Leave Me Alone With The Recipes: The Life, Art and Cookbook of Cipe Pineles

On a foggy Saturday morning a few years ago, while browsing at an antiquarian book fair in San Francisco, our guests Sarah Rich and Wendy MacNaughton stumbled onto a bright, hand-painted cookbook. Their discovery led them on a serendipitous journey to bring Cipe Pineles’ story — and her beautiful recipes — to the world.

Cipe (pronounced “C.P.”) Pineles was the daughter of Austrian Jewish immigrants who willed her way into the male-dominated world of publishing. By the mid 1940s, as the first female art director at Conde Nast, she shaped the look of Glamour. Later she led the design strategy for such iconic magazines as Seventeen, Vogue and Mademoiselle.

The manuscript that captivated Rich and MacNaughton was much more intimate: family recipes, which Pineles illustrated just for pleasure. Pineles was, Rich writes in her introduction to the book, “the artistic great-grandmother we never knew we had.”

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