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Sophie Coe (neeDobzhansky; July 7, 1933 – May 25, 1994) was an American anthropologist, food historian, and author born to Soviet immigrants in Southern California.
Coe studied native New World cooking and the history of chocolate. She co-authoredThe True History of Chocolate (1996), which was completed posthumously by her widower,Michael D. Coe.
With the help of her husband and friends, theSophie Coe Prize was created in her honor and is currently awarded annually to an outstanding and original essay or book chapter in food history.
Sophie Dobzhansky's parents, Natalia Sivertzeva andTheodosius Dobzhansky, the geneticist and evolutionary biologist, had emigrated to the United States from the USSR in 1927.[1] Sophie, their only child, was born inPasadena, California 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 theCold Spring Harbor Laboratory, whereBarbara McClintock, the Nobel Prize-winning cytogeneticist, was said to value the gentleness with which Dobzhansky cared for her experimental plants.[2]
Dobzhansky graduated in 1955 fromRadcliffe College with a major in anthropology, where she masteredRussian andPortuguese, and was known for keeping a pettarantula in a bottle.[3] She married shortly before graduation and received her Ph.D. in anthropology from Harvard in 1964.
Coe translated selected chapters ofYuri Knorozov's "The Writing of the Maya Indians" (1967). Knorosov based his studies onDe Landa's phonetic alphabet and is credited with originally breaking theMaya code. Coe's translation played a major role in legitimizing his previously derided theories. She also studiednative New World cooking, writing a number of scholarly essays forPetits Propos Culinaires (PPC). Her research in this area culminated inAmerica'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 theSchlesinger Library before her death, and afterward, her husband gave the library the rest of her collection.[4]
After her death, Michael Coe, with the help of their friendsAlan Davidson andHarlan Walker, set up the Sophie Coe Prize, a charitable trust based in the UK.[5] The prize is awarded annually at theOxford Symposium on Food & Cookery (which Coe attended every year) to an outstanding and original essay or book chapter in food history.
On 5 June 1955, the summer of her undergraduate graduation and the day before her final exam in Byzantine history, Dobzhansky marriedMichael D. Coe in aRussian 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.[6] They travelled and worked together extensively. In 1969, they bought Skyline Farm, inHeath, Massachusetts, where Sophie honed her cooking and gardening skills.[7] They had five children. Coe died of cancer in 1994.[4]
