Anne Long, in her kitchen in 2001, has written the You Asked for It column for the St. Petersburg Times since 1976.
Anne Long has written about 1,400 You Asked for It columns for the St. Petersburg Times. Today is her last.
For 28 years, Anne Long has fielded your recipe requests.
Olive Garden's Pasta E Fagioli, Jell-O salads studded with fruit and flavored with sherbet, bread starters, cakes made with Coca-Cola, even cakes that are better than sex are some of the recipes she has found for readers.
After all these years of opening envelopes and reading stories of favorite foods and family histories, Mrs. Long is retiring. Today is her last column.
"It's time," she says, in her sweetly matter-of-fact way. We suppose someone who has written some 1,400 columns has the right to say that, but that won't make us miss her any less.
For Mrs. Long, 69, there are stacks of quilting squares to be stitched together and grandchildren to spoil. She lives nearly half the year in North Carolina and will enjoy antiquing even more without a weekly deadline.
"I've enjoyed every bit of time on the column," she says.
When Mrs. Long took over the column in 1976 at the request of then-food editor Ruth Gray, it already had been running for about 20 years without a byline.
At that time, the newspaper was a cook's best bet to find a lost recipe. Today, many people find them on the Internet at sites with such names as www.topsecretrecipes.com a collection of restaurant recipes; www.epicurious.com dishes from Gourmet and Cooking Light magazines; and www.allrecipes.com with its massive library.
Since the beginning, the premise of the column was simple. Readers sent in their requests for recipes, and other readers looked through their collections for them. Mrs. Long acted as the clearinghouse, making sure recipes were correct and that they appealed to a broad audience. Her collection of 1,000 cookbooks was a big help.
In the years she wrote the column, Mrs. Long watched her three children grow up and learned the joys of being a grandmother and the heartbreak of being widowed after 41 years of marriage. She's a self-taught cook with a degree in mathematics from the College of William & Mary in Virginia. Besides being a good cook and accomplished quilter, she's a crackerjack gardener and has the healthy orchids and bromeliads to prove it.
Mrs. Long has always looked at the column as a way to educate readers.
"I'm writing as if I'm a young bride and hardly know how to turn on the oven dial," she said in a 2001 interview marking her 25th anniversary.
Over the years, Mrs. Long has come to depend on contributors such as Nancy Eggert from Dunedin and Gene Groner of St. Petersburg. When she sees their names on the return address, she knows the recipes enclosed will be accurate and interesting. She often wonders what happened to the regulars of years ago, whose contributions just stopped coming.
Mrs. Long has been stumped just a few times. Requests for recipes for Swedish yogurt starter and French creams from a specific patisserie up North went unfulfilled.
The most response she ever received was 175 recipes for Buckeye Balls, a peanut butter-chocolate sweet. It seemed everyone who ever lived in Ohio, drove through the state or went to Ohio State wrote in, she says.
As a columnist, Mrs. Long always took the back seat. You Asked for It has never been about her. She rarely shared her cooking experiences or passed judgment on requests. She printed readers' requests and let the responses take center stage.
Even when asked to write a farewell column to readers, she hesitated. After thinking about it for a week, she writes:
Dear Readers,
It seems almost incomprehensible that it has been 28 years since I was offered the opportunity to write You Asked for It. A constant thread that has run through all the letters during this time is that those interested in cooking and recipes are warm, hospitable and generous people.
Some readers have written occasionally and some have corresponded many times. Requests and responses have always been interesting, and the readership has benefitted from your generosity in sharing. It has been a pleasure to write this column and I shall miss you all.
With kindest regards,
Anne Long
Kind, warm and succinct. Just like You Asked for It, and just like Anne Long.
