The Woman Who Could Settle Any Stomach

When Harold Ross, the founder of The New Yorker magazine, dined at a restaurant with his friend and doctor, gastroenterologist Sara Murray Jordan, M1921, he was resigned to ordering compote of fruit for dessert, deeming it the only ulcer-friendly option on the menu.

He was astonished when Jordan instead recommended the meringue glacé. The French dish seemed sinful for its beauty and richness, but Jordan pointed out that it was mainly egg whites and sugar, which she considered mostly harmless.

“I found her a highly illuminating guide in the dietetic wilderness,” Ross wrote in his introduction to Good Food for Bad Stomachs, a 1951 cookbook he encouraged Jordan to write together with food journalist Sheila Hibbin. He called Jordan a “good and imaginative cook” who was “preponderantly constructive in her advice about proper eating.”

Jordan’s expertise was hard-won. Her parents discouraged her dream of going to medical school, so she became a different kind of doctor, earning a Ph.D. in classical philology and archaeology at the University of Munich at the age of 24.

She married a German lawyer and had a daughter, but returned to the United States with her child, leaving her husband behind, a year later when World War I broke out. In her early 30s, she was accepted at Tufts University School of Medicine, but under probation, requiring her to complete extra chemistry and zoology courses on top of the standard curriculum. Jordan took the courses, and when her probation wasn’t lifted, called for an investigation by the American Medical Association. Her probation was released and she went on to graduate at the top of her class, finalizing her divorce at about the same time. 

Known to insist that “femininity need not conflict with professional achievement,” Jordan helped found Lahey Clinic (now Lahey Hospital & Medical Center) in Boston at a time when less than 5% of physicians in the United States were women. She worked in the then-new field of gastroenterology, specializing in peptic ulcer disease and gastric cancer, and later becoming the first woman to serve as president of the American Gastroenterological Association.

Although Jordan had studied with top surgeons, she gravitated toward less invasive treatments. Discovering that her patients’ digestive issues were often due to poor diet, stress, and lack of exercise rather than ulcers or disease, she embarked on a campaign to promote better diet and lifestyle. She recommended that businessmen enjoy a daily highball for relaxation after dinner. 

While medical professionals today might frown on recommending alcohol, some of Jordan’s other advice still holds up. She encouraged plenty of exercise and noncompetitive sports, and she herself loved golfing early in the morning at Tedesco Country Club in Marblehead, Mass.

Jordan mainly focused on food. “Good, even excellent, food wisely selected and imaginatively prepared ... can play a comforting role in the treatment of all digestive disturbances,” she wrote in Good Food for Bad Stomachs.

A person suffering from digestive troubles has three options, she added: “continue to belch his distressed way through life,” “return to the dreary paps and gruels of infancy,” or “learn to eat both sanely and agreeably.”

Good Food for Bad Stomachs aimed to elucidate the third path. Based on the science and medicine of the day, the recipes leave out “notoriously indigestible” foods such as pork, nuts, pies, clams, and a number of vegetables, including corn, cabbage, cucumbers, tomatoes, and radishes.

Frying or stewing over direct heat is banned on the grounds that such techniques bind fat into foods “so firmly” that digestion becomes doubly difficult. Omelet recipes are instead cooked in a frying pan placed in a saucepan of boiling water, while stews are cooked in the oven. Lobster, for an undisclosed reason, may never be served cold.

With a classical and European focus, the cookbook is heavy on soufflés and meringues, and copious amounts of butter and cream are deemed acceptable. Partly due to the constant straining and skimming to remove excess meat fat, the recipes tend to be rather involved. Some call for 24-hour prep periods or special equipment such as mini heart-shaped custard baskets. 

Chicken livers make several appearances, stuffed inside whole onions and mashed on toast alongside fluffy eggs. A recipe for calves’ brains au beurre directs the reader to remove membranes and arteries, lay out the brains carefully to avoid breakage, and season them with lemon juice, butter, and salt. 

Other recipes are quick, such as a canned blackberry pie that eschews traditional pie crust, instead calling for a more easily digestible version made with Zwieback Toast, a twice-baked teething biscuit that has since been discontinued. A simple baked banana dish calls for butter, salt, and boiled lime juice—and, surprisingly, treats the bananas as a side dish to accompany an entree.

“Bananas are allowed to sneak into the vegetable section because with beefsteak, venison, or roast duck they take the place of vegetables so admirably,” reads the recipe.

Jordan, who also wrote the syndicated daily newspaper column Health and Happiness after retiring, believed that eating well should not come at the cost of enjoying life.

“It is not enough to help men and women to eat with safety; more must be done to allow them to eat with pleasure and even with delight,” Jordan wrote in her cookbook. “A cure that works up to a grand climax of weak tea and dry toast for the rest of one’s life may reasonably be held a very minor blessing.”

Jordan died in 1959 at age 75 from colon cancer after diagnosing herself with the disease. But her vision of healthy, happy eating and living, espoused in her cookbook and columns, lives on.

“In medicine as in statecraft and propaganda, words are sometimes the most powerful drugs we can use,” she wrote in The New York Times.