Marian Burros is More Than a Torte, More Even than The Muffin Debate

But I will also weigh in on the muffins, of course

If you, like me, have been paying attention to the popular food conversation for some time, but not decades, you might have heard a lot about Marian Burros via her torte. Google Burros’s name, and you’ll get more pictures of the torte than her personage.

I first heard of The Torte ca. 2013 on Smitten Kitchen. But really, once you start seeing it, you’ll see it everywhere—on the Kitchn, on Food52 as “the Best Ever,”in a recent New York Times retrospective, and in books, like the very hyped new Jess Damuck release, Health Nut.

If you have not run into the torte before, it’s basically a simple butter cake with plums on top and a sprinkle of cinnamon. For many, it is an late summer tradition, saved for when the plums come in, and it is one of the most popular recipes The New York Times has ever run.

Knowing Burros only from this torte, which was conveyed to me through various online filters, I suppose I developed an idea of who she was in my head. I imagined her to be a soothing food writer—with a voice like Sam Sifton or Melissa Clark, current New York Times writers, both—gentle, guiding, supportive, evocative. Maybe I thought of her a with a bit of Alice Waters’s detachment or Craig Claiborne’s stuffiness.

Truly, though, I didn’t think about it too hard. She was, in my mind, an anthropomorphized plum torte. Simple, classic, composed, uncomplicated. Marian Burros and her plum torte became one for me.

But maybe I should just rename this Substack “All of the Dumb and Inaccurate Assumptions That I Keep Realizing I Make” because I recently picked up a book that had me delving deep into Burros’s writing, and human plum torte she is not. (Who is, really?)

Burros and the 1980s New York Food Scene

I love library bookstores more than a little bit. But if you ask me, the free shelf outside a library always has the real treasures. The cookbooks and food writing other people have deemed too outdated, too niche, too beat up, too unappealing, is the stuff I really like finding. A 1982 Southern Living Annual Collection that a dog has clearly chewed on? Don’t mind if I do! Toshiba Microwave Cooking? Yes, please! (Cf. my collecting problem.)

And so was the case with a printed compilation of Marian Burros New York Times food columns from 1983 through 1987 that I spotted, The Best of De Gustibus: Food Lore, Favorite Recipes and Culinary Controversies (Simon & Schuster, 1988). Jackpot.

Delving into Reagan-era food debates and trends was a ton of fun. I learned that fajitas were one of the new hot foods, kiwis were overplayed in the early '80s, and mashed potatoes were a nostalgia-driven resurrection. Burros discussed the possibility of banning pipe and cigar smoking in restaurants, ostensibly the worst smoke of all, but barely dreamed that restaurants could ban smoking altogether.

I became immersed in the New York City restaurant scene of the eighties, where answering machines plagued diners hoping to make reservations and the tyranny of nouvelle cuisine. What’s more, I learned about the hotspots like Da Silvano just in time to understand the weight of the founder’s passing a few days ago.

Less fun, I read with horror about the discrimination women faced when dining out without a man. I actually felt lucky I had never heard of the rude stereotypes women confronted when eating at restaurants, like being bad tippers, ceaselessly clucking hens, and whiny diners.

Best of all, though, I learned about Burros. From this book, it seems to me she was a tireless consumer advocate, a bit of a health nut who was concerned always with sodium and fat, and huge fan of tuna fish sandwiches.

She’s also very funny and quick to sharpen her pen. Not only did the book include Burros’s columns, it also had excerpts from letters she received in response to her writing, along with her commentary. In these letters, you glimpse the progenitor of NYT Cooking Comments in the best way.

And she goes after her correspondents, not suffering any fools and rarely accepting critique often with the writer’s full name and job title included. In response to one of her “regular correspondents,” a Detroit professor, she writes, “Do I detect a note of residual sexism?” (My kingdom to see Priya Krishna similarly responding to her trolls in a pre-internet age, unrestrained.)

Reading all of this actually makes the repeated (and repeated, and repeated, and repeated) story about Burros reprinting the plum torte recipe every year even more funny. Apparently, she ran it each summer until the early '90s, when she refused. It’s quaint when you think of a mild-mannered food writer. It’s kind of par for the course when put in the Burros context—and I think that makes it even better.

Marian Burros is also a Blueberry Muffin

Full confession: I baked the famous plum torte about seven years ago (give or take) and have no strong recollection of it. I plan to try again in the coming months.

Until then, I thought I might delve into another famed Burros bake: the blueberry muffin. For a long time, I have wanted to try the dueling muffins, thanks in part to my susceptibility to the NYT Food App’s continual goading, and find out which one I liked best. Finishing up the Burros collection felt like the perfect time to reach my blueberry muffin ambitions, so I tested out both recipes to see if I could determine a winner.

Again, if you’re not familiar, The New York Times has gotten quite a bit of mileage out of this one, too.

In 1985, in a column called “A Special Way to Enjoy Blueberries,” Burros writes that the “large cultivated berries available in the supermarket…are best in cooked dishes, especially in blueberry muffins, most especially if the muffins are from the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Boston.” The hotel had served some form of a blueberry muffin since the late 1920s, itself a riff on a muffin from an old department store, Gilchrist’s.

A recipe followed, which I baked. It was a simple, one-bowl affair that took little time, and was easily completed with a small creature sitting on the counter helping mix.

The finished muffins were bursting with blueberries, not too sweet, and very good. My mom, one of my children, and I devoured them (the other child asked for a muffin, but without the blueberries, please and thank you).

The Ritz-Carlton Muffins

Of course, people wrote in droves to Burros about their own muffin recipes. One woman went so far as to airmail some muffins to Burros from Texas, straight from her freezer, to which the food writer responded, “they were not, I am ungrateful enough to confess, my style. Too cakey.” Ouch.

But one person wrote in about the Jordan Marsh blueberry muffins, muffins from yet another Boston department store. In 1987, Burros printed this recipe, too.

If you read the Jordan Marsh column, you’ll see that Burros states, “Whether the muffins are better than those from the Ritz-Carlton depends on how fine a texture you like. The Jordan Marsh muffins are more like cake. They have a lot more sugar and butter and fewer eggs than the Ritz-Carlton muffins.”

And, indeed, they were much, much more like cake. The process involved a mixer and many more steps than the Ritz-Carlton Recipe, steps that were the exact same as you would take to bake a cake.

The Marsh Muffin

Only time will tell, as they say, and the record shows that, overall, the Jordan Marsh Muffin stands triumphant. It has more reviews and a full five stars on NYT Food, to the Ritz-Carlton Muffin’s four. It was also the muffin chosen for inclusion in the newest New York Times cookbook.

My husband went crazy for these. Bakery quality, so good, etc. A house divided once again.

And me? They were not, I am ungrateful enough to confess, my style. Too cakey.