This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Oct. 2, 2011 - Ellen Sweets, who was born and raised and learned to cook in St. Louis, has just published a fine new book called "Stirring It Up With Molly Ivins: A Memoir with Recipes." It's part cookbook and part biography - of both food writer Sweets and her close friend and cooking partner, the late political columnist Molly Ivins. I think it's a splendid book, warm and funny and poignant and gutsy and deeply hunger-inducing,
But don't take my word for it - I'm not to be trusted on the subject of Ellen Sweets. I've been good friends with Ellen for, my god, has it been 40 years?
Fortunately, early reviews (the official publication date is Oct. 1) are terrific. David Finkel in the Huffington Post says "Stirring It Up with Molly Ivins" is a book "you can take to your heart and your hearth." And the old reliable Kirkus service, upon which booksellers depend, captures the warm, serendipitous tone of the book perfectly:
"The narrative calls to mind a hot evening sitting on a front porch, shooting the breeze and drinking beer with friends. Stories are swapped, not in any particular order, but rather as the spirit moves the assembled party. Sweets has assembled quite a party; Friends, colleagues, family members and admirers of the late Ivins share tales of her famously sharp political wit, her dedication to her beliefs and her culinary mishaps and triumphs. The author reminds us frequently that though Ivins was a private woman, she connected to others through food. Readers who loved her prose can now also love her Four Seasons Fancy Chocolate Cake and her Ouefs Brouille."
Ellen at the Post
To my best recollection, I first saw Ellen Sweets in 1970, across the city room of the Post-Dispatch, and she was walking in the general direction of the women's bathroom, carrying her shoes in her hand. She was pregnant with, as it turned out, her smart, beautiful and talented dancer-chef daughter, Hannah.
In those days, a few black journalists were at the paper. And only one of them, Ellen, was a woman. In my recollection, as I look admiringly across the city room at Ellen, I see frowns of disapproval cross the faces of some of the senior rewrite men in starched white shirts who sat nearest to the city editor. Maybe I'm imagining that. As it turned out, a couple of the veterans in the white shirts would become very good friends with the new, occasionally barefoot reporter, perhaps because she clearly knew what she was doing in a newsroom. Newspapers were in her blood.
The hiring of Ellen Sweets foreshadowed the arrival of a new generation at the paper, a generation that, within a few years would swarm through the newsroom of the then-prosperous Post-Dispatch, bringing a modicum of racial and gender diversity and a certain devil-may-care attitude to a previously stern white male redoubt. The city room soon became the sort of place where you might see more than a couple of black faces, and more than one journalist who was pregnant. However, Ellen was the only staff member I recall going barefoot in the newsroom. (In the new book, she says she always hated wearing shoes. Among the many qualities she shared with Molly Ivins, rebellion against a strict upbringing being prime among them, was a love of going barefoot.)
At the Post-Dispatch four decades ago, the new black reporters soon included Sheila Rule, later with the New York Times, and Bob Joiner, who now writes for the Beacon. They and Ellen all lived in Laclede Park and Laclede Town, the memorably hip, long-gone town-house project east of St. Louis University, and were very close friends. Ellen was a single mother raising a rambunctious daughter, she said, and help from friends like Sheila and Bob was crucial.
From her home in Texas, she said she also "remembered and treasured" editors Selwyn Pepper, Jim Fox and Jim Millstone and legendary investigative reporter Ted Link.
"And there was Sally. Wow. Sally. I don't know what I would have done without her." Sally Bixby Defty was one of the first female news reporters at the Post-Dispatch, and became the paper's first female city editor.
Newspapers in the Blood
Ellen Sweets was a good choice to break the color-gender gap at the Post-Dispatch. She grew up in the newspaper business. Her father, Nathaniel Sweets, was the publisher of the St. Louis American and her mother, Melba, wrote a sharp-witted column for the black weekly while keeping a close eye on Ellen and her two brothers: retired juvenile officer Nathaniel Jr. and retired journalist Fred, who was the second black photographer at the Post-Dispatch and became chief photographer for the Associated Press.
Ellen went to Soldan High School, since you asked, and Antioch College. She recalled growing up in the Ville, a black neighborhood, in an atmosphere of books and culture. She once sat at the head of the stairs and listened breathlessly as Langston Hughes read his poetry to a small gathering, and Duke Ellington would drop by when he was in town.
She said recently, "Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee also played in our house one Saturday night when they were in town for a production of 'Finian's Rainbow.' There were no restaurants where the (racially mixed) cast could eat together, so my parents had a chittlin' supper with spaghetti and fried chicken and greens and cornbread."
"Finian's Rainbow," which premiered in 1947 and was set in the mythical state of "Missitucky, was one of the first Broadway shows to deal with racism. The star singer, Ella Logan, and the show's producer were among those who came to dinner at the Sweets house. "They were persona non grata for insisting that, for the run, blacks be allowed to sit anywhere they wanted in the theater, not just the balcony," Sweets recalled.
In the early '80s, Ellen got a job with what was then called "the telephone company" (AT&T), a job that paid better than newspapering, but she missed journalism and after a few years in the Northeast moved to the Dallas Morning News, where she would win the James Beard award for food journalism. She later joined the Denver Post. A few years ago, she retired and bought a house in Austin, Texas.
