It was a love affair that lasted some years. Today, I don't feel exactly the same about the magazine, but it could be that I am jaded. It is still a consequential magazine, to be sure.
I'd like to share my story about this love affair, in hopes that my confession will lead you to confess in turn your own secret feelings about this magazine, both then and now.
They say that confession is good for the soul, and certainly thinking of love is!
The Gourmet Under the Table
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The bright red, black and white roosters twitched their waddles, nodded and danced in the blaring sun that drove down upon the cages stacked in neat rows. There was nothing at all on the horizon but this small white house. You might really call it a shack. Its hand-lettered sign dangling from the grimy front window announced in broad yawning handpainted letters : “Beer. . . Cigarettes. . . Soda. . . Milk. . .” Nothing on the horizon but cornfields, wide hazy blue skies above, nothing but fine smooth black tar roads quartered together in insistent silence but for the rare bark of a dog in the distance, nothing but heat in the air and whatever was in that store.
What was in that store was a man, always a man. Women did not come to this store, ever. Men came here, once in a blue moon. Sometimes they brought boys, boys that seemed even at tender ages of eight or ten to be younger versions of grown men, all of them quiet, watchful, all of them moving carefully out of their pickups into the store. The men chewed tobacco, the boys chewed gum alongtimes, in rhythm with their fathers.
The roosters in their cages became anxious as I approached. I lived down the road a bit, in this rural paradise, and was curious about what this corner store could be. I’d never lived in this particular part of the agricultural South before, and was naïve about many things. We’d explored the fields around our house together, my children and I – the grounds so solidly damp from the humid air, the frogs of all varieties honking and hooting and crying each night from the small stream that trickled along next to the tobacco field that aligned itself to our back yard. The smell the tobacco gave off after baking in the sun all day, when the blue dusk fell, was mesmerizing and delicious. I walked out through the door of the sun room each evening and looked into the distance that held only the moon and dim tops of tobacco plants, and breathed deeply, as deeply as I could. I wondered how on earth this sweet fragrant enticing aroma could actually become a cigarette, with an aroma so different.
Feathers fluffed and rose, shrieks and raucous cackles came from the cages. A man came out from the store. He didn’t say a word. Just looked at me. No expression crossed his face – the stubble of his beard looked like a gravestone.
“Lookin’ for somethin’, ma’am?” he finally asked. I was trying to decide whether to smile or to run.
The yankee lady (that was me) smiled. “Nice roosters,” came from her mouth, with what might have been a slight squawk herself.
“Cocks,” he said. “Fighting cocks. I sell ‘em to folks round here.”
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That was life in this small town. Sharecropping tobacco, growing field corn, maybe a factory job an hour down the road if you were real lucky, going to church (Baptist, please – move into town if you cared to be Methodist or Episcopalian) each and every Sunday with the family dressed up Sunday best, the preacher coming to do home visits of his parishioners once in a while, accepting a glass of spirits and a bit of cake (which might be home-made or might not) betting on cock-fights and dog-fights to make ends meet, deer hunting from the side of the long straight roads in fall, standing beside your pickup truck and watching the fields closely with binoculars – (lots of beer in battered coolers set inside the truck cabs) - just about the time the cornfields were burned to the ground to prepare for next season’s crop. Bear-baiting was a haute sport, not done by all but by the “best”, with huntin’ dogs, some cherished and sold at high prices, others dumped down by where the creek rose under the bridge at the edge of town, if they didn’t do as well as one might hope. A dog’s life was dependent on his performance, and sometimes, so were his master’s fortunes. Life had a hard edge in this small town in the South.
“Gourmet” was not a word one would expect to hear here. There were two small restaurants in town itself, a Cracker Barrel up near the highway half an hour out in the always-stretching distance up the black tar roads, and a barbecue shack that served just barbecue, on the edge of town. Straight up. Pork barbecue. Vinegar-y sauce on the table. Buns that seemed as densely humid as the air, though sweet and soft, too. A side of long-cooked bacon-dubbed green beans or coleslaw, thick heavy hushpuppies with soda (“pop” in the vernacular) to drink with it all, or sweet tea. No, you would not expect to hear “gourmet” round these parts.
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One day there was a book sale at the old dark-red brick library set to the center of town. The library was always rather strangely lit and often deserted. But a library book sale is a library book sale, so off we went to see what we could see, myself with a toddler on each outstretched arm.
