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Eda Saccone, 102; founded Hub culinary society chapter

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February 22, 2012|By Gloria Negri

Eda Saccone founded the Boston chapter of Les Dames des Amis dEscoffier,…

Eda Saccone never minded assembling her husband’s formal wardrobe to attend the elaborate annual dinners of the Boston chapter of Les Amis d’Escoffier, a male-only group of eminent chefs and culinary specialists. What bothered her was that those eight- and nine-course dinners were closed to women.

She decided to do something about it.

With charm and her husband’s assistance, she invited Charles Banino, executive chef of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel and chairman of Boston’s Escoffier society, to a home-cooked dinner and persuaded him to help. In 1959, she founded Les Dames des Amis d’Escoffier, the first women’s Escoffier chapter.

Thirty invited guests attended its first dinner at the Ritz-Carlton and “the unprecedented success of this event landed it on the 11 o’clock news and the front page of every major Boston newspaper,’’ said Mrs. Saccone’s daughter, Lucille S. Giovino of Westwood, a former president of the Boston Les Dames chapter, which counted Julia Child among its members.

Mrs. Saccone, who insisted that Les Dames be more than a gastronomic feast and also engage in charitable fund-raising, died Jan. 20 in St. Patrick’s Manor in Framingham of complications of dementia. She was 102 and had previously lived in Newton for 35 years and before that in Brighton.

“Les Dames is where Nana really shined,’’ said her granddaughter, Ann-Margaret Giovino of Ann Arbor, Mich. “She used to talk of being one of the first feminists because her fight to get her women’s food appreciation society was so successful. She apparently was told she could not do it. She showed them.’’

The men’s and women’s organizations are named in honor of Auguste Escoffier, the legendary French chef who died in 1935.

In the 1970s, Mrs. Saccone’s work inspired Carol Brock, food editor of The New York Daily News, to found a Les Dames chapter in New York City.

“Eda helped us get a charter in 1976,’’ Brock said.

The New York chapter, Brock said, spawned many other chapters here and abroad under the umbrella of Les Dames d’Escoffier International.

In 1966, Joseph Donon, the last student of Escoffier and founder of Les Amis d’Escoffier in the United States, granted the Boston Les Dames a charter, making it the first women’s chapter in the world.

“Now we’re on a level with Les Amis, our husbands,’’ Mrs. Saccone said at a Les Dames dinner attended by Dorothy Crandall, then the Globe’s food editor.

Crandall, who died in 2007, noted in a 1972 article that although the Boston men’s Escoffier chapter had never invited women, Mrs. Saccone took a different approach.

“We go the men one better, and invite them as guests - on occasion,’’ Mrs. Saccone told Crandall.