Jeffrey Lee Smith, nationally known as The Frugal Gourmet, was an immensely popular cooking-show host and cookbook author who attracted a near cult-like following. Born in Seattle in 1939, he was raised from age 12 by a single mother, along with his older brother Gregory. Smith met his wife Patricia while he was a divinity student at Drew University in New Jersey, and the couple married in 1966. Two years later, as an ordained United Methodist minister, he became chaplain at Tacoma’s University of Puget Sound, where he created a cooking class called Food as Sacrament and Celebration. It was a huge hit. He left the university in 1972 to open a cooking school and catering business called the Chaplain’s Pantry, which served as a launch pad for a televised cooking show on Tacoma public TV. Now called The Frugal Gourmet, which was also the name of his show, Smith moved production in 1983 to Chicago, where it became the highest-rated cooking show in televised history. He also published at least 12 cookbooks that sold millions of copies. In 1997, at the height of his fame, three lawsuits were filed by eight men who claimed Smith had sexually abused them when they were teenagers. A year later, the suits were settled out of court for more than $5 million. Smith made no apology or claimed any wrongdoing, and he was never charged with a crime. Jeff Smith died on July 7, 2004, in his sleep at the age of 65.
Early Love of Cooking
Jeffrey Lee Smith was born January 22, 1939, in Seattle, the youngest son of Leo David Smith and Emely Brown Smith. He grew up with an older brother, Gregory David Smith (1936-2015). His father Leo was a smooth dresser, glib talker, and big spender. He also was a heavy drinker. Smith was 12 when his father left the family and moved to Alaska. His parents later divorced. Leo remarried, Emely never did.
Jeff Smith often credited his love of cooking and his frugal nature to his mother, who was of Norwegian descent. "By frugal, Smith said he didn’t mean cheap but to 'use everything and be careful with your time as well as your food products" ("Jeff Smith, 65; Pastor, PBS 'Frugal Gourmet'"). When her boys were young, Emely worked as a hair stylist and then a saleswoman at an electronics company to make ends meet.
Smith grew up in and around Pike Place Market, a location that figured prominently throughout his career. When he was 14 years old, he made doughnuts and washed pots and pans at Rotary Bakery in the Market. Two years later, he worked at Brehm’s Delicatessen, a Market institution. He graduated from Lincoln High School in Seattle, attended Puget Sound College (later the University of Puget Sound), and then became a divinity student at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey, where he met his wife, the former Patricia Dailey, who went by Patty (b. 1941), a sociology major there. They married in 1966 and had two sons, Channing and Jason.
Becoming The Frugal Gourmet
In 1965, Smith became an ordained United Methodist minister and served in churches in New York and Washington, including Tacoma, where he was hired in 1967 as chaplain at the University of Puget Sound (UPS). He taught theology classes and created a popular cooking class he called Food as Sacrament and Celebration. "Part of his inspiration was concern for his students; they were spending their money on antiwar causes rather than on eating properly, and he wanted to show them they didn’t have to spend a lot to eat well" (Johnson).
Buoyed by the positive feedback he received from the class, Smith left UPS in 1972 to open the Chaplain’s Pantry, a cooking school, catering service, and gourmet store in Tacoma named for his previous career calling. Although not formally trained as a chef, he enjoyed cooking and thought that food was an ideal pathway to achieve global understanding and compassion. "His message is unmistakable: the preparation and consumption of food are a sacramental ritual, a catalyst for joy, fellowship, human communication and meaning in a depersonalized era" (Collins).
The popularity of the Chaplain’s Pantry led to his television breakthrough in 1974 when he began a program he called Cooking Fish Creatively on KRPS, a Tacoma PBS affiliate. In an interview nearly two decades later, Smith recalled those early years: "The set was tiny, with this artificial brick wall and pea green refrigerator. We had no money, so I had to go around the local markets and ask for free fish" (Svetkey). His wife, who owned a bookstore, created the moniker The Frugal Gourmet. To make more money, she suggested he write a companion book, Recipes from The Frugal Gourmet – a modest, self-published, spiral-bound cookbook he sold for $4.50.
Two Life-Changing Events
In the early 1980s, Smith experienced two life-changing events. In 1981, when in his mid-40s, he had open-heart surgery to replace a heart valve thought to be damaged by childhood rheumatic fever. The surgery went well but left him with huge medical bills. He sold the Chaplain’s Pantry to pay some of the bills but still owed $70,000. It was a low point in his life and Smith later admitted he had considered suicide (Dizon).
