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Giving Credit Where Credit Is Due: One Recipe’s Storied Origin

Andria
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Gem Rigsby, Lana Rigsby,

A PUZZLING RECIPE Gem Rigsby (on left) was surprised to see a dressing recipe attached to her name in The Buzz, until Lana, her daughter (on right), explained she had submitted it. Lana had no idea the recipe wasn’t her mother’s original creation.

When Gem Rigsby recently spotted her name and recipe in an online story in The Buzz, she had a minor panic attack.

The article, “Kitchen Traditions,” appeared in the December 2019 edition of The Buzz and now lives online here. It is a lighthearted story about recipes that have become mandatory additions to holiday repertoires: a cake made by a college friend each year; the corned beef that one mom’s children inevitably ask for; a pie found via a Good Morning America competition. Also, Gem Rigsby’s Perfect Dressing: A Spur Ridge Herb Farm Classic.

Recently, Gem was startled to see her name pop up online, so she called her daughter Linda in California. Linda immediately stepped in and wrote to The Buzz. With strong language and pointed use of all caps, Linda told The Buzz that her mother did not create Gem Rigsby’s Perfect Dressing recipe, and that the magazine needed to retract the story.

A few minutes after hitting send, Linda read the article in its entirety and spotted Lana Rigsby’s name. Her sister. Once the pieces of the story started to fall into place, Linda and Gem realized what had happened. Lana had submitted the recipe to the magazine and had no idea it didn’t originate with her mother. 

“It was my bad,” Lana says. “The recipe’s been in our family for 20 years. It never occurred to me that it wasn’t our recipe, so I gave it to you, and you published it, and oh my gosh. Then it popped up on her newsfeed, and Mom wondered how they got her name and the name of her ranch and her recipe. She was worried that other people would think she was trying to take credit for Madalene’s recipe, and then Linda fired off the email.”

Gem chimes in, “I just want the proper person getting credit.”

That person would be Madalene Hill, the original author of the Perfect Dressing recipe, who was Gem’s mentor in the business of herb farming. 

“Madalene was among the very poor during the depression and grew up very dependent on the earth to feed the family,” Gem says. “She learned about herbs years and years ago from her mother and grandmother and became the original herb grower in all of Texas, known nationwide in the herb industry.” Madalene and her daughter Gwen Barclay co-authored Southern Herb Growing, which became the bible for Texas herb growers. They were the first in Texas to use fresh herbs in cooking.

So when Gem decided to start growing herbs, she contacted Madalene and Gwen for help. “We had just moved back from overseas,” Gem says. “My husband was the manager for an oil company, and we had a play spot in East Texas. He wanted to see if we could do something to make the land pay for itself. He told me, ‘I’ll grow cows. What are you going to grow?’ I had never had a garden in my life that wasn’t taken care of by someone else!” That’s when Gem decided to do something that nobody else in Texas was doing on a large scale, and to do it well. 

“She decided she wanted to be the purveyor of the highest quality herbs,” Lana says. “If she was going to do it, she was going to do it right.”

Gem started her garden in Tyler, on the Spur Ridge Ranch. “I picked my customers, chefs in Dallas,” Gem says. “This is what I call marketing. I would drive over there and park in their parking lots, I even drove into the private clubs and pretended to be a member. I watched when the chefs would come in and go away. Then I went home and made a schedule. And I would go with this package of an initial introduction of my herbs, and I would sit where the chef would come out. I would tell him, ‘I believe we had an appointment at 2. You’re a little bit early.’ Well the chef wouldn’t remember, because there wasn’t an appointment. But I would tell him, ‘I brought you samples, may I show you?’ I lied a little at first, but then it got very common that I would be there. For six months, I gave them free herbs. But my husband was the one who wanted to make a living out of it, so he set the prices while I was giving all these things away. He was the efficiency expert.”

Gem would go back after a few months and convince the chefs – at places like Mansion on Turtle Creek and The Adolphus Hotel – that they needed to buy her herbs, all but revolutionizing the practice of using dried herbs until that point. “I was the only one in Texas they could buy fresh herbs from,” Gem says. 

“All the chef cognoscenti knew her and used her herbs,” Lana says. Gem went on to serve her herbs to five presidents and Queen Elizabeth. “Ronald Reagan was quite the gentleman,” she says. “And Henry Kissinger was quite a flirt.”

Back to the dressing recipe. It was created by Madalene and Gwen and first appeared in Herb Companion magazine in the October/November 1992 issue. “It requires a lot of fresh herbs,” Lana says. “Some are pretty hard to find, like winter savory. Everybody in our family’s got a copy, because every Christmas somebody makes this dressing. It’s become part of our family tradition.”

With the record set straight, and credit given to the appropriate cooks, Gem is happy to share her family’s beloved recipe. You can find it here. Maybe it will become a new tradition in your own family.

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