Marilyn Monroe,the chef?

A new book suggests she not only cooked,but cooked confidently and with flair

The image of a bombshell cooking her way to nirvana may seem old-hat now,thanks to Nigella,Giada,Padma and the like. But back in the 1950s,a Hollywood starlet was not expected to squander her talents or risk her manicure chopping onions.

A new book,however,includes a recipe in Marilyns handwriting that suggests that she not only cooked,but cooked confidently and with flair.

Fragments collects assorted letters,poems and back-of-the-envelope scribblings that span the time from her first marriage in 1943 to her death in 1962. Most of the material,dates from the late 50s,when she was at the height of her fame,moved to New York,married Arthur Miller and connected with Lee Strasberg and his Actors Studio. Her poignant attempts to assert her intellectual side are what have made news about this collection,but the recipe on Page 180 was a bigger revelation.

The recipe describes how to prepare a stuffing for chicken or turkey. The formula is extensive in the number of ingredients 11,not including the 5 herbs,salt and pepper,and in their diversity. Its unorthodox for an American stuffing in its use of a bread loaf soaked in water,wrung dry and shredded,and in its lack of added fat,broth,raw egg or any other binder.

It also bears the unmistakable balance of fussiness and flexibilitythe hallmark of an experienced and confident cook. The amount of spices is not specified,nor the amount of parsarly. We decided to try out her recipe.

We agreed to embrace the period in which the recipe was written,and resisted the temptation to substitute fresh rosemary and ginger for the dried variety. The most unnerving thing about the recipe is its laboriousness. More than two hours passed as we soaked and shredded sourdough the soaked bread,peeled hard-boiled eggs,simmered livers in water,browned the beef,cracked pepper,chopped and measured. Did Marilyn really have this much time on her hands?

When we tossed everything together,we were amazed to discover one of the most handsome stuffings weve encountered. The mixture was a nice balance of vegetables,meats and bold seasonings. We employed slight tweaks but the original genius and the heroic volume of her recipe remained fundamentally the same.

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We asked Anne Mendelson,a food historian who has written for The New York Times,if she could explain the soaked bread,the lack of binder,the use of Parmesan and the spice blend. She pegged its provenance to San Francisco. There were touches that seemed to Mendelson to have a sort-of-Italianate look,: raisins,parmesan,pine nuts.

There were clues to Marilyns kitchen fluency in the sale of her personal effects at Christies auction house in 1999,in the form of two well-worn cookbooks,with notations in the margins: the 1951 version of The New Fannie Farmer Boston Cooking-School Cook Book and the 1953 edition of Joy of Cooking. No facsimile of this stuffing recipe can be found in either. So what might connect Monroe,San Francisco and Italian cuisine? As any fan knows,she married Joe DiMaggio at San Francisco City Hall on January 14,1954. The marriage lasted nine months and she lived mostly with him in the city. His parents were first-generation immigrants from the north coast of Sicily in Italy. Could she have picked up this recipe,or at least some cooking tips,from the DiMaggio clan?