Zelda Miller Abele Gordon July 24, 1933 - December 24, 2015

WHAT WE DO

Zelda Miller Abele Gordon, who worked magic with food and anchored her family and friends with abundant love and support, died in San Francisco this past Christmas Eve. She was 82 years old. Her father, Frederick Abele, was a widower raising three children -- Kenneth, Warren and Norma -- when he married Zelda Miller in 1929. Then, on July 24, 1933, along came little Zelda, who started life in New Rochelle, New York. She was born during the Great Depression and spent her early childhood in an America immersed in World War II -- two seminal eras that shaped her character: resilient, creative, thrifty, stubborn, big-hearted, engaged and loyal. She attended Bard, the avant garde liberal arts college in the Hudson Valley, where she majored in English literature, found the sublime while listening to Ben Webster, Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, made friends for life and fell in love with her future husband, James Gordon. They had a daughter, Sarah Fox, in 1958. After moving to Chicago, their second daughter, Rachel Mary, was born in 1962. For Zelda, raising her girls was an art and a craft. She volunteered in their schools, fashioned their clothes and Halloween costumes with needle and thread and produced themed birthday parties with incredible cakes. In the mid-1960s, Zelda and her dear friend, Anne Hunt, founded The Melting Pot. The innovative cooking school embraced the flavors and cultures of the world where some of the best home cooks and professional chefs found in Chicago’s dynamic ethnic neighborhoods demonstrated not just how to prepare their favorite dishes, but also the rituals around food and the community they cultivate. Zelda and her family moved west to San Francisco in 1969, soon after the Summer of Love. She embraced the City’s diversity, which she explored through food -- focaccia in North Beach, handmade tortillas in the Mission, cabbage pirozhki in the Richmond and the Alemany Farmers’ Market in Bernal Heights, where she conferred with vendors about lychees, yardlong beans and Japanese eggplant. Her day was made when she found the perfect sun-ripened, fragrant peach. Her multifaceted career with food flourished. She developed recipes, managed the test kitchen at Ketchum Communications, wrote for food magazines and cookbooks and styled food photos. Not a week went by when she didn’t field calls from friends and friends of friends with such culinary dilemmas as what to do when a cake wouldn’t rise, when a soup was too sour or whether 1 percent milk could be substituted for heavy cream. Her kitchen table was the place where meals were served, art was made, homework was done and neighbors came for counsel. Lucky were the people who tagged along with Z on one of her frequent jaunts to the wine country with a thirst for discovery and her picnic basket packed with good eats and goblets. Over the years, she curated an amazing collection of hundreds of little shoes sent by friends who found them on various global travels, displaying them on a special Christmas tree once a year in her lovely painted-lady Victorian house. She amassed more than 3,000 cookbooks, made paper out of backyard flowers and herbs, crafted baskets out of pine needles, and took up lawn bowling in Golden Gate Park. Zelda, who was divorced, nurtured an eclectic group of cherished friends, some whose roots entwined with hers for decades. Her devotion to her family remained steadfast, and her family’s devotion to her never wavered. In addition to her daughters, Sarah Stegner (Tim Stegner) and Rachel Gordon (Liz Mangelsdorf), she is survived by grandchildren Jazmin LeBlanc (Matthew McClain), Daniel Stegner, Isabel Gordon and Akela Stegner; great grandchildren Paul and Josephine McClain; and her treasured sister, Norma Abele, who visited from the East Coast every summer and winter. Zelda also left behind two beloved cats, The Missus and Little Brother.
 Zelda's Life: A Journey Through Photos (Click on a photo to start the slide show)