Shirley Corriher puts science, food in the blender

Shirley Corriher’s first Thanksgiving away from home became an unintended science project.

The Atlanta native was living in New York and wanted to impress her new husband with something special. She passed on turkey and went with duck.

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JESSICA McGOWAN/jmcgowan@ajc.com

Atlanta cookbook author Shirley Corriher enjoys a cookie at a book-signing. In her newest book, ‘BakeWise,’ the Vanderbilt chemistry major breaks down how and why baked goods turn out the way they do. She learned partly by trial and error.

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JESSICA McGOWAN/jmcgowan@ajc.com

Shirley Corriher gets animated as she talks about proteins in batter during her book signing appearance with Food Network’s Alton Brown at the Margaret Mitchell House.

Shirley Corriher
• John Kessler samples recipes from Corriher's new cookbook
• Two Shirley Corriher recipes
• "Bakewise" information from Cook's Warehouse

“I love dressing,” Corriher said, “so I put a batch in the duck, and it just seemed to disappear. So I put another one in there, and another one, and another one. It never occurred to me that fat would sweat out of the duck and soak into the dressing and make it swell.”

The bird was roasting when Corriher heard a boom from the kitchen. She opened the oven door and found a volcanic mountain of dressing with a few bones sticking out.

“We had literally exploded that poor duck,” she said, laughing over a tale she has told many times in cooking classes.

The one-time destroyer of poultry went on to become one of the nation’s best-known authorities on the chemistry of cooking. Her first book, “CookWise,” sold 300,000 copies and won a prestigious James Beard Foundation Award. Her second, “BakeWise,” came out this fall, just in time for the holidays.

“Moses has come down from the mountain with another five commandments,” Alton Brown told a sold-out audience at the Margaret Mitchell House this month, introducing his friend at a talk and signing. Corriher has appeared many times on the Mariettan’s Food Network show, “Good Eats.”

Looking less like Moses than Mrs. Butterworth, Corriher hobbled toward the podium on a gimpy knee. At 73, she’s reassuringly round and has a moon face set off by spiky hair that suggests a bohemian streak. She perched herself in a high-top chair and greeted the congregation in a warm, honeyed Southern accent.

“I’ve got some questions,” Brown began, pulling a stack of pink notes out of his copy of “BakeWise.” He read one: “Can you make decent bread without gluten?”

Gluten? He might as well have fired a starting gun in front of a racehorse. Corriher galloped into an explanation of how wheat proteins link up to form elastic threads, demonstrating with waved arms and interlocking fingers — her signature “protein hop.”

“Easy, girl,” Brown said, eyeing her warily.

As she described the chemistry of batter in heat, Corriher made bread-baking sound almost lascivious. No wonder Harold McGee, who writes “The Curious Cook” feature for The New York Times, once cocked an eyebrow at Corriher during a class they were teaching and said, “The sexual promiscuity of your molecules always shocks me.”

Clearly, this woman has a passion for food. It is a passion she didn’t discover until midlife.

Georgia mud pies

It’s lunchtime at the OK Café in Buckhead, and Corriher is admiring a vegetable plate with a corn muffin on the side.

“That’s pretty much my muffin recipe,” she said. “I did some consulting for them.”

In addition to restaurants, Corriher has worked for companies from Procter & Gamble to Reynolds to Pillsbury, which based its frozen biscuits on her renowned Touch-of-Grace Biscuits.

Corriher’s curiosity about food started at her grandmother’s house in Conyers. Born Shirley Mann Ogletree at Atlanta’s Piedmont Hospital, she moved from city to city because of her father’s job as a business executive. But she spent summers and vacations at her Nanny’s, where she followed her around the kitchen watching her cook. Then she’d go out in the yard and make mud pies leavened with chicken feed.

“It gave them the perfect texture,” she said.

After she graduated from high school, Corriher wanted to study journalism at Northwestern, but her parents wouldn’t hear of it. “You’ll go up there and marry a Yankee,” she remembers them saying.

So she stayed in the South and went to Vanderbilt, where she majored in chemistry — one of two women in a program of 200 — and stayed on as research biochemist in the medical school.

