My Son the Cook

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.

No Fear. After leaving PM, Goldberg joined the New York Mirror's Sunday magazine section as a girl watcher, interviewing starlets--real, would-be and soiled--so often that a Mirror rule, which limited him to only one byline a day, has forced him to appear under such pseudonyms as Amos Coggins, Gabriel Prevor, Reg Ovington, Jaime Montdor (Spanish-French for Hymie Goldberg), Robert Benevy and Veigh S. Meer--a phonetic rendition of the Yiddish for "Woe is me." Goldberg rarely has trouble cornering subjects. "When they see me come, all fear vanishes," says he. "There is first my distinguished white hair. Then my baby-blue eyes. Also, most of them are bigger than I am." This disparity in size did not dispel the suspicions of one statuesque beauty named Grace Kelly who, when Goldberg first approached her, thought he was a white slaver.

As Prudence Penny, Hyman Goldberg brings to the job more than the collection of old jokes that usually appear as preludes to his recipes. Cooking runs in the family. Goldberg pere taught his wife how to cook while he established a number of eateries in The Bronx and its summertime extension, the Catskills. Son Hyman was bending over hot stoves before he reached his teens, and he has accumulated the most impressive library of cookbooks in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn, where he now lives. "My repertoire is catholic," he says. "I cook in Japanese, Russian, French, Italian, Spanish, Chinese, as well as American."

Mrs. Goldberg, who does not share her husband's multilingual enthusiasm for the kitchen, cooks strictly in Bay Ridge.

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