Cipe Pineles may just be one of the most famous Jewish women you’ve never heard of.
Her biography is vast. Not only was she the first woman to inhabit the role of design director at the Condé Nast magazine empire starting in the 1940s, but she also taught at Parsons School of Design for decades. She was the first woman inducted into the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame. And she was posthumously awarded the lifetime achievement medal from the American Institute of Graphic Arts, considered the Nobel Prize of design.
While her name evokes a certain timeless sophistication and foreignness to the American ear, it doesn’t give away the fact that she was born an Orthodox Jew in Vienna in 1908. Cipe — pronounced C.P. — was shortened from Cipora, a derivative of the more common Tzipora or Zipora.
Despite Pineles’ accomplishments, few are aware of her life’s work. That was the case for two Bay Area artists, one a writer and the other an illustrator, who discovered a painted sketchbook by Pineles at an antiquarian book fair. They were immediately intrigued, then inspired, and became determined to bring her story to a larger audience.
The result is “Leave Me Alone with the Recipes: The Life, Art and Cookbook of Cipe Pineles,” published in October and edited by Oakland journalist, editor and brand consultant Sarah Rich with artwork by San Francisco illustrator Wendy MacNaughton. (Other prominent contributors include cultural critic Maria Popova, writer and artist Debbie Millman, illustrator Maira Kalman and food writer Mimi Sheraton.)
The journey began several years ago when Rich and MacNaughton attended the California International Antiquarian Book Fair in San Francisco and came upon the manuscript that took hold of their imaginations. Pineles had made and illustrated her own cookbook of the Jewish food she grew up with, based on recipes from her mother, and gave it the cheeky name “Leave Me Alone with the Recipes.” The two women couldn’t believe it had been completed in 1945 because the content seemed absolutely timeless.
MacNaughton was mesmerized by a hand-painted image of bright pink beets with a hand-lettered recipe for borscht. The vibrant type and artwork jumped out at MacNaughton, a frequent illustrator of cookbooks and other food-related mediums, who had first spotted the unpublished manuscript in a glass case amid the muted shades of other well-worn books.
“We were stopped in our tracks by a woman we’d never heard of and would never be lucky enough to meet, but would spend the next three years getting to know,” Rich writes in the introduction of the reissued work.
Once the old book was removed from the case, MacNaughton could see the art had been done painstakingly with gouache. By the time Rich caught up with her friend, she found MacNaughton “nearly manic with the thrill of the discovery,” enchanted by the book’s charming aesthetic and nearly perfect design. Rich took a look and got excited about the recipes.
“This was my family’s food — the Old World, Eastern European Jewish cuisine that my grandmother and great-grandmother had made again and again in their kitchens — brought to life through the hand of this remarkable artist,” Rich writes in the reissued book. “I was stirred by the idea that this humble, traditional food could be celebrated so boldly through art.”
Rich and MacNaughton called their New York friends Popova and Millman and asked if they would pitch in to purchase the manuscript so they could make Pineles’ work and legacy more widely known. The Bay Area women were able to track down Pineles’ descendants, who gave their blessing to pursue the project.
Pineles may not have intended the manuscript for public consumption; the instructions for each recipe are somewhat general, serving more as a frame of reference for experienced cooks than a how-to. In the reissued cookbook, Rich says she approached her task as a “historic preservationist,” clarifying and updating the recipes while preserving their original integrity. MacNaughton simplified the illustrations.
The recipes will be familiar to anyone from Ashkenazi stock, with dishes such as stuffed cabbage, brisket, kasha, stuffed peppers and fricassee, with some lesser-known ones like caraway soup with dumplings. But the book isn’t about the recipes.
As Rich writes, “This woman, whose work we’d never seen, whose name we’d never heard, nevertheless shaped how we draw, design and even exist as women. This is the history of so many women, people of color, and underrepresented groups who have been left out of the narrative, forgotten with time, but who impacted the trajectory of their fields so substantially that we wouldn’t be who we are without them.”