Sophie Coe

Sophie D. Coe, in full Sophie Dobzhansky Coe (1933–1994) was an anthropologist, food historian, and author, primarily known for her work on the history of chocolate.
Early life and education.
Sophie Dobzhansky's Ukrainian parents, Natalia Sivertzeva and Theodosius Dobzhansky, the noted geneticist and evolutionary biologist, had emigrated to the United States from the USSR in 1927. Sophie, their only child, was born in Pasadena, 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 many of her summers assisting at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where Barbara McClintock, the Nobel Prize-winning cytogeneticist, apparently particularly valued the care and gentleness with which Sophie dealt with her experimental plants.
Graduated in 1955 from Radcliffe College with a major in anthropology, she apparently was known also for her linguistic prowess (speaking Russian and Portuguese) and for keeping a pet tarantula in a bottle. She married shortly before her graduation. She continued her postgraduate studies at Harvard and received her Ph.D. in anthropology in 1964.
Career.
Sophie D. Coe translated from Russian selected chapters from 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. Sophie Coe's translation played a major role in legitimizing his previously derided theories. She made another unique contribution to the field through her study of 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 Sophie Coe decided to expand upon for her next book, "The True History of Chocolate" (1996). She became seriously ill during the research and writing of this book and 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 including community cookbooks, 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 Harlan Walker, set up the 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. One of the first of its kind at its foundation in 1995, the Sophie Coe Prize remains the most generous and esteemed prize for thorough and readable food history scholarship.
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, an archaeologist and anthropologist particularly renowned for his work on Maya civilisation and pre-Columbian Mesoamerican studies who was a professor at Yale, in a Russian Orthodox ceremony in New York City. They travelled and worked together extensively. In 1969 they bought Skyline Farm, in Heath, Massachusetts, where Sophie honed her much-admired cooking and gardening skills. They had five children—Nicholas, Andrew, Sarah, Peter, and Natalie. Sophie Coe died of cancer in 1994.