Helen Jean Anderson was born on Oct. 12, 1929, in Raleigh, N.C. Her parents were academics, and transplants from the Midwest, which meant she was Southern-born, but not of the South, which gave her an outsider’s curiosity, particularly about the region’s foodways. Her father, Donald Anderson, was a professor of botany at North Carolina State University in Raleigh and later, at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. Her mother, Marian (Johnson) Anderson, had taught physical education.
Jean studied food science at Cornell University, graduating in 1951, and earned a master’s degree from Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism in 1957. In between, she went to work for the North Carolina Agricultural Extension Service teaching young women how to make nutritious meals, judging cakes and pies at county fairs and overseeing 4-H events. Her next job was as a food editor for The Raleigh Times.
After journalism school, she was hired as an assistant food editor at Ladies’ Home Journal for $125 a week. There, she worked in the test kitchen, wrote celebrity profiles and worked as copy director.
Ms. Anderson left New York in 2007, returned to Chapel Hill and published “A Love Affair with Southern Cooking.” The book included one of her favorite recipes, for brown sugar pie, which she had first tasted at her school cafeteria when she was 5.
Her last book, “From Kiln to Kitchen: Favorite Recipes From Beloved North Carolina Potters,” was published in 2019, when she was 90.
Ms. Anderson leaves no survivors.
Brown Sugar Pie
1 pound light brown sugar
4 large eggs
¼ cup milk
2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
¼ teaspoon salt
1 stick of butter, melted and slightly browned
One 9-inch pie shell
Preheat the oven to 325 degrees and set the rack in the middle of the oven. Blend the brown sugar, eggs, milk, vanilla, and salt in a medium bowl, then add the butter in a slow stream, beating all the while.
