A legendary food writer’s office treasures paint a portrait of a full life

Marian Burros died in September at 92, leaving behind a legacy that few food writers could touch. She wrote or co-wrote more than a dozen cookbooks, exposed the dubious claims of food manufacturers, dug into the politics of food safety and had the kind of access to power mostly unavailable to contemporary journalists.

Burros was the unofficial archivist of her own career, which spanned a half-century, including stints at both The Washington Post and the New York Times. Her office, on the second floor of her home in Bethesda, Maryland, was stuffed with papers, notebooks, printouts, yellowed newspaper clippings and more. And this was after Burros had earlier shipped about 10 boxes of papers to a university for preservation, said her daughter, Ann Burros. Ann gave The Post access to her mother’s office, just days before an estate sale.

This is what we found.

The cookbooks

Marian Burros’s home office has been rearranged since her death, but she appears to have kept all her own cookbooks on a small raised shelf on her desk, within easy arm’s length. Many of the dust jackets are torn, some barely clinging to their hard outer cases. Burros had bookmarked dozens of pages and even edited some previously published recipes, appearing to correct mistakes she had discovered.

Her daughter’s favorite is the “Elegant But Easy Cookbook,” which Burros co-wrote with Lois Levine, a frequent collaborator. “It was a great book,” Ann remembered. “Some of my favorite things [are] in there to make for friends at parties.”

About a week before Burros died, Ann decided to make her mother’s famous plum torte, one of the most beloved recipes among New York Times readers. “I made it for some friends, and then a couple of days later, she died, which was crazy. Then I made it for my kids and my husband, who don’t like cooked fruit. So they don’t like it that much, but I loved it.”

Photos with first ladies

In one photo after another, Burros is seen talking to America’s first ladies, whether informally or in what appear to be one-on-one interviews. She had access to the East Wing that reporters today would envy.

These days, first ladies are “so insulated from the press because, in my experience, they have a very fierce and small staff around them,” said Kate Andersen Brower, author of “First Women: The Grace and Power of America’s Modern First Ladies.”

“It’s very frustrating,” Brower added. “They weren’t elected to the job, so I think that’s also a huge part of this, too. They didn’t necessary ask for this spotlight.”

A vintage range and indoor grill

Marian and Donald Burros built their home in 1965 in Bannockburn, a Bethesda neighborhood with a long history of political activism. Their home still has the original Crown six-burner range with two separate ovens, a rarity back in the ’60s. But they also installed an indoor grill: a 1960s-era Majestic Char-Grill, with a lever that allows you to move the bed of charcoal up and down. The grill required its own ventilation hood to capture the smoke and fumes. More than 60 years after its installation, the grill is still filled with fake charcoal, though its grates are practically spotless.

“We actually didn’t use it much. I’m not sure why,” Ann said.

Typed recipes and nutrition analyses

On one table in her office, Burros had a stack of typewritten recipes, for dishes such as Chicken Fajitas and Tuna With Black Beans and Corn Salad. The recipes are typed with precision, showing precious few handwritten corrections. Each recipe has a second page stapled to it: a printout from Nutrition Associates, a company that analyzed the nutritional content for each recipe. These days, recipe developers simply plug their ingredients into an online database and get an instant nutrition analysis of their dishes.

The home office library

Burros had hundreds of cookbooks, many more than those now lining her office closet and shelves. Some had already been given away, and others were stored in the basement, Ann said. But those that remained offered a tour of 20th-century cooking. They included volumes by James Beard, Alice Waters, Craig Claiborne, Paula Wolfert, Julia Child, Joan Nathan, Marcella Hazan, André Soltner, Claudia Roden, Elizabeth David, Richard Olney and many others.

A purple cap that hangs in front of the bookshelves features the number 54. It was the year Burros graduated from Wellesley College with an English degree.

