Prepared with Love

One of Shreveport’s first “celebrity chefs,” Shirley Faludi taught a generation of Shreveporters how hot it is to cook

There are lots of better-known Shreveport cookbooks out there, but Shirley Faludi’s 1980 collection I’d Rather Cook gets my vote for the most entertaining. Faludi self-published the 312-page, spiral-bound recipe collection with help from professional editor Maburl Schober and support from her husband, Dr. Heinz Faludi (who also wrote a great introduction to I’d Rather Cook). The book is a collection of mostly Eastern European recipes that also provides–via cheesy puns, poems, relentless double entendres, and brief personal asides from the author–a window into Shirley Faludi’s remarkable life and personality. 

Shirley Faludi was born Shirley Isabelle Sklar on Sept. 30, 1922 in Germantown, Pennsylvania. Raised on her mother’s traditional Ukrainian cooking, she grew up eating Borscht, rolled cabbage, and chopped liver at home during an idyllic-sounding young adulthood in Pennsylvania Dutch country.   

She became engaged to Heinz, an Austrian neurosurgeon, in 1943, when she was 20 and he was 27.  The two met and fell in love in Philadelphia, where Heinz attended medical school at Temple University. After he completed his residency and served a stint in the U.S. Army Medical Corps during World War II, Heinz accepted an invitation to practice neurosurgery in Shreveport. 

The couple began turning up in the society columns of Shreveport newspapers in the mid-fifties. By the mid-sixties, Shirley was making near-weekly appearances in local newspapers for hosting cooking and music classes in her home at 702 Azalea Drive.

For Shirley Faludi, cooking was metaphysical and romantic. She frequently spoke to students in her classes about the close connection between romance and food, as well as other connections between food and sensuality. 

“When you cook, you see, hear, touch, and taste,” Shirley told the Shreveport Journal in 1988. “Touching the diverse texture of food is like touching the textures of life, especially when handling dough. And you should taste with an artistic tongue. One does not just cook; you create, using your own senses at their fullest.” 

It’s remarkable that Shirley Faludi became so publicly known as a great chef without ever operating a restaurant. Throughout the sixties and seventies, the Faludis hosted gatherings at their South Highlands home with such frequency that Shirley rented a refrigerated storage unit, located behind Cobb’s Barbecue on Kings Highway, where she stockpiled hundreds of frozen containers of premade party appetizers. Because she never knew when a party may erupt at her house, she had to be prepared to feed revelers at a moment’s notice. 

“Sometimes after an opera or concert, my husband will invite 50 or more people to our house for a happening,” Shirley told the Journal in a 1988 profile. “I have had some dillies.”

A dilly at the Faludi house typically called for extravagant food, fresh-cut flowers, live musical performances, and impromptu cooking lessons in the kitchen, where Shirley had mirrors installed above her battered stovetop so that onlookers could see inside of her simmering pots. Their parties often had themes, and guests were instructed to bring musical instruments or dress in costume.  

Alcohol didn’t play much of a role in the festivities for Shirley and Heinz, though a full bar was available for others to enjoy. Heinz was Shreveport’s only neurosurgeon for many years, and he was nearly always “on-call” during the happenings on Azalea Drive. The fact that Heinz could be abruptly plucked from a party and whisked to a nearby operating room, where he would most likely stand and perform brain surgery for eight or nine uninterrupted hours, didn’t seem to dampen his enthusiasm for a good “dilly.” To the contrary, Heinz considered hosting parties to be a requirement of his career.

“In my profession as a neurosurgeon we have to entertain frequently at dinner parties at our home,” he wrote in the introduction to I’d Rather Cook. “Invariably my wife’s cooking finds much acclaim. We have thus gained an enviable reputation of which I am justifiably proud. By publishing this book, should we share all this?”

In addition to her cooking, Shirley came to be well-known for her singing. By the time she published I’d Rather Cook in 1980, she’d already released three vocal albums backed by members of the Shreveport Symphony Orchestra. Those albums include a collection of Ukrainian folk songs, an opera (Shumann’s “Frauenliebe und Leben”), and an LP of African American spirituals. 

