The Passing of a Food Lover
Sharon Tyler Herbst, passed away on January 26. Not everyone may know her name, but anyone who has a serious interest in food has a copy of her book, the Food Lover’s Companion, close at hand. It’s one of the references I recommend for any food newbie.
This compact paperback, a kind of dictionary-encyclopedia, is the source most of us go to when we want to ensure we have the right number of “cs” in focaccia or to find out what castor sugar is when translating an Irish recipe (superfine sugar).
It took Sharon three years to write the first edition, she said, when I interviewed her for the Associated Press in 2001, following the publication of the third edition.
The three editions tell the story of the evolution of cuisine in America by the number and types of words featured. The first edition in 1990 had 580 pages. As interest in food continued to grow deeper and wider, we saw more entries; the third edition has nearly twice the number of word entries as the first, and is a robust 770 pages. To keep up, Sharon would weed out foods that have gone out of style, such as Madeira cake (an English pound cake) to make room for new entries, including more ethnic foods like za’atar (a pungent Middle Eastern herb or a Middle Eastern spice blend of toasted sesame seeds, thyme, marjoram and sumac).
According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Sharon was finalizing the fourth edition of Food Lover’s, which will be published this fall, as well as the Cheese Lover’s Companion, due out this June.
Sharon had a vivacious personality and a zest for food and for people. As she said in our interview, “People are endlessly curious, the food world is endlessly evolving, and I think that makes a delicious combo.”