Long tables of dusty books. Many titles that one would never think to call one’s own, sad books that had hoped for better. The children found something each, of course – there is never a time when a child can not find some sort of book, a momentary treasure found to clasp to themselves with hopeful ardor of discovering a new world within. My hand ran drearily along the dusty hopeless spines of lines and piles of books that I sadly had no heart for. Then, from below the table, a gleam of gold lettering caught my eye. On black leatherette. A collection.
A collection of old Gourmet magazines, hiding in the even deeper dust under the table. One set, two. Another? Yes, and another. All in all, six bound annual volumes of Gourmet. The years ranged from 1969 to 1975, with 1970 missing, oddly. Where did it go? Did the person who donated these keep the 1970 volume because that had been a particularly good year for them? And who was this mysterious person, living here in the midst of cornfields and tobacco farms, Baptist casseroles and fighting cocks, flat black tar roads that led only to more flat black tar roads – who read Gourmet magazine religiously enough in those years past to have gathered and carefully bound this collection of gastronomic ephemera?
The volumes sit before me now. They’ve traveled with me through three different states, and yet more homes. The two little toddlers that held my hands have both grown now, each to be taller than me, yet these slightly faded volumes remain the same as the day I pulled them out choked with dust from under the table, a needle in a haystack, already aged volumes, out in a place where life does not resemble in any aspects easily discerned by the general observer, the smiling glossy ads for the “high life” pictured in the photographs on these pages.
In Gourmet magazine, the year 1969 has no hint at all in it of muddy hay-strewn pickup trucks toting beer, guns, and deer meat. Opening to a page, Paris a Table appears, written by Naomi Barry. She tells of Dr. Johnson in his chophouse; Proust; Alexander Woollcott; and the Algonquin’s famous Round Table. It is a review of Drouant , the restaurant where the Academie Goncourt gathers to meet. The pages delight with the tastes of gigot de sept heures; chicken wrapped in pie crust; duck with peaches; the civet of baby boar with chestnut puree; a pate of woodcock en croute. The smells and colors fill the imagination, and we learn also that the bookshelf set in the far corner of the restaurant contains not only copies of all the Goncourt winners (since 1905) but also the works of Colette, a former president of the Goncourt Society. The evening quiet rises to fill my mind, the quiet perhaps that engulfed whomever it was first read this review in 1969, as they sat with the rich smell of fresh tobacco leaf right outside their backdoor, sitting in a comfortable chair right next to the yellow-orange beam of the reading lamp, their eyes and thoughts focused intently on images of Parisian night life of not only that singular year, but also of many sparkling years of the past, all spread deliciously out on the pages.
Having to miss out on 1970 saddens me, but there is 1971 to discover. The page opens this time to “Fritters”. Fritters. They will tell us how to make fritters, and oh what fritters. Hushpuppies are fritters too, a familiar thing where the crows dive onto the bared cornfields. But the recipes in Gourmet do a wild dance indeed, through so many forms, with ingredients perhaps rare to behold at the local Piggly-Wiggly market: fritters of whitebait (would catfish work?); stuffed lobster; almond sole; fritto misto (daring to include both calves brains and sweetbreads in the mix); hard-boiled egg; shrimp and vegetable; sweet potato (wonder if that might be good with barbecue!); onion; cheese; savory cocktail fritters (maybe good for the town meeting next week. . .); Indonesian peanut; apple; flower fritters (goodness gracious is there anything these folk don’t try to eat?!); apricot salpicon; souffled fritters (daresay Mawmaw might take to that!); pineapple with frangipane custard; calas; and even oliebollen. Like marching soldiers or angels on wing, they follow along one right after the other, these recipes, leading one to line dance right along with them in time and place.
The preacher might be knocking at the door unexpectedly as our imaginary reader‘s eye first traveled over the issues of 1972. A quick leafing leads to “Cooking with James Beard” where the master tells us about kebobs with his usual leisurely, informative style. The pages are dotted with bits of history dropped in a by-and-by manner (“Mrs. Ruffald, in the 1799 edition of The English Housekeeper, included a recipe for mutton kebobs. . .”) then we’re off for a whirlwind world tour as he instructs us all on how to make Turkish kebobs; souvlakia; Iranian kebobs; kofta; Moroccan kebobs; shashlik; shami kebobs; Moglai kebobs; venison kebobs (“serve the kebobs with a puree of chestnuts and drink a Burgundy” he advises); brochette Villeneuve; lamb chops en brochette; anticuchos; chicken hearts and livers en brochette; duck kebobs; Malaysian sates of pork and of chicken; sosaties; kabayaki; fruits de mer en brochette and brochettes Saint-Jacques. “Mornin’, Preacher,” says our reader from so long ago, opening the front door with a flourish, humidity rushing into the room with the usual glimpse of the endless black tar road outside. “Would you like some anticuchos?”
