Cecily Brownstone, who died August 30 at 96, was food editor for the Associated Press for nearly 40 years and claimed that, during those years, she was the most-read writer of recipes in the world.

She was a charter member of the downtown New York food elite of cooks, writers, critics, and editors who remade American gastronomy from the 1950s through the 1980s, the period Brownstone worked at the AP.

She once was described as “the ad hoc matriarch of James Beard’s culinary salon.”

“She and Beard talked every morning at eight,” said Brownstone’s nephew Jonathan Ned Katz, who said both gourmets were as interested in the history of an old recipe as in the most intimate behavior of their culinary pals.

Brownstone was also friends with Irma Rombauer and her daughter, Marion Rombauer Becker, authors of the “Joy of Cooking” best-sellers. All 15 editions of the classic cookbook were in Brownstone’s stacks when she sold her book collection to New York University in 2002. The painstakingly catalogued, 12,000-volume collection formed the cornerstone of the book collection for the Department of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health, according to Marion Nestle, founding chairwoman of the department.

“It provided in one fell swoop the underpinnings for the programs we have here,” Ms. Nestle said.

The collection, housed at NYU’s rare book collection, includes extensive correspondence with famous foodies and contains about 5,000 food pamphlets, some on subjects as odd as the culinary usage of the nutria, a large aquatic rodent found in the South.

A native of Manitoba, Brownstone moved to New York in the late 1920s after just a year of college, a modern girl intent on making a living. She lived with her sisters and tried in vain to teach herself shorthand – she was fired from a series of secretarial positions for incompetence. Eventually she found work as an assistant at Parents magazine, where she toiled on a variety of projects before being hired as food editor at the Associated Press in 1947.

Brownstone had little experience in the field beyond writing about children’s food for Parents and nurturing a deep-seated love of Schraffts and other classic Gotham eateries. But food writing was a less crowded field in those days, and Brownstone had a wealth of childhood experience to draw on. Her mother, a formidable cook who was demanding enough to insist that the local dairy company make its cottage cheese according to her specifications, had trained all five of her daughters to be excellent cooks.

Some of Cecily Brownstone’s early selections, for instance a 1952 concoction called “mackerel casserole” (“an economical main dish that tastes good”), are redolent of an era happily left behind. She eagerly moved with the times through the 1960s and ’70s, stressing fresh ingredients, American regional cooking, and spicier fare. Yet in a 1993 interview with Newsday, Brownstone still looked back with nostalgia on no-longer-fashionable dishes, such as bacon-wrapped chicken livers, Nesselrode pies, and tomato aspics (“much better than their reputation”).

Although Brownstone became a well-known hostess in gastronome circles, she seldom lifted a pan herself. She relied instead on a cook to prepare the actual recipes at her Jane Street home. A mid-1950s feature on fried chicken in the New York Times included a photo from her home of a table piled high with chicken, corn, melon, and cans of Rheingold on ice – the kind of simple fare that Brownstone favored.

Another of her favorite chicken dishes was “Country Captain,” a curry whose recipe seemed to mutate in ways that aggravated her, even as it gained in popularity.

After Brownstone retired from the AP in 1986, she became a consultant to the Cuisinart company, helping to popularize what had formerly been a primarily gourmet appliance.

She also served for many years as children’s editor at Family Circle. She published two books, “Associated Press Cookbook” (1972) and “Classic Cakes and Other Great Cuisinart Desserts” (1993). On the latter, her coauthor was Carl Sontheimer, founder of the Cuisinart company.

In recent years, bedridden with a malady that was not specified, she delighted in her nieces and grandnieces and kept up with a stream of visitors.

Cecily Brownstone
Born April 18, 1909, in Plum Coulee, Manitoba; died August 30 at St. Vincent’s Medical Center of pneumonia; survived by several nieces and nephews; she never married.