Then came the second life-changing event. In February 1983, after getting wind of Smith’s popular cooking show, producers of Donohue, the enormously popular daytime talk show produced in Chicago and featuring Phil Donahue, asked Smith to appear as a guest. After it aired, more than 45,000 viewers called in to order his self-published cookbook, now selling for $4.75. Smith was then invited by WWTW, a PBS affiliate in Chicago, to move the show there; the following year, it went national. Within weeks, he had paid off his medical bills, landed an agent, got an advance on his first commercially published cookbook, and was on his way to becoming a household name in kitchens around the country.
Despite being a native son, it wasn’t until 1985 that KCTS, Seattle’s public television station, aired the half-hour program. In announcing the addition to the KCTS line-up, Seattle Times reporter Tom Stockley noted, "it’s safe to say that he should attract a generous audience; that’s been the case everywhere else. In Chicago he appears on prime time opposite Tom Selleck’s 'Magnum, P. I.' and still has high ratings. In New Orleans, he’s on at 7:30 a.m. and half the city gets up to watch. Smith’s impressive ratings make him the host of the hottest cooking show in television today" (Stockley).
TV’s Highest-Rated Cooking Show
Once it was offered nationally, The Frugal Gourmet skyrocketed to become the highest-rated cooking show on television. By his own admission, Smith’s two chosen careers – ministry and cooking-show host – required similar traits: simple messages that are easy to understand, a larger-than-life personality, and an ability to connect with others. At 6 foot 3, with a white goatee and wire-rimmed glasses, sporting a striped chef's apron and a necktie, Smith looked both erudite yet approachable. His "energy is almost awe-inspiring. He’s fast on the uptake, talks a blue streak, laughs a lot, works like a fiend, and enjoys his celebrityhood" ("Eclectic Mix Helps Frugal Gourmet Celebrate His Latest Book").
Even after moving to Chicago, he continued to maintain ties with Tacoma, where he and Patty lived and raised their boys. In 1988, he opened a deli called The Judicial Annex, which catered to hungry students and attorneys affiliated with the University of Puget Sound’s Norton Clapp Law Center. Sandwiches and drinks with clever law-inspired names filled the menu. There was a vegetarian sandwich called the Habeas Corpus (because you can’t produce the body – i.e., "meat"), the Amicus Curiae martini ("friend of the court"), and a Chief Justice Burger after Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren E. Burger.
Smith never let geography or ethnic heritage hem him in; his cooking repertoire spanned the globe. During 1999, for example, he focused one show on ways to cook leeks (blanched, frittered, and made with lamb – February); another centered on Chinese food (dumplings, pot-stickers, and won-ton soup – May), and a third featured unusual foods (jellyfish salad, pig’s foot, and lamb’s head – August). Despite the variety, one element remained constant: At the end of each episode, Smith would look solemnly into the camera and proclaim: "I bid you peace."
Frugies and Cookbooks Abound
In 1991, Smith moved The Frugal Gourmet show from Chicago to Seattle. Half in jest, he told a Seattle Times columnist he was "sick of eating airline food and sleeping in hotels" (Wurzer). By this time, The Frugal Gourmet was being broadcast on 288 stations and watched by more than 15 million people every week. Smith was recognized nearly everywhere he went, even walking along a quiet beach in Greece. The show had its own fan base, called Frugies, and Smith himself was referred to as the Frug.
While his wife and sons continued to live in Tacoma, Smith moved into a two-story condo he owned at 88 Virginia Street, just a stone’s throw from Pike Place Market, where he had gotten his start. The condo, which combined two separate units, housed an office, test kitchen, and part-time home. "He had converted the upstairs family room into a kitchen large enough to feed the Olympic Four Seasons Hotel. It has a six-burner commercial gas range, a huge built-in marble pastry board, a large kitchen island, countless doodads and a sizable collection of antique wine corkscrews ... His test kitchen grocery bill runs about $500 a month, but he takes frugal pride in the fact that no food goes to waste" ("Frugal Gourmet Has Happy Recipe for Working").
As a way to bring his passion for cooking to an even larger audience, Smith turned out cookbooks like hotcakes, many of which broke sales records in their category. Two of his earliest cookbooks were featured on The New York Times bestseller list at the same time – the first cookbook author to achieve that feat. "His six cookbooks have sold over 4 million copies, making him America’s number-one cookbook author" (Svetkey). In the introduction to his 1984 cookbook called The Frugal Gourmet, Smith addressed his personal philosophy around food: "Our current economic bind also pushes us to think carefully about what it is we are cooking, and why. I dislike most instant food products not just because they lack flavor and fascination but because they are too expensive. Cooking from scratch is much less costly and is certainly much more fun for everyone in the household. But you must organize yourself and learn to cook seriously one day a week" (Patty Feist).
