The Marshall Field’s Cookbook
Food Styling: George DoleseMarshall Field’s wasn’t just one of the last great American department stores. It was loved, venerated even, for its food. So a Marshall Field’s cookbook, featuring all the classic recipes from The Walnut Room and other venues as well as recipes from the celebrity chefs of the Field’s Culinary Council (including Rick Bayless, Tyler Florence, Todd English, Nancy Silverton, Ming Tsai and Marcus Samuelsson among others) seemed like a good idea. Catherine Jacobes and I conceived, researched, wrote, designed, shot and published the book under our Book Kitchen imprint.
It turned out to be an even better idea than anyone expected. What we didn’t know during the year we were developing the book was that it would hit the shelves in all of the company’s stores just months before the company was absorbed into Macy’s and the Marshall Field’s name would vanish forever. In the landrush that followed that announcement, Field superfans flocked to the store, grabbing anything with the company’s logo they could get their hands on. The book, with its history of Field’s and beautiful location and food photos by Maren Caruso, was the keepsake everyone wanted. Reprinted twice, including in a boxed, clothbound collector’s edition with a brass Field’s plaque on the cover, it sold more than 163,000 copies and became the most profitable SKU in the entire chain.
Roles: Editorial Director, Writer, Packager, Publisher
Publisher: Book Kitchen
Design: Catherine Jacobes
Photography: Maren Caruso
Writing sample
A Century and a Half of Tastes and Traditions
A great department store is a palace of dreams. Its gleaming windows lure us inside to gape at the soaring expanses and wander amid case after case, rack after rack, and room after room of brightly lit treasures. If you’ve stepped into a world-class department store any time since, well, the mid-1800s, you know that the best of the lot are equal parts museum, theater, social club, and amusement park. But what you might not know is that much of what we think of as the hallmarks of these grand emporia came from one groundbreaking store and the self-made man who created it.
Marshall Field, Merchant of Dry Goods and Dreams
Marshall Field was, in many ways, an unlikely innovator. He was a shy, serious farm boy from rural Massachusetts, a lad of few words who left school at sixteen to work in a dry goods store a few miles from home in the town of Pittsfield. Small-framed and steely-eyed, he was anything but gregarious. While his colleagues were off carousing at oyster roasts and taffy pulls, he’d spend his evenings reading and endlessly memorizing columns of prices, profits, and figures. But though he may not have fit the mold of the glad-handing salesman, right from the start Marshall Field showed a keen instinct for the psychology of retail.
To get inside the minds of his customers, young Marshall would pore over Godey’s Lady’s Book, a leading women’s monthly of the Nineteenth Century, studying fashions and tastes. In a little notebook, he recorded the names and preferences of his female customers, and instead of sweet-talking them in the fawning manner of clerks of the day, he would gain their trust by listening attentively and anticipating their needs.
Whether he knew it or not, “Silent Marsh,” as his colleagues called him, was quietly inventing a revolutionary, customer-focused approach to retail—an approach that would eventually become his defining motto. Years later, at the peak of his success, while walking through the vast department store that bore his name, Marshall Field overheard a clerk arguing heatedly with a customer. “What are you doing here?” he asked. “I’m settling a complaint,” the clerk replied. “No you’re not,” said Field. “Give the lady what she wants!” And those famous words remained his credo for the rest of his life.
The Walnut Room—It All Started with a Humble Pie
By 1890, Marshall Field’s had established itself as a place where ladies were welcome to congregate. But there was just one thing missing: food. That’s when Mrs. Hering came along. An enterprising clerk in the State Street millinery department, she had been trained in Field’s “give the lady what she wants” tradition of customer service. So when she overheard two customers grumbling that they had nowhere to eat, she thought nothing of offering them the chicken potpie she had brought for lunch. Mrs. Hering set up a table, served up her pie, and, without knowing it, started a restaurant—and a revolution.
The ladies spread the word about the tasty meal they’d enjoyed, and soon the millinery department was drawing a lunch crowd. A young manager named Harry Selfridge (who would go on to found Selfridges Department Store in London, modeling it after Field’s) was quick to recognize the potential of serving food to hungry guests, and thus keeping them in the store for more shopping. So he persuaded Field to try out the idea by opening a small tearoom in the building.
On April 15, 1890, fifteen tables were set up on the third floor. There were eight waitresses and four cooks. Each plate was adorned with a red rose. That day, fifty-six women turned up to lunch on corned beef hash, chicken salad, orange punch in an orange shell, and, of course, Mrs. Hering’s chicken potpies.
Selfridge’s hunch paid off. The South Tearoom, the world’s first restaurant in a department store, was a runaway hit. It was quickly expanded and within a year was serving 1,500 guests a day. In the tradition of Mrs. Hering, many of the cooks in those early days prepared their specialties—from codfish cakes to Boston baked beans—in their own home kitchens and brought them in each morning.
When it moved to its current location on the seventh floor, the tearoom expanded to 17,000 square feet. It took its new name from the Circassian walnut that was imported from Russia to panel the walls. Today, during peak shopping season, as many as 6,000 guests a day line up at the red ropes outside the Walnut Room, and more than a century later, Mrs. Hering’s potpies are still the top-selling item on the menu.