Come Into My Kitchen column celebrates 60 years of recipes from our readers

In a world obsessed with snippets lasting 60 seconds or less, 60 years might seem like an eternity.

But, though in the moment food can be fleeting, it also has a way of sticking with you.

“The Come Into My Kitchen column has a timeless quality to it,” says former features editor Marjean (Phillips) Busby, who was one of the first writers to pen the column. “I’m not a cook, but I still like reading what other people do in their own kitchens.”

Over six decades, approximately 3,100 cooks (and in some families several generations) have been featured in the weekly Come Into My Kitchen column since it debuted on Nov. 7, 1955, in The Kansas City Times.

The first column featured Mrs. Harold Anderson, a Kansas City homemaker married to the former police chief, baking a loaf of Swedish rye bread that was regarded highly by family and friends.

The late Erma Young, the column’s original editor, wrote of its inception as “a look at Kansas City kitchens and a friendly exchange of recipes,” and that delicious directive hasn’t changed. But the column has come a long way since introducing homemakers by their husbands’ names: today, it invites people of all ages and ethnicities to share their stories through food.

Yellowed clippings of the earliest Come Into My Kitchen columns, saved by Busby, tell the story not only of how American eating habits have changed, but also how people have lived.

A Six Can Casserole from the 1960s gives not a thought to a nutritional analysis of the recipe; that information now accompanies each column as a health tool for readers. Collected recipes range from simple pickled okra to showy Artichokes Au Vin Blanc and seemingly everything in between.

Readers continue to devour the columns because they get to step vicariously into other people’s kitchens, hear their stories and share their food, says Judith Fertig, the Overland Park freelance writer who wrote the column from 1998 until 2005.

“There’s a certain level of intimacy that happens when you come into someone’s kitchen,” she says. “Food is a way to tell a story, and it’s one to which we can all relate.”

The Come Into My Kitchen column has been brought to readers by a handful of documented female reporters. Laura Rollins Hockaday has the first byline for the column, on Oct. 9, 1967, and she eventually went on to retire from The Star as society editor in 2000.

A number of reporters in The Star women’s department were career-minded females who did not cook, so the assignment often was given to cub reporters without a byline, Busby says.

For Fertig, one of her most memorable columns was watching a woman grind her own grain for bread in Greenwood, Mo. “It was so exotic then, but it was so delicious,” she says. “That memory stuck with me and certainly informed my own baking.”

Recently Fertig, who has authored nearly 20 cookbooks to date, filmed an online class demonstrating how to grind whole-wheat flour for her own cinnamon roll recipe.

Judy Kirk of Kansas City held the apron strings of the column the longest. From 1978 until 1990, Kirk featured approximately 700 cooks and laments only the lack of a GPS navigational system when traveling to houses in unfamiliar areas.

“The wonderful thing about this column is that we, as writers, have been part of a person’s 15 minutes of fame,” she says. “I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve seen people frame the column in which they were featured. It feels good to be a part of that.”

In 1991, Kirk published “Kansas City’s Star Cooks,” a compilation of the best recipes she featured in the column that can currently be found new or used on Amazon for prices that range from $3.24 to $715.11. “We tested every one of those recipes, and when we had a reception for all the cooks featured in the book, I could still remember names and spending time in their kitchens,” she says. “Writing this column was a big part of my life and made me a better cook for my own family.”

Janet Majure of Lawrence wrote the column until 2007, for a total of 10 years, split between two tenures. She enjoyed the interviews and talking with people about cooking. “Food is a way in which culture and tradition are shared with others,” she says. “It’s also an active gateway to memory.”

Majure vividly remembers an outgoing Italian cook who lived in Olathe who gave her a list of names as potential cooks to be featured in the column. “Especially before the days of email, there could be a certain amount of anxiety in coming up with the next week’s cook for the column,” she says. “During my first tenure of writing the column, I had to have multiple recipes and take my own pictures using a camera and film.”

Majure compiled her favorite Come Into My Kitchen recipes into a book called “Recipes Worth Sharing.” She has also written technical books on Internet-related topics, but today her passion is teaching weightlifting to women, so they maintain their strength as they age (GiveMeStrength.net).

“The reason the column has been popular is because it is honest,” Young said in a 1974 interview. And Kirk has great hopes for the next generation of cooks.

Her granddaughter, Ashley Sanders, a writing major at Belmont University in Nashville, recently wrote about the power of Four Cheese Macaroni, a Come Into My Kitchen recipe that Kirk would prepare when family gathered. “This is an example of the power of food,” Kirk says over coffee recently. “Here’s to the next 60 years.”

This story was originally published November 3, 2015 at 3:00 AM with the headline "Come Into My Kitchen column celebrates 60 years of recipes from our readers."