are named for him. During the 1950s, he undertook a comparative study of different national diets and health statistics, concluding that fat consumption was a causative factor in heart disease. His work initiated both a long medical debate on the effects of various dietary fats and a tremendous concomitant expansion of commercial food products with purported cardiac benefits.

Photograph Courtesy of University of Minnesota

Julia Child

Julia McWilliams Child (1912–2004), cookbook author and television cooking teacher


With two Frenchwomen, Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle, Child drafted an ambitious manual that became Mastering the Art of French Cooking, vol. 1 (Knopf, 1961). In 1963, she began appearing in the hugely popular television program The French Chef, which kindled an indelible association between “Julia” and a persona that was forthright, generous, welcoming, unflappable, and spontaneous. Off-screen, she worked untiringly to enlarge public recognition of food professionals’ accomplishments in all venues from the salad station to the library.

Photograph by Arnold Newman/ Getty

Judith Jones

Judith Bailey Jones (b. 1924), cookbook editor


Jones was instrumental in persuading the firm of Alfred A. Knopf to publish Child, Bertholle, and Beck’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking in 1961. For more than 45 years, she’s brought many influential food writers to Knopf, including Madhur Jaffrey, Marcella Hazan, and (during the most eminent years of his career) James Beard. Her efforts helped endow cookbooks with lasting prestige in the American publishing scene.

Photograph by Chester Higgins Jr/ Redux

Frances Lappe

Frances Moore Lappé (b. 1944), author and political activist


During the countercultural upheavals of the 1960s, she formed a forceful synthesis of beliefs about global resources, energy consumption, personal food choices, and moral responsibility. In the hugely influential Diet for a Small Planet (1971) she proposed a meatless diet relying on protein-rich food combinations as a practical means of addressing all these issues. World hunger and just food distribution have remained central concerns of her work.

Photograph by Anna Lappé

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