The land is dark and blank, vistas edged by scrub, the closest neighbors’ Christmas tree lights barely visible a mile down the road as our reader tears December 1973 from its thick brown paper wrapper, fresh from the mailbox, cold fingers eagerly slipping round it, hurrying to get back into the warmth of the solitary house. And once torn eagerly open, there within is Lillian Langseth-Christiansen to entertain and entice on the subject of “Swedish Yuletide Baking”. Lillian informs us that “Sweden’s baking reflects her history and rejects her geography, and it combines flavors that come from the east with the light touch of France.” The beautiful story of the Feast of Santa Lucia is told, the recipes to make a candle-lit Swedish Christmas are amply provided – pastries rich with the scent of cardamom, colored like the sunshine with saffron, all rich with good butter and endowed with good names like drommar (dream cookies). The final page of December 1973 has “The Last Touch”, which this month comprises “Game Sauces”. Oh, just a few of those. Sauces made from chestnuts, their richly colored shells reminding one of that bay mare down the road a piece; a sour cream and mustard sauce; piquant sauce; lingonberry (wonder if those mulberries set down would do? Maybe add some crabapples, maybe. . .) sauce; fruited curry sauce with pine nuts; chasseur sauce; red-wine sauce. Game sauces might be not only useful but a way to bring variation in the days of these cold months when life reduces itself to labors done indoors - no tobacco to cut, no hay to bale, no land to till, even the woodpile cut and placidly waiting.
Sophistication and elegance mark the June 1974 centerfold “Bachelor Dinners” in June 1974. It might have been a tough choice for our reader between the weeding that needed doing quick before it took right over the garden or between this suave entry. The bachelors that peopled Gourmet back then were advised in no uncertain terms to prepare dinners such as the following: Mackerel in white wine to start, double lamb chops with mustard butter accompanied by potatoes Savonnette as entree, chicory salad to cleanse the palate after, then a fine wedge of Brie as finish. Served with a Chateau Talbot ’64, of course. Guess those guys didn’t remain bachelors for long. Or maybe they did, cooking elegant dinners for themselves and their bachelorette companions, as they years rolled merrily on, well served by good food and even better wine. Could our reader have been this sort of man, ensconsed in a rural life, hearing the cocks crow at dawn as he diced rich ingredients for a Cognac-soused pate, knowing without even a hint of wonder that those same birds, this afternoon would fight to the death as bettor’s device?
There were many other writers I knew in these pages - these people were the ones that taught me to cook, in times close to “way back then”. Married to a man who loved food, I adored and consumed the ways of cookery like potato chips, never being able to “eat just one”! Gourmet Magazine was the light of sustenance. In years to come, when I became a chef, there were other writings, other books, heavy tomes, that became my food for thought – but these words and stories written in Gourmet were the ones that first set my soul alight in ways that cooking, finally, as a professional, never really could touch in the same ways.
The question still hums through my mind though: How did one get from “here”, this tiny quiet southern farming town where the soil was always present and palpable, the sun something that one relied upon to grow age-old traditional crops, to “there”, the pages of Gourmet that lauded the haute society and the histories of every civilized land and then some? Who had owned these volumes, who had read them and dreamed of foreign lands and worlds that held astonishments and treasures of food and culture?
I don’t know. Serendipity left its touch when these volumes were so quietly given to that dank somewhat crumbling red brick library, in a town where (as a foreigner myself) never did I expect to find such a thing, never did I think to know someone was there, up the black tar road, maybe round the corner near where the dogs were dumped in late Fall, someone that loved these volumes and the worlds they essayed with as much intent and ardor as I did.
The last image, the last year of volumes. 1975. Elizabeth Andoh relates with vibrancy her knowledge of the ways of the “The Seasonal Japanese Kitchen –Picnic Lunches”. I like to think of my imagined friend turning the magazine pages slowly, in the kitchen, the warm breeze moving slowly through the window, the frogs humming their seasonal melodies while the tobacco plants push up from the sienna soil, corn shoots nearby starting their even lines upward. He ponders at length the very serious question of where to find the dried hijiki and abura age needed to make a fine Hijiki no Nimono.
Lifting the telephone receiver, he dials the number of the one person in the entire world he knows he can count on to hop in the car with him at a moment’s notice, crank up the AM radio, and make that long drive down the black tar roads to the far distant city, where he might find some of these ingredients that just don’t make their way out here.
“Yep, sure – I’ll be right over. Let me just get someone to watch over these birds for me,” the man at the corner store smiles as he answers his brother. “It’ll be fun.”
