Elsie Henderson was a self-taught cook who came from simple means. That didn’t stop her from whipping up memorable foods for some of Pittsburgh’s wealthiest residents and famous celebrities.
She gained fame herself cooking for department store magnate Edgar J. Kaufmann, who hired her to prepare meals at Fallingwater, the famed summer retreat Frank Lloyd Wright built for him above a waterfall in Fayette County in the late 1930s.
Ms. Henderson learned of the job in 1947 through an ad in the newspaper. She so impressed Edgar Sr.’s wife, Liliane, during the interview that she hired the 33-year-old on the spot — even though the cook, who was born and grew up in a tiny apartment on Mount Washington and didn’t know how to drive, was wary about working in the country.
It would end up being the highlight of her culinary career.
Every Friday for the next 15 years, until the property was donated in 1963 to the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy, Ms. Henderson traveled by chauffeur to the cantilevered house on Bear Run. There, she’d prepare meals and bake for the Kaufmanns and their weekend guests — some of the nation’s most famous writers, painters, musicians and politicians. It was, she recalled in a cookbook chronicling her time there, a dream come true.
“Who could have guessed that I could ever call a place like Fallingwater home?” she wrote in “The Fallingwater Cookbook: Elsie Henderson’s Recipes & Memories.” “It was the best job I ever had.”
Ms. Henderson, of Stanton Heights, died peacefully of unknown causes on Saturday. She was 107.
The youngest of 13 children, she had a hardscrabble childhood. Her father, Thornton, died when she was 2, leaving her mother, Ada, to support the family by cleaning houses for rich people. She expected her children to pitch in, too, so as a child, Ms. Henderson scrubbed a neighbor’s bathroom floor for $1 a week.
She took a cooking class at the Red Cross and spent summers in the kitchen with her maternal Grandma Jeffries, who was Cherokee, on her grandparents’ horse ranch in Fort Royal, Va. But mostly, Ms. Henderson learned to cook by watching her mother, who’d grown up in the South. Many of the recipes she dished up over the years, like the sweet potato pie served each Thanksgiving at Fallingwater, reflected that heritage.
She was a proponent of the farm-to-table movement before it was a thing, cooking seasonally with locally sourced ingredients. She prepared food from her impeccable memory rather than recipes, and she paid similar attention to her menus. She always checked with the Kaufmanns’ city cook to make sure she didn’t replicate a dish on weekends, and kept track of Fallingwater guests’ meals so they never were served the same thing twice.
Even in recent years, her memory was unassailable — Ms. Henderson could even recall being a 6-year-old, greeting her older brother Lewis when he returned home from World War I.
“She could cook anything and was as sharp as a whip,” said Suzanne Martinson, former food editor for both The Pittsburgh Press and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette who collaborated on a book with Ms. Henderson. “She was the smartest woman I ever interviewed.”
Ms. Henderson didn’t set out to be a culinarian. She left South Hills High School after the 11th grade with plans of becoming a nurse, one of just a handful of jobs open to a black woman in the 1930s. Only problem was, she couldn’t stand the sight of blood.
Instead, she went to work for Kaufmann’s department store for six years, in the overdue accounts department.
She had an interesting recollection of her time there in an interview several years ago at the Senator John Heinz History Center: “Your board is in front of you, and you know who everyone is on that board that has an account at Kaufmann’s. And you also know if they haven’t paid their bill. You knew exactly who they were. So, let that be a lesson for you. Oh dear,” she said in the July 2015 interview.
After her time at the department store, Ms. Henderson began working for families in wealthy Sewickley Heights before being recruited to cook for ketchup king H.J. Heinz II at Rosemont Farm, his estate in Fox Chapel.
On her first day at Fallingwater, Edgar Sr. instantly recognized Ms. Henderson from the department store.
“He said, ‘I know this lady. I know this lady,’ Ms. Henderson recalled in the interview. “And he said to me, he said, ‘Elsie, you’re going to like it better than you did in bad accounts.’ So I discovered that I did like it better. In fact, Fallingwater was the best place that I’d ever work in. And I’ve been around all of it.”
After leaving Fallingwater, she spent the summer of 1965 in Hyannis Port, Mass., cooking for the Shrivers and Kennedys.
Her mother was a feisty woman, and Ms. Henderson also had strong opinions, said Ms. Martinson. “She knew she should be treated with respect.”
An avid reader as a child, Ms. Henderson had an eye for beautiful clothes and loved high-heeled Italian shoes, and was often the best-dressed woman in the room, according to Ms. Martinson. She had boundless energy, both of body and mind. She studied the language of cooking — French — at the YMCA in her 60s and again at age 94 in a class for seniors at the University of Pittsburgh. Well into her 80s, Ms. Henderson baked desserts for volunteer meetings of OASIS, a seniors program at Kaufmann’s department store.
At 95, many of her favorite recipes were published, along with her memories of working at Fallingwater, in a cookbook penned by Ms. Martinson. Two years later, she was immortalized as a character in a children’s book “Moxie, The Dachshund of Fallingwater.”
“She was so proud when the cookbook came out,” Ms. Martinson said, and handed out postcards that promoted the book and traveled to book signings. “It was her legacy.”
She was honored by Mayor Bill Peduto with an official proclamation on her 105th birthday for being “a unique and vibrant Pittsburgher whose talent enraptured the rich and famous.”
Justin W. Gunther, director of Fallingwater and vice president of the conservancy, called her passing “a tremendous loss.”
“Through her wonderful stories and recipes, the rich culinary history she created will forever live on as a remarkable and treasured part of the Fallingwater story,” he said in a statement.
Ms. Henderson’s favorite dish was always crab cakes, said her niece-in-law Cheryl Carter, of Stanton Heights.
“We used to cook together and Aunt Elsie cooked for me all the time,” said Ms. Carter, who is married to Ms. Henderson’s nephew Arthur Carter. “She would call me at work and say, ‘Stop here on your way home.’ She’d have baked drumsticks with wild rice, and she would make an apple turnover or fruit turnover.”
Even in her later years, Ms. Henderson wore high heels in the kitchen, Ms. Carter said.
“I would ask her if she wanted slippers, but she never did,” she said. “She showed me how to make the corn pudding from her cookbook — it was my favorite dish of hers.”
Approval from her aunt was everything to her, said Ms. Carter, who thought of her aunt more as a mother.
“I’m from Louisiana and I asked her if she would like to try some gumbo,” she said. “She said she’d never had that. Well, I fixed her a bowl and she ate the whole thing. I was like, ‘I’m good.’ Anytime she would compliment me on my cooking that was my highlight. I didn’t care what anybody else thought.”
Ms. Henderson married three times, was divorced once and widowed twice. She had no children.
A viewing is planned from 6-8 p.m. Friday at Spriggs-Watson Funeral Home, 720 N. Lang Ave., in Homewood. Social distancing is required. A private burial service is planned for Saturday.
Gretchen McKay: gmckay@post-gazette.com, 412-263-1419 or on Twitter @gtmckay. Staff writer Janice Crompton contributed to this story.
First Published: March 24, 2021, 11:47 p.m.
Updated: March 25, 2021, 10:27 a.m.
