¡iyman,alias Prudence.peckxout a mliimii.

PrudencePenny

the lady columnist who really isn't.For seven months a grizzledportly man has been leadinga secret life as a lady cook

By Hyman Goldberg.

Since last June 1 have been obliged (olaugh with seeming glee whenever

some waggish friend hails me with criesof, "Hello there, Prudence." My friendsarc convulsed by the thought that perhapsa million or more people must think of meeach day as a little old lady, presumably adear old one, while they know that for 39years I have been a cigar-smoking news-paperman working as a New York policereporter covering fires, murders, gangwars, and from time to time interviewingstars of the stage, screen and TV. Notonly my friends but absolute strangers,too, are bewildered by the thought that agrizzled, somewhat portly man with abasso profundo voice should be using aname which is so decidedly feminine, andeven prissy, and that such a man shouldbe writing about cooking.

The other day the phone in my officerang, and 1 picked it up and said, as I gen-erally do. "Goldberg." (That's my name,after all.) There was a second's silence, andthen a feminine voice said, "I'm sorry, Imust have the wrong extension. I'm call-ing Prudence Penny." 1 sighed and said,"Tliis is she." There was another silenceand then the voice said, "1 don't under-stand." So I explained that I, HymanGoldberg, am the author of the cookingcolumn which is printed under the nameof i*rudence Penny. With disbelief appar-ent in her voice, my caller hesitantly saidshe would like to French-fry a three-pound chicken and she wanted to knowwhat kind of baiter to use. "Two cups offlour," ! told her, "two teaspoons of bak-ing powder, one-half teaspoon salt, twoeggs and one-and-one-half cups of milk."

When she had finished writing all thisdown, she said, with doubt strong in herToice, "You sure? This isn't some kind ofjoke, is it?" "Madame," I said, "I swear,by Brillat-Savarin, by Escoffier and byHoward Johnson, this is not a joke."

In a restaurant where I took my wife todinner a few weeks ago I had somewhatthe same experience, but this time face toface with a disbeliever. I had just eaten adish which was new to me. The menucalled it "Breast of Capon, Mai Rose." 1knew that it had in it May wine, creamand lhe yolk of an egg as part of the in-gredients for the sauce, but I wanted tohave the precise measurements so after Ipaid the check, I asked to see the maîtred". The name of the restaurant is not es-sential, but it is one of Ihe better and moreexpensive ones in Manhattan.

"1 am Prudence Penny." I announcedwhen he arrived, smiling at me with thatpeculiar mixture of unctuousness andfrosty superiority affected by such people

When Hotitticrg isn't plaijing Prudence, he spii:es his life by interri€wi7ig actresses, such as Greta

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For 39 years I covered fires, muider!PRUDENCE PENNY

in swanky joints. Immediately his expres-sion changed. His face mirrored disbeliefand, perhaps, dislike. My wife giggledwildly as I explained the situation to theman. It took a long time lo convince him,but I finally did, and he got the recipe forme from the chef.

My metamorphosis into PrudencePenny came about when a lady namedVaudine Newell, who had been food-and-cooking editor for the New York Mirrorfor aboul 25 years, died suddenly onenight. A couple of weeks later, upon hear-ing that the job had not yet been filled, 1asked Selig Adler, managing editor of thepaper, if I could have it. He laughed."What the hell," he inquired gently, "doyou know about cooking?"

I told him something of my secret life asa cook, and then he said that the editor ofthe paper, not he, would have to makesuch a momentous decision. So I soughtout Glenn Neville, the editor, and askedhim for the job. He laughed.

But when he became convinced that Iwasn'tjoking, he said the publisher of thepaper, Charles B. McCabe, would have topass on my request. Neville told me towrite a letter to the publisher telling myqualifications and my philosophy of howa cooking column should be written.

The publisher apparently did not laugh.The day after he received my letter hecalled me on the phone. "About thatPrudence Penny job," he said, "let's haveluneh about it." So we had lunch and,after some embarrassed haggling aboutsuch sordid topics as money, we reachedan agreement and shook hands. So I be-came Prudence Penny.

That by-line was coined by WilliamRandolph Hearst Sr. more than 50 yearsago, and it has been used ever since bythe food editors of most of the Hearst

newspapers. At one time there were 30Prudence Pennys scattered around thecountry, and now there are still four, in-cluding me. {I met one of them, a nicewoman who works for the San FranciscoExaminer, at the Pillsbury Bake-off inLos Angeles a couple of months ago. Oneevening at a party we went around to-gether asking people, "Who is the realPrudence Penny?")