After a short-lived marriage that took her to New York, Corriher and her second husband moved to Atlanta in 1959 and started the Brandon School, a boys academy in an abandoned mansion overlooking the Chattahoochee in Dunwoody. Fifty years ago, the area was still rural.

“We were raided once,” she said. “They saw smoke coming from this deserted house and thought they had ‘em a big-time moonshine operation.”

In addition to keeping the books and sometimes mowing the grass, Corriher was responsible for feeding a student body that grew to 140.

“It was trial by fire,” she remembers. “I dreaded scrambling eggs. This was before nonstick cookware. I’d crack a dozen eggs into this big old aluminum skillet and frantically stir and end up with a pile of knotty mess. And the boys would go, ‘You’re starving us!’ “

Corriher stayed at the school until her second marriage fell apart in the late ’60s. She had three children and no obvious career path. She made ends meet by delivering newspapers.

“We barely got by,” said one of Corriher’s twin daughters, Terry Infantino of Roswell. “We’d go camping a lot because it was cheaper than motels. Mom would make stuff like sautéed sweet potatoes and marinated shish kebabs. She kept it fun.”

A cook is born

Corriher had taken cooking classes before, but she didn’t get serious until she entered a grits recipe contest at the Rich’s Cooking School in 1976. Her prize: free lessons with the school’s director, Nathalie Dupree.

Dupree hired her to set up and clean up after classes. Her protégée was soon teaching a course on food science.

“I tell people I was Shirley’s cooking teacher, but I learned as much from her,” Dupree said. “She had been through a hard period in her life, and it was miraculous to watch her become what she was supposed to be.”

Corriher started doing cooking demos and teaching classes, sometimes traveling as much as 40 weeks a year. She wrote for food newsletters and magazines. Before long, food editors and luminaries such as Jacques Pepin and Julia Child were phoning her for insights into the chemistry behind their craft.

She remembers the time Child called sounding wounded because her baby spinach leaves had turned bitter. The legendary cook had left them boiling too long, and the cell walls had started to break down.

“Oh, Julia,” she told her, “it’s mass death and destruction.”

Corriher started working on her first book in 1987. It took a decade to finish and eventually involved 11 editors.

“I was going crazy,” she said. “One editor wanted to fill the book with cute French phrases so she could let everyone know she had spent a year in Provence. I refused to put my name on it.”

She repaid the advance and found another publisher. When “CookWise” finally came out in 1997, it sounded like Shirley Corriher.

Among the book’s fans was Alton Brown, a young culinary school grad who was writing a pilot for a TV series about the hows and whys of cooking. In Corriher, he found a kindred spirit.

“That book was a life-changing experience for me,” Brown said. “There’s so much joy in Shirley’s work.”

Martha Stewart she isn’t

Corriher’s second book, “BakeWise,” took even longer to complete — 11 years. Deadlines came and went as she meticulously tested and retested recipes, sometimes as many as 20 times.

After all these years, she’s still learning things. She discovered, for instance, that stirring the dry ingredients for a cake is better than sifting.

She has her husband of 31 years to thank for that revelation. Arch Corriher, a retired Georgia Tech researcher, suggested that she mix dark powder with flour so she could determine which method more evenly distributed the leavening — an engineering solution.

“He wasn’t interested in food when we met,” she said.

“I’m still learning to love tomatoes,” he admitted.

The Corrihers carry out their cooking experiments at their home in Buckhead. They usually don’t allow visitors inside because they’re both pack rats and keep the rooms stacked with newspapers, magazines and cookbooks.

“We try to keep it clear around the stove,” Corriher said, her moon face beaming, “so we don’t burn the place down.”

THE QUOTABLE COOK

On low-cal baking: “If you don’t put much sugar in a cake, why are you bothering? Make bread.”

On the most common baking mistake: “It’s tough to recover when you burn the fool out of something.”

On the low-end Sears Kenmore oven in her kitchen: “I try to use the equipment real people use.”

On her weight: “The hardest part is being on the road. When chefs recognize you and send out dishes, I feel terrible not trying them. So here’s old glutton eating everything.”