A Love of Food
In February, Ellen celebrated -- and I mean celebrated -- her 70th birthday in New Orleans, one of her favorite cities, with a dinner party. Seemingly every liberal and progressive in Austin drove over for the affair, and there were guests from New York and Denver and Los Angeles and, of course, St. Louis -- old friends Art and Gayla Hoffman and Rose Jonas among them.
She had booked all three floors, including the kitchen and the dining room, of a bed and breakfast in the Ninth Ward, slowly crawling its way back up after Hurricane Katrina. Ellen and a well-known chef provided crawfish etouffe in puff pastry shells and other Creole and Cajun delights for what might be called a standup dinner, and Ellen counted on her friends to fill in the rest of the weekend in the restaurants and nightspots of the Crescent City. "I figured if I and my friends were going to spend money somewhere," she said nonchalantly, "why not do it in New Orleans?"
Sadly, Molly Ivins could not come. The outspoken political commentator, one of Ellen's best friends, died in January 2007 after a long fight with cancer.
Molly Ivins
Ellen met Molly Ivins at an American Civil Liberties Union event in Dallas in 1990, about a year after going to work at the Morning News. The short black food writer from the Ville and the tall blond syndicated columnist from a wealthy suburb of Houston quickly bonded over the intensity of their shared political convictions and the equal intensity of their mutual passion for food. Ivins was living in Austin, and fairly soon Ellen was finding reasons to regularly drive the three-and-a-half hours to the state capital -- the People's Republic of Austin, as the outpost of progressive politics and alternate lifestyles was known to some.
Molly and Ellen talked politics, and they cooked for Molly's friends, who soon became Ellen's friends. "I spent so much time in Austin people thought I lived there," she recalled.
In February 2007, a few days after Molly died, Ellen wrote a lovely eulogy for the Texas Observer ("News, politics, and culture from a progressive-left viewpoint since 1954," its masthead announces.) Molly Ivins had worked at the low-budget Observer in her early years as a journalist, and always missed those days.
In the eulogy, Ellen recalled the early 1990s in Austin:
"Molly's house became my stopping place. We often didn't do much of anything other than cook. The two of us in a grocery store was often a double-barreled disaster. We'd make a list and either forget to bring it or completely misunderstand who was to get what. Cruising Central Market, I'd think we needed more of this and less of that. She insisted my sense of proportion was totally without merit, so I'd sneak an extra something that she would then promptly remove."
"One year," Ellen recalled, "we did a Cajun Thanksgiving, complete with seafood gumbo and turducken. We e-mailed plans back and forth, planning a timetable for making the sweet-potato casserole, the carrots sauteed in brown butter with shallots, collard greens, baby brussels sprouts in Dijon-cream sauce, mashed potatoes, and giblet gravy. The four-hour meal ended with cherry and pumpkin pie, and various guests spread-eagled on the floor, bemoaning their lack of self-control."
"Over many years and many, many meals," Ellen wrote, "there was never a dull one. Molly's dinner parties were a thing to behold, whether duck a l'orange with leeks and pureed potatoes, or chili with cheese and sour cream, or barbecued chicken, potato salad, and slaw, or a standing rib roast and baby vegetables. We drank, we talked, argued politics, embellished the truth, and in all probability told outright lies."
For "Stirring it Up with Molly," Ellen interviewed dozens of people who had known her friend, and a surprising number of their memories involved food, whether eaten at the large round table in Molly's dining room in Austin, at a barbecue joint in the backwoods, or on a riverbank during one of the many float trips Molly organized. The book is full of recipes, from "Ellen's St. Louis Chili Mac" -- Molly was appalled that anyone would mix chili with pasta, until she tasted the dish -- to the "Outrageous Brownies" that Molly made from scratch and at times would helplessly gobble up before the company arrived.
The book ends with Ellen's recipe for Gentle Chicken Soup, which Ellen first made for Molly when her friend was in bed with what at the time seemed like a case of bronchitis. As Molly Ivins became increasingly ill, the chicken soup became one of her favorite meals.
Among the dozens of photos of Molly Ivins in the book, it's hard to find one where she isn't smiling or laughing, even among those taken in the pain-ridden last year of her life. Once you get past the blond hair and the wealthy establishment upbringing, the Molly Ivins that emerges from Ellen's portrait seems much like Ellen herself: whip-smart, opinionated, fearless, contemptuous of her enemies (at the least the political ones) and deeply loyal to her friends.
Both were rebellious girls who loved to read and chafed at strict parenting; both loved the brawl and camaraderie of newspapers, and were instrumental in bringing women and minorities into the mainstream of American journalism. And they shared a joy in living -- and that definitely includes cooking and eating good food.
And both were blessed with a great sense of humor.
In the book, Ellen recalls a story told by old friend Larry Norwood.
"During one of her end-stage hospitalizations," Ellen writes, "an adverse reaction to a new medication had provoked a hideous, painful result. As she struggled to find a comfortable position, she looked into Norwood's eyes, smiled, and said, 'God I wish Dick Cheney had these hives'."
Harper Barnes, the author of Never Been A Time: The 1917 Race Riot That Sparked The Civil Rights Movement, is a special contributor to the Beacon.