The lucky woman in this picture with Chef Alfredo of Rome is Josephine Gibson. They are eating fettuccine Alfredo, a dish the Italian restaurateur served at his establishment.
The picture was taken at Pittsburgh’s Hilton Hotel in 1961, the year Mrs. Gibson retired after a 24-year career as food editor of The Pittsburgh Press. By the time she took that coveted job, she could toss parmesan cheese, butter, cream and noodles together with the ease that today’s culinary celebrities demonstrate regularly on television.
Mrs. Gibson had earned a degree in home economics from Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1924. In 1927, she founded and directed the home economics department at the H.J. Heinz Company.
At a model kitchen arranged on a stage in the Heinz plant auditorium, she lectured while demonstrating how to cook specific dishes. She developed and tested recipes using Heinz products and gave demonstrations to more than 80,000 people a year who toured the company’s plant. She also was a successful broadcaster. Her radio show, “Hostess Talk to Women,” aired three times a week on the NBC network.
After joining the Press in 1937, she answered thousands of letters in a column called Recipe Exchange. Press feature writer Maxine Garrison interviewed Mrs. Gibson and the story’s headline read, “Press Writer Mixes Career With Marriage Successfully.”
The two women talked over lunch at Mrs. Gibson’s home, where she served creamed mushrooms with bacon, fresh vegetable salad with stuffed celery, hot rolls and strawberry shortcake.
Mrs. Gibson outlined her philosophy this way: “Most housewives, and the families they cook for, aren’t epicures, and don’t want to be. They want honest-to-goodness food, and for the most part, they ask merely a new approach.”
Mrs. Gibson tested many of her recipes at home in the evening while her husband, Attorney William H. Eckert, worked on his estate cases. He was a founder of the law firm Eckert, Seamans Cherin & Mellott. The couple had two daughters, Josephine and Dorothy. Mrs. Gibson was 86 when she died in April 1990 at her Rosslyn Farms home.