‘What To Eat’ by Marion Nestle

Burros had at least two copies of nutritionist Marion Nestle’s “What to Eat,” a popular tome first published in 2006. A student of food politics and nutrition herself, Burros closely examined the paperback edition of Nestle’s guide to good eating, bookmarking more than 20 pages with paper clips. In the margins of one page, she added a handwritten note: It appears to say, “This is wrong.”

Burros seemed to be rebutting guidance from the Center for Science in the Public Interest that you can eliminate about half of the PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) in farmed salmon by cooking it to an internal temperature of 175°F.

“I agree: it says ‘this is wrong.’ I’m not sure what she means,” Nestle responded via email. “Was CSPI wrong about how to get rid of PCBs? I included that in ‘What to Eat’ because I thought it was hilarious. Nobody would go to all that trouble. In any case, I’m enormously relieved to see that I did not repeat that advice in ‘What to Eat Now’ or its spinoff, ‘The Fish Counter.’”

The three card files

Like all reporters of her era — before smartphones — Burros had to organize her contacts the old-fashioned way: on desktop card files, such as the Rolodex. Burros was so well-sourced that she had three separate card files. The people in her Rolodex, some now deceased, are among the most famous in the worlds of food, politics and media. They include Diana Kennedy, Ted Kennedy, Eric Ripert, Walter and Joan Mondale, Wolfert, Jeremiah Tower, Ralph Nader, Arianna Huffington, James Carville and Hillary Rodham Clinton.

One card seemed particularly ominous. It listed a number and said, “Do Not Call.” It turned out to be the number for the Do Not Call Registry.

The china collection

Burros was an avid antiques collector and was particularly fond of china. She had multiple collections of dinnerware, which she used for the sumptuous dinner parties she hosted. As Ann walked around her mother’s house, she stopped to open a cabinet filled with fragile antique china. She used an app on her phone to explain the history of the dishware: It was Chinese porcelain, in the Famille rose style, which was “highly sought after in Europe and America from the 18th century onwards,” according to the Curio app.

The value of a single plate is between $500 and $800. This explains why Ann relies on the app. As she sells much — but not all — of her mother’s valuable china in an online auction, she wants to make sure she’s getting a fair price.

Quite the donkey collection

Marian and her husband, the late Donald Burros, collected donkey figurines over many decades. Their collection was symbolic in a way: It was an embrace of the Burros name, one that was foisted upon the paternal side of the family when an earlier generation immigrated to America, Ann said. The daughter has saved a handful of her parents’ figurines to display in her own home in Westchester County, New York.

“Who the hell names themselves ‘donkey’?” Ann asked rhetorically.

Boxes upon boxes

Asked if her mother was something of a pack rat, Ann smiled tightly and nodded. In her latter years, the elder Burros filled her office with stacks of papers and boxes, some overflowing with even more papers. This wasn’t her usual style, Ann said. It was more a reflection of her failing mind. In her younger years, Burros saved almost everything, but it was organized, Ann said.

Burros saved notebooks, invitations, typed recipes, photos, letters, VHS tapes, historic newspapers and seemingly every story she ever wrote. “I don’t know what she was going to do with it all,” Ann said.

The Hillary Rodham Clinton story

Burros had saved a copy of her famous — or infamous? — 1995 story about a White House lunch with 11 writers who covered the first lady. The story included Clinton quotes that others at the lunch said were off the record. The White House complained about the breach of rules, and the story put a strain on the professional relationship between Clinton and Burros, according to Ann.

After the story appeared, “Hillary was furious and demanded an apology,” according to Brower in her book “First Women.” Burros argued that she had received permission to quote Clinton.

The reporter and the first lady eventually made their peace. After Clinton lost the 2016 presidential election to Donald Trump, Burros wrote a letter to the former secretary of state. Clinton responded in a letter dated May 2, 2017, in which she called Burros “my friend.” Burros had retired from the New York Times in 2008.

“Above all else, I remain deeply grateful for all your support over the years, even when your ‘day job’ required your neutrality,” Clinton wrote.