Margaret Frances Price left this earthly life to join her beloved ancestors on Sunday morning, April 12, 2015. She leaves behind four daughters: Leslie, Sally, Kate, and Joan, sons-in-law Bob and Ed, and grandchildren Colline, Ivy, Jules, Emmett, Stuart, Cedar, and Scout.
Frances left this earth quietly, but her life was anything but. Born in Rome, Georgia in 1930, the only child of Mary Thedford and Erwin Manley Price, she moved with her parents to a tiny house in Atlanta in 1935. She attended Girl’s High and subsequently the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, graduating with dual degrees in Journalism and Home Economics. Food and writing became the organizing themes of her life. The woman could slam cook.
Fran at her Baby Shower, October, 1955. Englewood New Jersey.
After college she worked for TWA as a stewardess during the early days of the commercial airline industry. She married Blair Protzman in January 1955, and bore three daughters in less than four years, while working as a dietitian at Englewood Hospital and perfecting Christmas cookie and fruitcake recipes still made annually by her daughters and friends.
In 1959, with three children, two still in (cloth!) diapers, she flew to Indonesia to join her husband, who was running a jungle outpost clinic for Caltex Oil Company. There she honed her curries and chutneys. A fourth daughter was conceived in the jungle and born – of all places – in Arkansas, shortly after tornado season.
Returning to Atlanta, Frances managed the cafeteria at Emory University Hospital before moving with her husband to Center City Philadelphia in 1963, where she worked for ARA Food Services developing themed quantity recipes for college and hospital food service systems, during the days when real food was still being cooked in these institutions. Her family feasted as she experimented with regional and international food folkways and traditions, building quantity recipes from family-sized heirlooms. Oreos were rarely on the menu: homemade raisin cookies and chocolate mousse were in. As were beef stroganoff, sauerbraten, crookneck squash soufflé, from scratch Boston baked beans, corn sticks, popovers, salads with marvelous ingredients, Moravian Love Cake, Sally Lunn, Nanaw’s Coconut Cake – you name it, she made it, people ate it, with gusto.
Following a divorce, she moved to Tarrytown New York in 1967 and continued her work with institutional recipe development for General Foods, before going to work at a Madison Avenue ad agency. A rare woman in a sea of men, she wrote her way up the ladder until moving to Virginia Beach in 1972, where she co-founded an ad agency, then went on to provide free-lance consulting for institutional food service and products companies.
In 1982 she opened an award-winning restaurant in Norfolk, Café La Rousse (The Redheads). The cuisine was American Regional. Fran was gifted at taking commonplace foods and transforming them into divine fare. Everything, down to the bread for the sandwiches, was made in-house. Critics loved it. Martha Stewart even made an appearance. After the roof literally fell in on the restaurant in 1984, she rolled with the punches by moving to France and working as a chef for the Australian Embassy in Paris.
Returning to Richmond, Virginia in 1986, Frances reinvented herself yet again as a food writer with the syndicated column, The One and Only Cook, featuring stories from her life along with recipes designed for the solo cook. These recipes formed the basis for a cookbook, Healthy Cooking for Two, or Just You, published in 1995, that sold over 125,000 copies and is still going strong on Amazon. During this time she also free-lanced as a restaurant critic for the Richmond Times-Dispatch, and returned to college at Morgan State University to re-certify as a Registered Dietician.
Frances spent her final decades moving back and forth between quaint and beautiful homes in Richmond, Norfolk, Baltimore, and the rural hillsides of Maryland, doing occasional free-lance writing and continuing her love affair with food, travel, history, music and politics. A yellow-dog Democrat, she kept herself amused staying up late watching Jon Stewart and his compatriots as her health declined. She fell ill for the last time on April 1, signed herself into hospice six days later, and died the morning of April 12 surrounded by her loved ones, who sang her out with the old-time spirituals that reflected her Southern Baptist roots.
Frances will be missed for her sharp wit, her incredible sense of adventure, and for the love she spread so generously and widely through her phenomenal gift with food. Cornbread, beans, and collard greens will never be the same. And neither will we.
Frances with her parents, Erwin and Mary Price
Sometime in the future Fran’s ashes will be spread in her birthplace of Rome, Georgia, and her tombstone will be placed between those of her beloved parents Mary and Erwin. She has requested that her epitaph read: “It was something she ate.”
