Author and Educator

The success of Alma’s children’s cookbooks encouraged her to try writing a cookbook for men. The unpublished manuscript for this cookbook includes recipes for meat, salads, and vegetables, which she found to be “appealing to men and at the same time not too exacting.”

In 1970 Alma published Cooking à la Cordon Bleu. When the Parisian school protested about the use of its name without permission, Harper & Row declined to reissue the book under another title. The rights to the cookbook reverted to Alma and she subsequently republished it, with expanded sections on regional French cuisine, with the University of Chicago Press in 1974 as Hows and Whys of French Cooking. It was an immediate success.

During this time, she also launched a subscription cooking publication, Alma’s Almanac.  Beginning with the first issue in 1972, the Almanac provided seasonal menu plans, recipes, and other culinary hints to its monthly subscribers. In addition to her published books, Alma wrote twice-weekly columns as food editor of the Chicago Sun-Times, as well as a number of magazine articles, booklets, and brochures over the course of several decades. She also spent many years traveling, developing, and testing recipes for a book on Chinese cooking that she was never able to complete.