In the late 1960s, well before the era of celebrity chefs and the flood of cooking shows, Irena Chalmers found herself stuck with six fondue pots at La Bonne Femme, the cooking school and specialty food shop she opened in Greensboro, North Carolina.
At the time, few in that small Southern city had heard of fondue. So to promote the dish, Chalmers wrote a slim volume of recipes called Fondue Cook-In. It worked. The pots sold, and the book would be the first of more than 100 titles she would write or later publish for other cooks, many of whom went on to become well-known cooking authorities.
Chalmers died of esophageal cancer on April 4 at her home in Kingston, New York, her daughter, Hilary Chalmers, said. She was 84.
Although Chalmers had long been interested in cooking, her career didn’t take off until 1971, when she divorced her first husband and moved back to New York (where they had met). She quickly discovered a market for short, affordable single-subject booklets like her fondue book. Home cooks found them to be welcome alternatives to the big compendiums of time-consuming recipes that were popular at the time.
She also wrote the recipe booklets that came with a wave of new products, like the Cuisinart food processor, yogurt makers, microwave ovens and the French Le Creuset cookware she came to love.
With an ability to market ideas and a sense of what cooks really wanted, she emerged as a spotter of talent and created a book packaging company.
For nearly a decade Chalmers rented two floors of an Upper East Side brownstone in Manhattan owned by Barbara Kafka, a food writer and restaurant consultant. She persuaded Kafka to let Chalmers’ company publish Kafka’s first cookbook, American Food & California Wine, in 1984.
She produced other debut cookbooks as well, including those by the cake expert Rose Levy Beranbaum, the New York cooking teacher Peter Kump and the Southern food author Nathalie Dupree.
She went on to write newspaper and magazine articles, a collection of recipes from cooking schools, a compendium of food careers and, in 1994, The Great Food Almanac. But her greatest hit was a 48-page book called Napkin Folds, which sold more than 1 million copies.
Chalmers, who was quick to throw out a clever comment and never shy about offering her clear-eyed assessment of the food world, became a popular lecturer and adviser to New York’s professional cooking community, which included James Beard and others who formed the foundation for a proliferation of cooking media and regional American restaurants in the 1990s.
She sometimes took a contrarian view of trends. “I think insisting on having a free-range chicken,” she often said, “is like having a free-range boyfriend. You never know where he’s been.”
Irena Chalmers-Taylor was born in London on June 5, 1935, to William and Alys Chalmers-Taylor. She became a midwife and a nurse after her father discouraged her from studying to be a doctor.
She was educated at the private Haberdashers’ Aske’s School for Girls outside London, received a midwife’s certificate at a maternity hospital and completed a yearlong program at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery in London.
After completing graduate work at the Neurological Institute in Queens Square, London, she headed to New York in 1959 with a contract to teach at the Neurological Institute of New York, part of Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital.
On the day she arrived, she met Fredric D. Kirshman. They married and had two children. She also began to cultivate a love of food and cooking, sparked in large part by a weeklong class at Le Cordon Bleu London. Kirshman moved the family to the South when he obtained a job an as executive with a bluejeans manufacturer.
Chalmers spent 16 years teaching at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York, and championed women in the culinary fields. She was a founder of both Les Dames d’Escoffier International and the International Association of Culinary Professionals, at whose events she would often hold court and deliver gently biting witticisms, endearing her to Julia Child, a friend.
The chef Jacques Pepin was a regular at those sessions, and the two would tease each other about whether his French accent or her British one was thicker.
“She was controversial because she was frank to the point of bluntness,” he said in an interview. “But she was the type of person I liked because you always knew where you stood with her.”
Chalmers, whose second marriage, to Allen D. Bragdon, also ended in divorce, eventually began working with the flamboyant New York restaurateur Joe Baum, the man behind the Four Seasons, the remodeling of the Rainbow Room in Rockefeller Center and the redesign of Windows on the World at the World Trade Center. She and Baum ended up in a romantic relationship.
Chalmers knew several of the workers who perished in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. She never quite shook the trauma of that event, her daughter said, and eventually moved from Manhattan to upstate New York.
Besides her daughter, she is survived by a son, Philip Kirshman.
