Sophie Dobzhansky Coe (July 7, 1933 – May 25, 1994) was an anthropologist, food historian, and author, who studied the history of chocolate.

Early life and education

Sophie Dobzhansky's parents, Natalia Sivertzeva and Theodosius Dobzhansky, the geneticist and evolutionary biologist, had emigrated to the United States from the USSR in 1927. Sophie, their only child, was born in

Pasadena, California Pasadena ( ) is a city in Los Angeles County, California, northeast of downtown Los Angeles. It is the most populous city and the primary cultural center of the San Gabriel Valley. Old Pasadena is the city's original commercial district. I ...

in 1933, and the family moved to New York in 1940, when she was seven years old. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Dobzhansky spent her summers assisting at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where

Barbara McClintock Barbara McClintock (June 16, 1902 – September 2, 1992) was an American scientist and cytogeneticist who was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. McClintock received her PhD in botany from Cornell University in 1927. There s ...

, the Nobel Prize-winning cytogeneticist, was said to value the gentleness with which Dobzhansky cared for her experimental plants. Dobzhansky graduated in 1955 from

Radcliffe College Radcliffe College was a women's liberal arts college in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and functioned as the female coordinate institution for the all-male Harvard College. Considered founded in 1879, it was one of the Seven Sisters colleges and he ...

with a major in anthropology, where she mastered Russian and Portuguese, and was known for keeping a pet tarantula in a bottle. She married shortly before graduation and received her Ph.D. in anthropology from Harvard in 1964.

Career

Coe translated selected chapters of Yuri Knorozov's "The Writing of the Maya Indians" (1967). Knorosov based his studies on De Landa's phonetic alphabet and is credited with originally breaking the Maya code. Coe's translation played a major role in legitimizing his previously derided theories. She also studied native New World cooking, writing a number of scholarly essays for '' Petits Propos Culinaires (PPC)''. Her research in this area culminated in ''America's First Cuisines'' (1994). This work contained a substantial amount of material on chocolate, which she decided to expand upon for her next book, ''The True History of Chocolate'' (1996). She became seriously ill during its research and writing; it was published posthumously in 1996, having been completed by her widower, Michael D. Coe. It is now in its third edition. Coe built an extensive collection of books on culinary history, nearly 1,000 volumes from around the world dating from the eighteenth century onward, as well as a group of manuscript cookbooks. She donated her collection of community cookbooks to the Schlesinger Library before her death, and afterward, her husband gave the library the rest of her collection. After her death, Michael Coe, with the help of their friends Alan Davidson and

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, set up th
Sophie Coe Prize
a charitable trust based in the UK. The prize is awarded annually at the Oxford Symposium on Food & Cookery (which Coe attended every year) to an outstanding and original essay or book chapter in food history.

Personal life

On 5 June 1955, the summer of her undergraduate graduation and the day before her final exam in Byzantine history, Dobzhansky married Michael D. Coe in a Russian Orthodox ceremony in New York City. Coe was a professor at Yale, an archaeologist and anthropologist known for his work on Maya civilisation and pre-Columbian Mesoamerican. They travelled and worked together extensively. In 1969, they bought Skyline Farm, in Heath, Massachusetts, where Sophie honed her cooking and gardening skills. They had five children—Nicholas, Andrew, Sarah, Peter, and Natalie. Sophie Coe died of cancer in 1994.

Works

Books

* Coe, Sophie D., ''America's First Cuisines'' (1994), (hardback); (paperback) * Coe, Sophie D. and Michael Coe, ''The True History of Chocolate'' (1996; 2003; 2013), Thames and Hudson, New York. (paperback), (hardback)

Articles

* Coe, Sophie D. and Michael D. Coe. 1957 Review of Diego de Landa: Soobshchenie o delakh v lsukatani, 1566, by Y. V. Knorosov. ''American Antiquity'' 23 (2): 207–208. * Coe, Sophie D. (trans.), Knorosov, Yuri V. 1958 'The Problem of the study of the Maya Hieroglyphic writing.” ''American Antiquity'' 23: 248-291. * Coe, Sophie. "On Kulich." ''Petits Propos Culinaires'' (PPC) 12 (1982): 19- * Coe, Sophie. "Soviet Cook Books." ''Petits Propos Culinaires'' (PPC) 16, March (1984): 13–27. * Coe, Sophie. "Aztec Cuisine Part I." ''Petits Propos Culinaires'' (PPC) 19, March (1985): 11–22. * Coe, Sophie. "Aztec Cuisine Part II." ''Petits Propos Culinaires'' (PPC) 20, July (1985): 44–59. * Coe, Sophie. "Aztec Cuisine Part III." ''Petits Propos Culinaires'' (PPC) 21, November (1985): 45–56. * Coe, Sophie. "Eating Guinea Pigs in Italy. (Notes and Queries)" ''Petits Propos Culinaires'' (PPC) 28, April (1988): 63. * Coe, Sophie. "Inca Food: Animal and Mineral." ''Petits Propos Culinaires'' (PPC) 29, July (1988): 7–17. * Coe, Sophie. "Inca Food: Vegetable." ''Petits Propos Culinaires'' (PPC) 31, March (1989): 29–38. * Coe, Sophie. "Peru: The Inca and the Spaniards." ''Petits Propos Culinaires'' (PPC) 37, May (1991): 27–39.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Coe, Sophie D 1933 births 1994 deaths American women anthropologists American food writers Food historians Women food writers Mesoamerican cultures 20th-century American non-fiction writers 20th-century American women writers Radcliffe College alumni 20th-century American women scientists 20th-century American scientists History of chocolate 20th-century American anthropologists American people of Ukrainian descent