“She would literally enthrall people, and so would Dad,” said the Faludis’ daughter, Suzi Johnson, who still lives in Shreveport. “I was more mortified and embarrassed than enthralled, at the time. I was shy, I didn’t want to attract any attention, and my mom would be doing recitals in the living room, wearing sparkling gowns and gold slippers.”

In addition to hosting parties and cooking classes in her home, Shirley would partner with Shreveport venues, organizations, and events to present music-filled cooking classes as Creative Cookery, Inc. The most popular of her classes, “Everyone Kneads Dough,” highlighted Shirley’s area of greatest expertise: bread.  

It is in Shirley Faludi’s relationship with bread that readers discover an essential fact about I’d Rather Cook: For a cookbook, it contains an uncommonly large amount of sexual innuendo. Community cookbooks like this one are almost never bawdy, as a rule, but I’d Rather Cook is the exception that proves the rule.

The front cover illustration by Drew Hunter shows the nude figures of Adam and Eve, from behind, plucking a forbidden apple as a serpent looks on. A Journal reviewer called the book’s cover art “intentionally sexy.” 

Shirley had a stock response for anyone who asked about the cover artwork. 

“Mom would just say: ‘You know, Adam and Eve were the first cooks,’” Johnson said.  

If they made it past the saucy cover, overly prudish readers were probably turned off by the very first recipe in I’d Rather Cook.

“Let us treat the yeast loaf as a lover,” the opening recipe begins, before going on to detail how dough must be fondled adequately, if you’d like it to rise, and how it must be allowed to rest after the first rising. On the facing page, a photo illustration called “The Staff of Life” shows what could be interpreted as an obscene bread arrangement. This all happens within the first fifteen pages.

Times food writer Carolyn Flournoy asked Shirley about the sexy bread stuff. 

“I tell students in my own cooking school as well as those who attend the Red River Revel cooking classes that every principle of love-making fits into molding a loaf of bread,” Faludi said. 

“Everyone had been after her for years to write a cookbook,” Johnson said. “I think it cost them $10,000 to publish at the time. Mom would go to Les Boutiques de Noel and the Red River Revel, and she’d host cooking demonstrations where she’d sell so many copies of that book. It had quite a following.” 

I sometimes got the impression, as I pored over old media interviews with Shirley Faludi, that interviewers and society page columnists didn’t quite know how to process her relentlessly sex-positive worldview. Consider one Journal writer’s reaction to Shirley, from a review of a bread-making class held at the Women’s Department Club: “…our hostess was attired in the dress traditional to the women of Salzburg, Austria: Dirndl-skirted, with a taut bodice dripping into a rounded decolletage and a lacy frill of blouse with brief, semi-puffed sleeves.”

Sir, I thought. Get a hold of yourself.

By all accounts, Shirley had that effect on people. She was a firecracker. Her energy was so intense that it commanded the attention of everyone in the room. It’s just that, unlike all of the other captivating ingenues at a South Highland dinner party in 1967, once she had your attention, Shirley Faludi was liable to attempt to teach you how to pound gugelhupf dough.     

Personally, I think that all of the sex, humor, and music was just a “hook” to help students learn her primary message: that the best way to show someone you love them is by cooking for them. At her core, Shirley Faludi wanted to make the world a better place, I think, by restoring intimacy and personal expression to the domestic lives of her students.

“I just happen to think that anything you make has to be fun and that you cannot teach cooking without the atmosphere of the arts around you,” she said. “I don’t teach gourmet cooking. I teach an enthusiasm for doing what you have to do and enjoying it at the same time.” 

Recipes from Faludi’s cooking classes, along with the legendary Viennese fare that she and Heinz served at their frequent parties, make up the bulk of I’d Rather Cook. Buoyed by the book’s popularity, she continued to present cooking classes, host parties, and make appearances in the local media until she was diagnosed with a terminal illness in 1989. She passed away only a few months after learning of her illness. She and Dr. Heinz Faludi are buried side-by-side at Hillcrest Cemetery in Haughton.

“She died in her 60s, which was way too young,” Johnson said. “She was definitely cutting a path for other great chefs. She loved to encourage people to learn to cook. Everything tastes so much better when you cook for someone you love.”

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