Myra Waldo

Myra Waldo Schwartz (1915 or 1916 – July 25, 2004) was an American food writer who wrote prolifically on international cuisines and locations for a domestic audience.

From the 1950s through the 1970s, Waldo was an influential advocate for American travelers eating local food, and home cooks making food from outside America. Over her career, she worked in a range of roles around food, including as a restaurant critic and food editor for radio and print. By the time of her death, Waldo had written more than 40 books on subjects including The Art of Spaghetti Cookery, 1,001 Ways to Please Your Husband, and The Complete Round the World Cookbook.

Early life Waldo was born in 1915 or 1916 in Manhattan, New York. As a child, she accompanied her father in his travels across Europe in his role as a cosmetics salesman and later attended Columbia University. In 1937, Waldo married Benny Schwartz, a corporate lawyer and author.

The same year, Waldo released another book—the Round-the-World Cookbook, published by Doubleday as a collaboration with Pan American World Airways.

By 1960, Waldo had published twelve cookbooks, the product of extensive travel with her husband. Waldo's cookbooks around this time included texts on weight loss and The Complete Book of Gourmet Cooking for the American Kitchen, covering dishes that had gained popularity after World War II such as quiche Lorraine, chicken Marengo, and paella Valenciana; Craig Claiborne in the New York Times praised the book as a "delightful gift" despite occasional oversimplification. A profile that year in the New York Times recounted a series of anecdotes that had come about from Waldo's travels: a white-tablecloth dinner of game pâté, homemade bread, and stuffed and braised francolin eaten in a clearing while on safari and an event Waldo hosted in Moscow, where she served Bloody Mary cocktails made with Russian vodka and American tomato juice to a group of 60 Russians. It also recounted other events Waldo had attended, including a coming-of-age ceremony in Burma and the birthday of the emperor of Japan. At this time, she hosted dinners each month for the Overseas Press Club and consulted for Pan Am. Profiles during this period often commented on Waldo's looks: in the second half of the 1950s, separate articles in the New York Times described her as a "petite, fine-featured world traveler", "as pretty as Billy be damned", —by 1969 she had released around twenty books. Her output was attributed by Claiborne to an approach towards food as a commodity and the interest of publishers in having her as a writer: "If I write an article in The Times on a woman who cooks shrimp, the next day [Waldo will] be called by every publisher in New York to write THE definitive shrimp cookbook". Starting in 1968, Waldo began an on-air role at WCBS radio as an editor of food and travel content, continuing in the position until 1972. A book titled Restaurant Guide to New York City and Vicinity came out of the role, which Waldo continued to publish revisions of into the 1980s. These had included texts on cooking with wine, barbecue, Spanish cuisine, and a 1955 cookbook with actress Gertrude Berg titled The Molly Goldberg Jewish Cookbook, named after Berg's character in the radio and television comedy The Goldbergs. Outside of cookery and travel were advice books that relied on Waldo's celebrity, covering topics such as marriage (for instance 1,001 Ways to Please Your Husband) and dieting. Twenty years after her death, Waldo is less well known than her cookbook-writer peers of the mid-20th century, and only her book on soufflés remained in print.