Maria Guarnaschelli, a formidable book editor who helped transform American cooking from a domestic chore to a cultural touchstone, and who presided a major revision of the popular book “Joy of Cooking,” died on Saturday in Manhasset, N.Y. She was 79. Her death, at Northwell Health Stern Family Center for Rehabilitation, was caused by complications of heart disease, said her daughter, the chef Alex Guarnaschelli. In a career that began in the mid-1970s, Maria Guarnaschelli brought intellectual heft and curiosity to the cookbooks she acquired and edited while pushing American cooks and chefs, who had been conditioned to revere “continental” cuisines like French and Italian, to think beyond Europe. The first cookbook she shepherded became the first comprehensive Indian cookbook for American kitchens: Classic Indian Cooking, by the Brooklyn cooking teacher Julie Sahni. And at a time when the Mexican culinary tradition was little appreciated in the United States, she encouraged the chef Rick Bayless to reproduce the recipes he had studied in Mexico in painstaking detail.

Source: International New York Times February 11, 2021 22:41 UTC