Some of his other cookbook titles include The Frugal Gourmet Cooks with Wine (1986), The Frugal Gourmet Cooks American (1987), The Frugal Gourmet Cooks Three Ancient Cuisines: China, Greece and Rome (1989), The Frugal Gourmet on Our Immigrant Ancestors (1990), The Frugal Gourmet Celebrates Christmas (1991), and The Frugal Gourmet Cooks Italian (1993).
Ubiquitous Presence
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Smith seemed to be everywhere. He was a guest at celebrity dinners, judged barbeque entries at the San Juan County Fairgrounds, endorsed Black & Decker small kitchen appliances, appeared on the Today Show, and brought down the house at a benefit auction for Seattle Children’s Hospital when he bid $9,000 for a 1990 bottle of Cabernet. For several years, he was a spokesperson for Columbia Crest wine and he marketed his own line of Frugal Gourmet chef tools at stores nationwide.
His easygoing style and passion for cooking made believers out of millions. "On camera, whether gleefully attacking a piece of meat with a cleaver or chuckling over a spilled glass of burgundy, his persona is soothing, unpretentious, and unabashedly cheery. He makes viewers believe that, under his tutelage, even the cooking impaired can feel at home on the range. 'That’s the secret of my success,' he says. 'I don’t threaten anyone. I teach people that cooking is something anyone can do'" (Svetkey).
Not everyone held his cooking skills in high esteem, however, and many in the food business were puzzled or even annoyed by his popularity. Some felt he conveyed inaccurate information on his cooking show and in his cookbooks. "His megastar status has also provoked criticism from some of the cooking establishment who find his recipes simplistic and who tend to dismiss him as a television huckster" (Collins). But the Frugies loved him, as one fan explained: "This man, Jeff, he explains things so simply, and he shows you how to make the best with what you've got. And my wife likes the way he wipes his hands on the apron – just like she does" (Collins).
Accusers Come Forward
Smith’s ebullient on-air behavior and good humor were sometimes at odds with his business drive and perfectionist personality. Jonathan Susskind of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer saw this dichotomy up-close: "I have witnessed his peremptory, 'don’t-you-know-who-I-am?' tone in a restaurant. I have heard several first-hand stories of his being rude to waiters and flight attendants. A few restaurateurs have confided that they would not care if Smith never again dined in their establishments" (Susskind).
In January 1997, Smith's decades of fame and fortune came tumbling down. That year, seven men came forward to accuse Smith of sexual assault perpetrated when they were teenagers in the 1970s and early 1980s. Six of the men had worked with Smith at the Chaplain’s Pantry in Tacoma. The seventh man was a young hitchhiker whom Smith had picked up along Pacific Avenue in 1992. When court documents were released months later, it was learned that an eighth man had accused Smith of molestation in 1991 and was paid $1.5 million in exchange for keeping quiet. "Clint Smith [no relation to Jeff Smith] said he got an initial, large-sum payment, but then was cut off from remaining payments when he breached the alleged secrecy agreement" ("$2 Million Smith Bid to Settle Suit Alleged").
Smith’s wife Patty, an officer in Smith’s companies, was named as a co-defendant, as were two of his businesses. The suit claimed that Patty Smith knew, or should have known, of her husband’s activities but did nothing to stop him in an effort to protect her financial interests.
Three separate civil suits were filed initially. Clint Smith’s suit was dismissed for reasons unknown, and the remaining two suits were consolidated. In July 1998, just days before the trial was to start in Tacoma, the cases were settled out of court. Although the statute of limitations had run out, Smith agreed to pay more than $5 million to his accusers without having to make an apology or admission of guilt. Most of the settlement funds ($4.75 million) were paid by Smith’s insurers, not from his or his wife's personal assets. Smith denied all accusations and was never charged with a crime.
Smith’s career took a nosedive once the sexual abuse claims surfaced. His cooking show, once the most popular in the country, was pulled off the air. For the next six years, he lived a relatively quiet life, entertaining friends and appearing at certain fundraisers. He started research on a book about biblical foods and traveled to Hong Kong and New York to eat at his favorite restaurants. On July 7, 2004, Smith died in his sleep at the age of 65. He had suffered from heart disease for years. His two sons and wife Patty survived him. Although they had lived apart for two decades, the couple had remained married until his death.
