I grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, which means that I also grew up with Georgia O’Keeffe. A painting by her, of a puffy, magnified purple petunia, hung over my bed, perfectly complementing my lavender walls and Laura Ashley-style floral motif. I did not select it—my parents decorated while I was still young—but I grew to feel comforted by the swollen petals, large and violet, like elephant ears. My parents had other O’Keeffe prints, too—cow skulls and empty mesas, nautilus-shell whorls and black doorways in adobe houses. These images populated our stucco house and became the low-humming mood board that formed my early ideas about beauty. The way O’Keeffe looked at plants, with a botanist’s eye for structure and strangeness, influenced my own interactions with prickly-pear cacti in our front yard. I would sit and study the spiky paddles and the gloppy pink fruit they protected, deciding which colors I would use to paint them. Unfortunately, I did not develop an artistic aptitude. The closest I ever got to emulating O’Keeffe was in my long staring contests with succulents.
But then I became an adult, moved to New York City, and learned to cook. O’Keeffe, who made the opposite migration (she started visiting New Mexico in the late nineteen-twenties, while still living in Manhattan, and relocated permanently in 1949), also spent a lot of time in her kitchen. She told Margaret Wood—who became her assistant in 1977, when O’Keeffe was ninety years old—that her main reason for buying her ranch home in Abiquiu, where she moved in 1949, was that it had a garden: she was tired of travelling the seventy miles of dirt road from Ghost Ranch to Santa Fe for fresh vegetables. Wood, who was twenty-four when she started working for O’Keeffe, frequently cooked for the artist, who was too old to spend all that time chopping and canning. But Wood still followed O’Keeffe’s time-honored recipes. “Food served in the O’Keeffe household was always nutritious, tasty, and simply but beautifully presented,” Wood wrote, in the introduction to her 1997 cookbook, “A Painter’s Kitchen: Recipes from the Kitchen of Georgia O’Keeffe.” “Miss O’Keeffe often wondered aloud, ‘Do you think other people eat as well as we do?’ ”
I received a copy of “A Painter’s Kitchen” when I was in my early twenties, as a Christmas gift from my uncle, a retired veterinarian who spends his afternoons as a docent at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe. It was his way of encouraging me to remember where I come from, but when I flipped through the book I quickly found that its recipes were not exactly for traditional New Mexican fare. Although there are a few nods to the Southwest, like green-chile chicken enchiladas and fried flowers, most of the recipes from Wood’s book read more like California hippie cuisine. There’s avocado soup, cottage-cheese-and-orange salad, and a roasted leg of lamb with honey-mint sauce. O’Keeffe liked her foods fresh, natural, and plain. She ate a regular crop of produce that any Whole Foods shopper would consider basic—roasted beets, kale, dandelion greens—but which, for a woman living out in the desert in the mid-twentieth century, were downright eccentric. When I started to cook like O’Keeffe, my diet instantly became healthier. I roasted acorn squash. I braised chard. Some of the recipes are almost mocking in their simplicity. The book’s preparation for broccoli, adapted from a technique that O’Keeffe learned from the popular nineteen-forties nutritionist Adelle Davis, is simply to steam it and then add salt.
And yet Wood’s interpretations of O’Keeffe’s recipes feel baroque compared to the real things, which I recently had the opportunity to rifle through at Sotheby’s, on the Upper East Side. (The file of recipes is just one small lot in a much larger auction, featuring items from the collection of Juan Hamilton, O’Keeffe’s former studio assistant, who inherited most of her estate, including an album of photographs of Ghost Ranch, several black dresses, and a set of German pastels.) O’Keeffe’s recipe file, which she maintained dutifully from the nineteen-fifties to seventies, is a small tin of multi-colored index cards, several with instructions written out in O’Keeffe’s scrawling cursive. The cards are ostensibly organized in alphabetical order, but the system is imperfect: the “B” and “C” cards are shoved into the middle of the stack, and if you are looking for “Sour Cream Dressing” (a dollop of cream with tarragon, paprika, pepper, and chives) you have to look under “D” and not “S.” Several of the recipes are typewritten, transcribed by a dutiful assistant. Some are no more than a few lines long and resemble minimalist poetry. A recipe for “Mint Leaves” simply reads “Tender, green and dry. Dip in slightly beaten egg white, then in granulated sugar. Dry in good current of air. Keep in dry can. TRY rose leaves also.” A few of the dishes, such as “Floating Island,” “Crabmeat Thermidor,” and “Tomato Aspic,” are charmingly retro. But the majority of O’Keeffe’s recipes are practical and austere—rye bread, griddle cakes, oatmeal soup, roasted chicken. She allowed herself just a few indulgences, like candied limes or fresh vanilla ice cream made with egg yolks. Otherwise, she ate to fortify, not indulge, which seems to have done her well: O’Keeffe lived to be ninety-eight.
On Thursday, the day of the auction, Sotheby’s announced that the card file would go to the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, at Yale University, where scholars can visit them. (The auction house kept the final figure confidential, but estimated the recipes at six to eight thousand dollars.) This means that they will be kept pristine for future generations. And, although it is comforting to know that the recipes will be available to the public and not stashed inside a collector’s vault, it is also a bit sad to realize that they might never again be near a kitchen. Several of the recipe cards and loose papers in O’Keeffe’s tin have food stains on them, including a nineteen-fifties instruction manual for a pressure cooker. The most heartening aspect of holding O’Keeffe’s recipes in my hands was seeing how tattered and softened, by oily fingers, they were. I liked knowing she cooked as she painted: vigorously, fascinated with the bounty of the earth.
If you won’t be at the Beinecke Library anytime soon, Wood’s book is a worthy stand-in. My copy has moved with me to five apartments, in two cities. I don’t cook too much from it anymore (except when I want to make a big pot of posole), but I still love reading the intros to each recipe, in which Wood offers up a memory of her employer’s hearty, pragmatic approach to the kitchen. In “Brown Rice with Ginger,” she recounts a story that O’Keeffe would tell, about staying in a large ranch house in the Rio Grande Valley, in the nineteen-thirties. The woman of the house was making a casserole, and O’Keeffe noticed water dripping from the ceiling into the pan. “Miss O’Keeffe climbed up on the roof and found a big puddle right above the kitchen,” Wood wrote. “It was soon swept off, and the casserole was eaten despite the drips.”
