Food You Can Eat: Celebrity Sunday Matinee: Piper Laurie’s Dill Bread

For me, Piper Laurie is one of those actors like Estelle Parsons who I know, and know I should know, but I don’t know from where. My research has revealed that she had one of the best screen roles ever and this I’ll never forget: she was the Mom (Margaret White) in Carrie. Move over Meryl Streep: you have nothing on this woman.

Anyway, we’ll get to Piper. But first, I can pin down where this recipe comes from: it appeared in the pages of the New York Times on January 13, 1972, almost exactly 51 years ago today. 

Piper was born Rosetta Jacobs in Detroit. All her grandparents were Jewish immigrants, from Poland and from Russia. The family moved to LA, and in 1938, when she was six, her parents shipped her older sister off to a sanitarium because of her asthma and sent Piper along too, to keep her older sister company. So perfectly healthy Piper was institutionalized…I bet her parents were a piece of work, and I wouldn’t doubt that her childhood informed her performance in Carrie.

When she was 17 she went under contract to Universal. She appeared in Louisa, with Ronald Reagan, whom she dated, and who she claims she lost her virginity to. Before you throw up in your mouth a little, watch if you can Ronald Reagan in a non-acting role from around this time. He was uncannily charismatic. I’m sure I would have fallen under his spell.

She didn’t get much work in Hollywood so she moved back to New York and did stage and TV work. She somehow got cast as Paul Newman’s girlfriend in The Hustler (1961), a movie I’ve never seen but have always wanted to, which also starred Jackie Gleason in a career-redefining role, and for this she was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar. And then…nothing. So she moved back to New York, actors lead vagabondish lives, and did more TV and stage work. Hollywood called, again, and she got the role of Mom in Carrie, so now she’s making another movie, a good 15 years after The Hustler. One wonders where all those Hollywood casting agents were all this time, who her agent was, and who decided to cast her so irregularly but always in these great roles. She then went on to appear in Children of a Lesser God, 1986, a decade after Carrie, and got her third Oscar nom. She was like those authors whose books appear very sporadically but when they do they are up for all the awards and sit on the bestseller lists for months.

Then she did mostly television, including a role on Twin Peaks and Magda Goebbels (now there was a mother) in the 1981 TV movie The Bunker (with Anthony Hopkins as Hitler; how the hell did I miss that?) and in three episodes of one of the best miniseries to come out of the 80s, The Thorn Birds. But did she do TV guest appearances? Of course she did! St. Elsewhere, Hotel, Matlock, Murder She Wrote, Frasier, and, say it with me, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. As recently as 2018 she popped up on McGyver, so she certainly has a stronger work ethic than I do.

But now, back to the 70s, with another dill-flavored recipe.

Piper Laurie’s Dill Bread

Ingredients:

1 c. creamed cottage cheese
3 tbsp. butter
1/4 c. dried minced onions
3 tbsp. sugar
1/4 c. water
2 tbsp. dill seed
2 tsp. salt
1 egg
2-2 1/4 c. flour, sifted and warm
1 pkg. yeast

How to:

Mix ingredients through egg and warm in saucepan to 105-115 degrees. Mix in warm bowl of mixer with 1 cup flour and the yeast. Beat 2 minutes at medium speed. Add 1 cup flour and beat or knead for 2 minutes more. Work in the rest of the flour and beat at least 1 minute more. Let rise.

Punch down and transfer to greased casserole or Bundt pan. Let rise again. Without preheating oven, bake on bottom shelf at 350 degrees for 40-50 minutes. Makes 1 loaf.