The pseudonymous life is not new tome. For years I had several articles in theSunday Mirror Magazine each week and,since the paper permitted me to use myname on only one of them, I was forcedthrough the years to invent others. One isGabriel Prevor. Gabriel is my son's firstname and Prevor is a name in my wife'sfamily. I went to high school in Lake-wood, N.J., with a boy named Benevy,which I thought at the time had a lot ofclass, so I adopted Robert Benevy. RegOvington was born because I lived at thecorner of Ridge Boulevard and OvingtonAvenue. The editors once asked me tofigure out "a New Englandîsh-soundingname," so I gave them Amos Coggins.Mannheim Bergold is my name turnedaround. I also use Jaime Montdor. Jaime,Spanish for James, is pronounced"Hymie," and Montdor, translated fromthe French into German, means 'Gold-berg." My favorite, however, was VeigKS. Meer. But someone told my editor thatin Yiddish it means "Woe is me!" and hemade me quit using it.

I was brought up in restaurants andhotels. My father, a blacksmith, became arestaurateur by accident. He had a one-man smithy in the Bronx wben he becameill and had to go to the hospital for an op-eration. With no money coming in, mymother, with five children to take care of,began cooking meals for men in theneighborhood who were saving money tobring their families to America from

Prudence Penny's recipe for an (u-e murder.

LIZZIE. BORDEN

SOUP

3 pounds mutton1 tsp. salt1 parsnip1 turnip3 small onions3 quarts cold water

Do you have a warm reeling of kinship lur our fellow citizensfif our ijister slate to the north of us. Massa dm settsV If vou do.pi-rliaps you would like to memorialize a dav famous "in thatcomiiionwciitth's glorious liistorv by making'a disli which hfis(ireat siííQiíicance on this tiay.

Sal t million, place iu kt-ttie and let stand M hour to bring ouidavor. Pour in cold waler, let stand for 1 more bour. Bring toljoil,then simulera hours, lîlutupexcess fat with paper napkiu.Add vegetables, simmer ibr additional hour. Taste lor davor,;uld seasoning. Refrigérale overnigJit. On August 4, ISy-J, iuKail iiiver, Mass., Mrs. liorden served tbis delicacy to berslepdauiibter, Lizzie Borden. Mrs. lîorden and ber hnsbandwere lound, later tbat day, axed unto deatli. She liad servedtlie .soup i-old, with a side disli nf hananas. For breakfast.

ang wars and actresses. Now I cook.

IAt home in lirooklyn, I'mdenve adth a heartij .ilinj of s/icrr// to kasha cnrnitelikas.

Europe. By the time my father came outof the hospital he found, to his astonish-ment but also great pleasure, that mymother had a flourishing business going.He promptly rented the flat next door,broke down the walls separating themand installed more tables. After a fewyears he was able to rent a store with astreet entrance and opened it as a res-taurant seating about 75 people. My twobrothers, two sisters and 1 all helped. Iwas an expert salad man and chicken-liver chopper at the age of six.

Once he got into the restaurant busi-ness, my father set about learning it.Pretty soon he knew everything mymotherdidaboutcooking, and blossomedout into a wonderfully daring and inven-tive cook, developing pleasing and excit-ing variations on the traditional Russian-Jewish cuisine.

It wasn't until I left my parents' homein the Bronx more than 30 years ago—I'm 55—that I had an opportunity to trymy o n hand at cooking in the languagesothi iiian Russian-Jewish. I had becomeexf' ' d to other cuisines earlier, when Iwei ' 'J work as a copy boy and then as apoi reporter at the age of 16 for the^,;\^ •¿OT)i World, long defunct. (I alsowor;.<;d for the New York San, defunct;

New York Telegram, defunct; City NewsAssociation, defunct; the newspaper PM,also defunct. And now the New YorkMirror, defunct. This morbid necrology isgiving my new editors on lhe Journal-American pause to think.)

In my letter to Glenn Neville, editor ofthe Mirror, I told how I had become pro-ficient in cooking in French, Italian, Chi-nese, Japanese, Spanish and many otherstyles, including, of course, American. 1mentioned the hundreds of recipes [ hadcollected and invented over the years andsubmitted several sample cooking col-umns. The first cooking column of minethat was printed began like this:

"There was this woman in The Bronxwho bought two live chickens and keptthem on her fire escape to fatten them.Sadly, one of them became indisposed.So she killed the healthy chicken to makesoup to bring the one that was ill back tohealth. Here's her recipe for, . . ." Andthen 1 gavearecipe forchicken-in-the-pot.

That recipe excited a lady in Montclair,N.J., who wrote:

Dear Miss Penny, Voiir recipe for Chicken-in-tlic-Pot came in real handy lonighi. Mymolhcr-in-law came over to huvc dinner withmy husband and I, and he's always praisinghis mother's cooking all the lime—and 1

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Q U A L I T Y M O T O R C O N T R O L

I was an expert saladman and chicken-liver chopper

at the age ef six.

PRUDENCE PENNY

rdlowcd your recipe and he said in fronl ofhis mother that he had never tasted chickcn-in-the-pot as delicious as what I had cooked.His mother has been buggingme ever since wehave been married and you gave me the nerveto tell her lo go fustigate herself.

