Flirting With The Brass Sisters

Marilynn and Sheila Brass are the stars of the delightful half hour PBS show Food Flirts. It's equal parts cooking and travel show as the sisters from Winthrop, Mass. go to various Massachusetts restaurants and garner recipes from some of New England's best cooks and bakers. They have also written amazing cookbooks such as Heirloom Cooking with The Brass Sisters and Baking With The Brass Sisters (both from Saint Martin's Press). Marilynn and Sheila were good enough to grant Foodie Pantry an interview.word

1.   I apologize for being late to the party with Food Flirts. I fell for it from the first episode. It’s an entertaining show - how did it come about?

In 2010, we were doing a 1-hour Holiday Special for the Cooking Channel.  We were going to bake and cook with the firefighters at our local Taylor Square Firehouse in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  We met with Bruce Seidel, the then Vice President for Programming and Development at the Food Network and the Cooking Channel, for lunch at Morimoto’s Restaurant, in New York City.  We ordered black cod, which was cooked, and everyone else ordered sushi.  We had never had sushi before.  Bruce asked us if we had ever eaten sushi before, and we said, “No.”  He asked if we’d be willing to try it.  Since we were at Morimoto’s Restaurant, and he was an Iron Chef, we felt that it was one of the safest places to eat raw fish.  Bruce, at that time, was the Producer of Iron Chef America. 

We ate the sushi, and it was actually very good.  We started talking with Bruce about all of the foods we hadn’t eaten or tried, or prepared, and he asked us if we’d be willing to try eating and cooking and baking those foods?  It was a sort of “fish out of water” approach.

We did the Holiday special.  A couple of years went by, and we were writing a cookbook, BAKING WITH THE BRASS SISTERS for St. Martin’s Press.  We saw online that Bruce had left the Food Network and the Cooking Channel and started his own Production Company, Hot Lemon Productions.  We contacted him to congratulate him.  We talked, and he said that he still wanted to do a series with us.  We told him that we had to finish BAKING WITH THE BRASS SISTERS first. 

We spoke on the phone several times, and Bruce came out to Cambridge to shoot some film.  He wanted to see what we would be like when he shot the footage.  He also wanted to see whether we could do the long days it would take to shoot a series.  He was thrilled with the footage he shot.  We were in our seventies then.  Sheila is now 81, and Marilynn is now 76, and we like to say that we are “overnight successes.”  It took us only 79 and 75 years to become Co-Executive Television Producers.

We all worked hard to raise the funding for the series, and PBS was interested in airing it.  Last April, we went to New York City to attend the James Beard Foundation Awards Show and Dinner.  We were one of three finalists for The Best Television Series on Location.  Although we didn’t win, it was an honor to be nominated.  The winning series traveled all over the world shooting.  We shot in Cambridge, Somerville, Dorchester, Boston, and Provincetown, Massachusetts.  They had a very large crew.  We did our series with six people and two culinary assistants.  Everyone helped clean the bathroom.  Bruce cleaned off Sheila’s car and vacuumed the rug.  The days ranged from 10 to14 hours, mostly 10 hours.

2.   What has been the response from the public?

We have heard from viewers all over the United States and Canada.  They love the show!  We have received comments from young people and older people.  We like to say, “It’s not just what you put on the table, it’s what you bring to the table!”  THE FOOD FLIRTS is a celebration of the multi-ethnic cultures of America.  As Sheila said, “It’s food without borders.”  We would love to see a return to civility where people learn that they are very much alike when they sit down to eat together.

3.   Have you thought of “flirting” in other cities, such as New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, etc.?

Yes, we have thought of shooting in other cities, and even other countries.  We always come back to a kitchen, usually ours in Cambridge, Massachusetts to mash up the two cuisines we’ve learned about.  We are going to be exploring ways to find more funding so that we can do more seasons.  At this time, we managed to shoot in New England, but there’s a great wide wonderful world out there.

