Published June 30, 2005

Sonoma’s own Mary Evelyn Arnold, seen here in the kitchen, may very well be the valley’s “Soup Queen.”

Join me in Cooking with Love, my new column featuring Sonomans who cook from the heart. Many among us who love to cook cook for others, and many of us cook for ourselves. Other people are tired of cooking, hate to cook, or don’t know how to cook, and are happy with other people’s cooking or ready-made food from Sonoma Market.
Cooking with Love brings you interesting people who cook at home and, usually, cook well.

We will not present professional chefs, but we will tell the stories of how local characters got interested in cooking, learned from their parents, developed their skills, and why they love to cook now. We will even include some cooking disasters, versions of which we have all encountered, sometimes with great laughter and often with some embarrassment.

If Julia Child could drop a turkey on television and survive with humor, we, too, can burn the French fries, forget to serve the garlic bread, or leave the twice baked potatoes in the microwave for three days.

I thank Mary Martinez for naming this new endeavor. She told me how petrified she was to cook for M.F.K. Fisher one evening and Mary Frances said, the food was wonderful because it was cooked with love. Mary just called to say that when she and her husband, architect Adrian Martinez, got married, her grandmother gave them a trivet that still resides in their kitchen and proclaims, “Kissin’ don’t last, but cookin’ do!”

My first brave interviewee is Mary Evelyn Arnold, who seemed to be strictly a meat ‘n’ potatoes cook when we first met a couple of decades ago and has morphed herself into an excellent cook famous among her friends for her soups. In fact Mary Evelyn may well be Sonoma’s own Soup Queen.

When I told Mary Evelyn that “Cooking with Love” is the name of my new column, she spouted “That’s why I cook! I cook for people, I give them food, and that’s how I show them I love them!”

Mary Evelyn grew up on a sort of meat and potatoes diet. Her mother, Ginger, cooked that way because her Ohioan father, Bill, preferred simple foods. “Everything was roasted,” said Mary Evelyn. “Roasted leg of something, roasted or baked potatoes, but we did always have a green vegetable.” Since the King family lived in Wayne, Pennsylvania on Philadelphia’s “Mainline,” fresh vegetables were available mostly in summer, so they ate a lot of frozen peas and green beans.
The nearby Amish UTZ farmers’ market in downtown Wayne was open Wednesday-Saturday, and Mary Evelyn remembers her favorite booth was “the potato chip lady. She had huge cans and poured out a scoop.

Or you could get a whole bag, like a waxed paper sandwich bag full of chips for ten cents, or you could bring your own can and she would fill it.”

The Kings always made lots of cookies, and Mary Evelyn has her grandmother’s boxes full of handwritten recipes, with a whole separate one for Christmas cookies. Now M. E. makes fabulous Madeleines and many other butter and sugar loaded temptations.
Mary Evelyn started cooking for real while attending Radnor high school where she played field hockey. She and her “girlfriends cooked and had dinner parties, girls only, no boys” partly to get out of their own houses and partly to go to someone else’s house. M.E. remembers her greatest high school culinary triumph was coq au vin, for which she thinks she may have used a recipe from an old Peg Bracken cookbook.

In her senior year at the University of Denver, Mary Evelyn broke out of the dorm into her first apartment and cooked Thanksgiving dinner for people who worked in the dorm and didn’t go home for the holiday. Her parents always had a group of friends who loved to cook. According to M.E., “food was important to people who were important to me, and I grew up with people trading recipes.”
Mary Evelyn has always cooked from cookbooks and still has her first one, a 1972, seventeenth printing of Betty Crocker’s Cookbook. Now her two cookbook shelves hold copies that range from Trader Vic’s Pacific Island and Mexican Cooking to Barbara Kafka’s Roasting, the Silver Palate Cookbook, Joy of Cooking, Café Beaujolais, Frugal Gourmet, Meat & Potatoes Cookbook, and Marcella Hazan.
Mary Evelyn’s cooking repertoire made its first big leap when she moved to Santa Monica and worked in then Rep. Alfonso Bell’s Santa Monica office and then as a head hunter. She used to frequent the Golden West butcher shop and ask the experts what certain cuts were and how to cook them. Suddenly she was introduced to new fresh veggies and new styles of cooking.

She made a giant culinary advance when she moved to Sonoma and she met lots of people in the wine business who appreciated good food, and she “worked up to that expectation.” She marks five years ago when she moved to a new house and renovated its kitchen, just the way she wanted it, as another milestone in her cooking. She now cooks with Cephalon pots and pans on up-to-date black Kitchen Aid appliances, stirring that soup cauldron as she goes.
Mary Evelyn cooks with love one day a week for Meals on Wheels, co-founded Chandelle Winery, with which she is no longer involved, serves as chair of the First Congregational Church’s Pastoral Search Committee, chairs the Sonoma Valley Library Advisory Committee, and belongs to Kiwanis, AAUW, the Sonoma Valley Art Museum, and the Sonoma Cuisine Society.

Mother Ginger King always made vegetable soup, and it became the family’s comfort food. “Even if I wasn’t cooking anything else, I always had vegetable soup in the freezer.”
As Mary Evelyn’s and her sister “L.A.’s” parents’ health has suffered, M.E. bought new huge soup pots so she could make soup for her parents. A great thrift shop shopper, M.E. scours them for coolers to ship the soup to her parents in Boston.
She freezes the soup in square plastic containers in one-cup servings, then “decants” them frozen into zip tight plastic bags, packs them with dry ice in the coolers, and ships the coolers via FedEx.

Or she packs the soup squares with dry ice in Styrofoam coolers and carries them with her on an airplane for personal delivery. What shows more love than cooking soup for your parents when they need it!

As of this moment, Mary Evelyn has this soup, as well as vegetable beef, split pea, lentil, onion, turkey, and chili in her freezer, but I won’t tell you where she lives.

—Kathleen Hill is co-author of Sonoma Valley-The Secret Wine Country and Napa Valley-Land of Golden Vines. Kathleen and Gerald Hill host two shows at 5 p.m. on KSVY- 91.3 FM Mondays and Thursdays. hilltopub@aol.com.