The readers of the Mirror, and now ofthe Journal-American, obviously are a so-phisticated lot, for they seem to havetaken in stride the rather violent change-over in style from the old PrudencePenny, who wrote with deadly seriousnessahout food. Some have written to say thatit is good to laugh while cooking, which issomething I have always helieved, for foodis a great joy, and anything written aboutit certainly should not be drearily dull.

In addition to writing the food columnfor the Journal-American seven days aweek, 1 still interview actresses. Both arefull-time jobs. But I am cursed—ormaybe blessed—by an inability to sleepfor more than three or four hours at astretch. For years I would lie in bed, si-lently formulating foul oaths and pityingmyself. But then it occurred to me—andmy doctor confirmed my opinion—thatperhaps I did not need as much sleep asothers, just as some people require lessfood or booze than others. So now, in-stead of worrying about not sleeping, I getup and work at my typewriter or stove.

My wife is a good cook, and she enjoyscooking, but not, 1 know, as much as I do.For one thing, she must cook; so it isnaturally more pleasurable for me. Longago she slopped being amazed at my dar-ing approach to cookery, for she is whatis called "a plain cook." This does notmean that she is not beautiful, for she is;it means simply that she cooks uncompli-cated, plain dishes like steaks, roasts,stews. What I like to cook, and I do agood deal of it weekends, are things likepiroshki, which are Russian meat pastries;oila-podrida, a Spanish stew with 19 in-gredients; gandinga, a wonderful Carib-bean dish witb ham, pork and the liver,kidney and heart of a hog; tiem shuen yti,a Chinese sweet-and-sour fish; kashavarniidikas, a noodle dish with buck-wheat groats.

When I first became Prudence Penny, Icooked gefüllte fish and made tschav andinvited Glenn Neville, the A//rror's editor,and John J. O'Connell, then also a Hearsteditor, and several other friends to eat myhome-cooked lunch. We had the lunch-party at the Peking House Restaurant, aChinese restaurant near my office, whosebartender, Harry Lee, had once taughtme how to cook a yellow pike in gin. Thegerüllte fish and tschav, the editors toldme, established my right to call myselfPrudence Penny.

In case anyone is wondering, J alsocook in American. I have in my repertoiresuch things as Mormon stew; Minnesotabaked pike, Yankee bean soup. NewEnglandclam chowder ;Kalama2oochow-der and New Orleans pecan pie. Everywinter 1 roast several geese, for in myfamily we think goose fat is much better

for many kinds of cookery than butter orany other fat. 1 also have invented a stuff-ing with fried rice, goose and chickenlivers, mushrooms and many onions andmuch garlic.

Many of the recipes in my repertoireare for dishes I learned as a boy in myfather's restaurant ; others I have got overa period of more than 30 years from news-papers, magazines, wives of friends andfrom professional chefs; and I have acouple of hundred cookbooks that I havecollected. Since I have been Prudence,publishers keep sending me new ones.

The awful thought is always with methat if I write a recipe for somethingterrible I might make approximately amillion or more people unhappy, or muchworse, heaven forfend, ill. So I try to testanything that is new to me before I printit. But anyone who has been cooking fora long time—and professional chefs havetold me this too—can tell by reading arecipe almost precisely how it will taste.So, occasionally, I will print a recipe forsomething I have not tried out, but whichI know will be good. Confidentially, Ioften print recipes for foods I do not carefor at all but which I know that many ofmy readers will like, I will try almost any-thing, and I have eaten, even before Jturned into Prudence, some exceedinglystrange dishes, to the amazement—andsometimes horror—of my friends.

When I first became Prudence Permy,my wife said that any woman reading thecolumn would know instantly that a manwas writing it. If my readers are aware ofthat, it does not seem to make anydifference to them. Most of those whotelephone me do not seem at all surprisedwhen I say, "This is she." Neither of mypapers saw fit to tell the readers thatPrudence Penny is a white-haired, mid-dle-aged, longtime husband and father,but several other publications have asked alot of questions. One TV man asked if 1had ever done any other writing besidenewspaper work, and I told him I hadwritten for some magazines ranging from77«? New Yorker to True Experience, forwhich I once wrote this lead, of which 1have always been proud. It was ghostedfor a girl who had been freed after sheshot and killed a man : "I shot and killedmy lover, father of my twin illegitimatesons."

As a result of all this notoriety, plansare afoot to syndicate my column to news-papers nationally; 10 publishers of bookshave called or written asking me to writea cookbook, which I am now doing forone of them, and a few magazines areasking me to write articles for them, someof them not about cooking.

People keep asking my wife how shefeels about my being Prudence Penny.She gives them the same answer she hasalways given people when they told her,confidentially, "for your own good,"(hat they have seen me in a restaurant,bar or nightclub with a beautiful yoi n^actress. "Well," replies my wife, wh, ,;both philosophical and funny, "he's ¿o:to make a living," THE END

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