I only met Sheila Lukins once, but it was a meeting to remember.  Oddly, my husband brought it up just hours before we learned of her untimely death. We had been talking about the logistics of eating with visiting authors, a pricier practice now than when I had an expense account for working lunches. Lukins, though, wouldn’t let me pick up the check last year even when I assured her it wouldn’t come out of my mom-of-two-with-a-broken-stove budget; that it would be reimbursed by my then-employer,  who had just paid $500 million cash for a “resplendent” new Manhattan skyscraper. She still wouldn’t drop the bill. “I want to get this,” I remember her saying in her hoarse voice. “I like you!”

Coming from the woman who, as Nancy Leson wrote, was everyone’s kitchen girlfriend, that was a memory as worth savoring as a plate of Skewered Shrimp With Prosciutto, the first dish I remember cooking from my college roommate’s Silver Palate Cookbook.

I wrote a little more about the lunch, and how impressed I was with Lukins, assistant Laurie Griffith, and their final cookbook,  here in today’s Christian Science Monitor. 

I’ve been trying to find obituaries that do her justice, or tell me more than the basic well-trod storyline of her life. (Maybe what I really want is a biography. Anyone out there planning one?)

So far, Morton Goldfein has one of the best remembrances I’ve found, here in the Huffington Post.

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