Playing catch-up from the last few days:
Marilyn Hagerty. If you’ve been around the Internet for a while, that name may ring a bell with you.
Ms. Hagerty wrote a restaurant review column (“The Eatbeat”) for the Grand Forks (North Dakota) Herald. In 2012, she wrote a review of the new (and first) Olive Garden in Grand Forks. It went viral on the Internet.
When the article first began to ricochet across social media, the initial consensus was that the writer was a kindly Midwestern grandmother who had lost the script. This seemed to be the view of an out-of-town reader who sent her a one-word email: “Pathetic.”
In fact, Ms. Hagerty was following a script of her own. It was her long-running custom to provide factual rundowns of the dining options in Grand Forks, a college town near the Minnesota border that has fewer than 60,000 people and few restaurants intent on culinary innovation.
She covered truck stops, diners and fast-food joints, some of them more than once. Although she wrote about places serving Vietnamese and Somali cuisine in Grand Forks, Eatbeat readers craving a new thrill generally had to look for it in Fargo, about 80 miles to the south.
“If you were going to review the fine dining here, you’d be done in three weeks,” Ms. Hagerty once said of her community.
What she said. It bothered me at the time, and it still bothers me. Why not seriously engage with and critique with what Olive Garden has to offer? (Back when we were still doing regular reviews, the Saturday Dining Conspiracy also reviewed our local Olive Garden, and our logic was the same: why should they be above criticism?)
…
She was 99.
Jim Edgar, Republican governor of Illinois during the 1990s.
Marian Burros, noted food writer. She worked at various times for the Washington Post, Washington Star, and the NYT.
She might offer a recipe for, say, Martha Washington’s Great Cake, usually in the weekly De Gustibus column, which she took over in 1983, while reporting on a sodium labeling bill being debated in Congress or regulatory battles over the wording of federal dietary guidelines.
From her home base in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, she became a close observer of the White House kitchen, reporting on a succession of presidential chefs, inaugural meals and the dining styles of new administrations. She took a particular interest in the White House vegetable garden planted by Michelle Obama.
On the pleasure side of the equation, her plum torte was one of the most popular recipes in the history of The Times, reprinted every September from 1983 to 1989.
“The Story Behind Our Most Requested Recipe Ever” (archived). Recipe (archived).
Martha Washington’s Great Cake (archived).