Violet 'Vicki' (Silvert) Oppenheimer

LAKEVILLE — Vicki (Silvert) Oppenheimer, author and expert on the history and culture of food, died after a short illness in Faro, Portugal, at the age of 99. For many years she lived in New York City, Northwest Connecticut and eventually Miami and Naples, Fla. For the past year she had been staying with her son, William Silvert, in São Brás de Alportel, Portugal.

She was born Violet Rosenblum in 1908 in New York City, the first member of a family of Russian Jewish immigrants to be born in the United States. In 1921 she was placed in the Rapid Advance Class at PS 55 and went on to Evander Childs High School. She then attended Hunter College. Through the difficult years of the 1920s and 1930s she supported her family by working as administrator of the Concourse Sanitarium in the Bronx and then as the owner-operator of a nurses’ registry. She married a young physician, Meyer Silverzweig, in 1930.

Although always a dedicated and admired cook, her “professional� career in food began in 1942 when she worked with a U. S. government agency to develop recipes for nutritious meals that did not rely on rationed ingredients such as butter.

Following the war, during which her husband had served as a flight surgeon in the U.S. Air Force, they moved to Topeka, Kan., where he studied psychiatry at the Menninger Clinic. Through a chance encounter with former Kansas Governor Alf Landon she landed a job with Household magazine, where she became the food editor.

They then returned to New York and divorced in 1950, following which she moved to Lakeville. She worked for many years as an editor at the Doubleday Literary Guild, commuting to New York City once a week, while she also wrote articles on subjects dealing with travel, childcare, the environment and food. She wrote a regular column for The Lakeville Journal and created the paper’s summer festival supplement. She continued writing for this and other papers almost to the end of her life.

She moved back to New York City in 1958 when she married Armand M. Oppenheimer, a dentist, who for many years taught a course on human evolution in the post-doctoral program in orthodontics at Columbia University College of Dental Medicine.

She shared his interests and returned to complete her bachelor’s degree and get a masters degree in anthropology from Columbia University Teachers College in 1963.

They traveled extensively together to follow their interests in the physical and cultural evolution of early hominids in South Africa and Europe, and on how food culture developed in the New World and spread to Europe.

They also became very active in environmental affairs and both served as presidents of the Sharon Audubon Society in Northwest Connecticut, and were longtime members of National Audubon. After establishing a winter residence in Miami, Fla., she became a docent at Fairchild Gardens, and later when she moved to Naples, Fla., she became involved in the Conservancy of Southwest Florida and the Naples Botanical Garden, where her interest was in creating a children’s vegetable garden.

She wrote two books on the history and culture of food. Her first, “On the Nature of Food,� was published in 1991; she donated the rights to the Conservancy of Southwest Florida as a fundraiser. Her second book, “The Taste Makers: How New World Foods Came to Old World Kitchens,� was published in 2003, when she was 95.

She is survived by a son from her first marriage, William Silvert in Portugal; a stepson from her second marriage, John Oppenheimer, in New York; and five grandchildren.