Prudence Penny, the New York Mirror's cooking columnist, was teaching readers how to make rum pie with zwieback crust. "Break up zwieback," commanded Prudence conventionally. The next step in the recipe was the kicker: "Keep rum bottle handy; if smashing up zwieback exhausts you, take swig of rum and resume zwieback breaking when strength returns." The extraordinary advice may have startled housewives not yet privy to the Mirror's secret: Prudence Penny is a onetime police reporter named Hyman Goldberg.
Since June, when he took over the column after the death of Vaudine Newell, its previous expert, Goldberg has dealt one shock after another to the essentially feminine realm of the kitchen. He seems intent on turning dinner into a binge: fish a la Goldberg is poached in gin, hens are baked in beer, and the glazing of apples is less important than fortifying the cook ("If you'd like to get a little glazed yourself, pour a shot of rum or brandy in"). Some of his recipes read like calisthenic exercises: "Now add the vanilla and beat! beat! beat! If you think you are too beat to beat any more, you are a quitter!" Others encourage the housewife to pick quarrels with the quartermaster: "Ask butcher to lard beef with 1-in. strips of salt pork. If he won't take the trouble, curse him roundly, leave, and find a butcher fellow who will."
Resounding Success. Hyman Goldberg's new role as housewife's helper is no more improbable than any other milestone in his journalistic career. At 16, Goldberg was covering the police beat for three Manhattan papers and a news service to boot. He was still 16 when he lost one of his papers, the old New York Sun, for excessive drinking on the job. Goldberg blames the calamity on the more experienced police reporters working the lobster shift. When he arrived at police headquarters, they were usually imbibing the last of the night's gin and grapefruit juice, and he was called upon to help.
He had no trouble getting hired and fired by assorted other New York dailies. The New York Post cut him loose for not writing about pretty girls during the week after Pearl Harbor; Goldberg, who normally loves such assignments, churlishly refused on the ground that, considering the times, there were more important subjects to write about. On PM, the long-defunct intellectual tabloid, he was asked so many times to gather man-on-the-street reaction to stirring events that he once rebelled and interviewed 35 New Yorkers all named Hyman Goldberg. To his surprise, his story was a resounding success.