Ted Botha

"Chefs, always on the prowl for something to differentiate them from the competition, have found a novel ingredient in tobacco."

- The New York Times, January 2001

The first person to widely use tobacco in cuisine was Trudy van Gelderen. More than half a century ago, she had a minor publishing success with her cookbook Put That in Your Pipe and Eat It . Few who have ever been treated to them will forget Trudy's savory chaw profiteroles or her subtly addictive snuffcakes.

Perhaps most well-known of all those desserts were the intoxicating menthol muffins. ( Ingredients: Same as for plain or filtered muffins, plus two menthol cigarettes. Mode: Add three-quarters of cigarette to batter. After baking, decorate with leftover tobacco leaves, preferably sugared. Time: One hour. Cost: Depends on whether cigarettes are bought or collected from stubs in the ashtray.)

From early on in her career Trudy experimented with ingredients mainstream chefs deemed useless, even dangerous. She was derided for using chopped pine needles, grated leather, and tree bark in cooking, but she was adamant. "As a chef, I am always on the prowl for something different. If we didn't prowl, do you think we'd ever have found parsnips, spatzle, pickled tongue, haggis, or schmaltz?"

Not all Trudy's recipes were successful, however. Her Never Say There's Nothing in the Pantry cookbook (with its innovative formulas for banana peel mash, apple core fritters, and eggshell flan) sold only thirty-three copies. Disillusioned with public cooking trends, Trudy crisscrossed the country giving lectures. She drew small but passionate crowds, and the trip resulted in the formation of the now trend-setting Suet Society.

Two schools of thought prevail on how Trudy became a gastrobacconist. Some say it was inevitable, seeing the only thing she loved as much as lighting up her stove was lighting up a Marlboro. In her kitchen, she often smoked herbs when she ran out of cigarettes (favorites: hyssop, borage, and yarrow), and in his autobiography, My Cigar Was Her Fingerfood, her husband Larry claimed this habit led to Trudy's epiphany. "If you can smoke what you cook," he quoted her as saying, "why not cook what you smoke?"

According to Trudy, who split from Larry soon after he started marketing a brand of cigarette named Mellow Yarrows, it didn't happen that way. She was apparently preparing her famous redwood-bark cake, when a half-smoked Marlboro (or a Camel - historians disagree on this point) fell out of her cigarette holder and into the batter. The resulting confection had a distinctly tarred flavor, and the rest is tabaking history.

Chefs jealous of Trudy's fame regularly accused her of being out of her mind or, more incredibly, an agent on the payroll of R.J. Reynolds. But she took the criticism in her stride, following up the success of her crème Burley with corned beef infused with chewing tobacco, Lucky Strikelets, panatela puffs, Virginia broadleaf salad, tabacaroni and faghetti.

Late in her career, Trudy had to be hospitalized on several occasions for ingesting a meal the wrong way. As she explained at the time: "The food smelt so good, I didn't know whether to eat it or smoke it." Trudy van Gelderen never made this mistake again after May 14, 1965, which was when, tragically, she lit and then inhaled a cheroot flambée.

Submitted to Smithsonian Magazine, but rejected with the following typed letter: "Dear Mr. Botha, Thank you for sending your manuscript, 'One Part Flour, Two Parts Virginia Broadleaf,' to us for consideration. Your submission gave me a giggle, but I am afraid that due to our backlog of Last Page essays awaiting publication, we are forced to decline some good submissions. Please note that our mailing address and telephone number have changed. We can now be reached at ... Thank you for thinking of SMITHSONIAN. Sincerely, ..."