4.   Any chance you’d come to my state, New Jersey, the diner capital of the world? 

We love diners!  We love the informality and congeniality of them.  We love diner food.  We have great respect for people who own or work in diners or both.  It is a hard life, but the sense of community is marvelous.  As for New Jersey, we think of tomatoes and blueberries.  There is nothing so unique as a “Jersey Girl!” We would love to be honorary “Jersey Girls.”

5.   Marilyn and Sheila, how did you become interested in the history of cooking and baking?

Our mother, Dorothy Katziff Brass taught us how to cook and bake when we could just about reach the kitchen table in our second-floor kitchen on Sea Foam Avenue, in Winthrop, Massachusetts during the 1940s and 1950s.  We lived in a three-decker near the beach.

As teenagers, we found that we were buying copies of GOURMET Magazine, and we loved them.  There was a lot of information in them about food history, travel, and lots of challenging recipes.  Later, when we were in our twenties, we started to buy copies of THE WOMEN’S DAY ENCYCLOPEDIA OF COOKING, which could be purchased in the local supermarket for about $1.68 a volume.  We both collected our own sets of 12 volumes.  Later we started collecting the TIME-LIFE books on cooking all over the world.  Even later, we decided to collect cookbooks.  We collect two kinds of cookbooks – printed cookbooks, and handwritten Manuscript Cookbooks.  We joined the Culinary Historians of Boston.  We love meeting people and learning about the food they eat and how to cook and bake it.  Knowing what people eat tells us a lot about how they live, how they buy food, nutrition, culture, and how they teach others how to cook and to bake.

6.   I love the ice cream molds you brought  out in the “Thailand Meets Tres Leches “ episode. When did you start collecting and where do all of them come from?

When we were about seven and twelve, we visited a cousin who worked in a grocery distribution center in the Wharf section of Boston.  He gave us a gift of some small tartlet pans used for sweet pastry and savory pastry, such as appetizers.  We still have them.   When we started buying and selling antiques about 42 years ago, we bought our first mold, a copper and tin jelly mold for a dollar at a house sale.  It had an ear of corn motif on its top.  We started doing research, and we found and collected food molds that are made of copper, copper and tin, tin, pewter, and porcelain.

We also collect menus, culinary ephemera, and culinary antiques.  We have more than 5,000 items in our collections.

7.   You also collect recipes and cookbooks from the 1600s on up. Again how did this come about? Can those recipes be used today?

About 30 years ago, we started buying handwritten Manuscript Cookbooks at yard sales, flea markets, house sales and book shops.  Everything old is new again!  Manuscript and printed cookbooks can serve as inspiration for today’s cooks and bakers.  Because everyone’s stove was different years ago, and heated by wood or coal, the woman or man who used it knew how to stoke it and clean it.  Stove temperatures were inconsistent.  Flour and sugar were different then, and the texture and composition of ingredients were different.  It mattered which mill you obtained your flour from.  Fannie Farmer was one of the first to standardize measuring ingredients.  So, the old recipes have to be “translated” for modern cooks.  We test the Heirloom recipes for our cookbooks six to ten times each.

8.   What do you think of today’s cooking and trends like the Paleo diet?

We don’t know a lot about the nutritional aspects of the Paleo Diet, but it’s interesting that people are exploring the really old ways of eating.

9.   Both of you love baking and cooking. What are your favorite recipes and can you share them with us.

The recipe for Brown Sugar Brownies is wonderful.  It has appeared in both HEIRLOOM BAKING WITH THE BRASS SISTERS and BAKING WITH THE BRASS SISTERS.  The recipe in BAKING WITH THE BRASS SISTERS was changed slightly.  We’d have to discuss this between ourselves and talk with you about this.

The last - the famed Foodie Pantry I have to ask question

10)   Which sister is the better cook? Who’s the better baker?

This is a very hard question to answer.  We both bring something different to our cooking and baking.  We approach cooking and baking differently, but with what we like to think is genuine creativity.

Sheila is very precise in baking and cooking, and Marilynn finds that she can improvise as she cooks entrees.  However, Marilynn can be precise when she bakes and cooks, as well.