Love Affairs with Gourmet Magazine

[Carrot Top]

I have a confession. I used to be in love with a magazine. Gourmet Magazine, to be exact.

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.”

……………………………………………………………………………

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.

………………………………………………………………………

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.”

[zoe b]

what a lovely memory piece, Carrot Top--and so true that the old Gourmet was a window into a world of elegance and history and unusual ingredients for so many of us who lived in small towns in the US. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that there are many of us who began thinking about food because of this magazine.

I remember sitting on the hard red vinyl leatherette sofa in my Great Aunt's den in the 60s in suburban Philadelphia--and getting lost in her stacks of Gourmet--imagining the dinner parties with pheasant and five different wine glasses that i would attend some day--never even considering that i could cook such a feast--or maybe imagining the servants who would do it for me!!

It is curious to wonder who did buy those annuals in your town--maybe a farm wife used her egg money to enter that world in her free time, too.

It's so odd that you would write this at this time--about two weeks ago I picked up seven Best Of Gourmet annuals from the 90s at a thrift store--and they've been sitting on the kitchen table so that i can leaf through them while I drink coffee or eat a bowl of soup for lunch--they are still old Gourmet, but simpler, and i can imagine actually cooking some of the meals pictured--but the voices of the wise ones--James Beard and Laurie Colwin and all the others are sadly absent.

Zoe

[Lori in PA]

I am forcing myself to stop in the middle because I MUST run, but I am loving it. Thank you!

[santo_grace]

What a wonderful story. I'm not sure my reply to it will do your story justice. I am a big fan of Gourmet. Coincidentally, I was born in 1970, the year of your phantom copies. In my 20’s I picked up cooking magazines here and there, not with much consistency and never an allegiance to a particular one. A few years ago for Christmas a friend gave me a subscription to Gourmet, and I have to say my reaction after the first few issues, was the opposite of yours. I wondered why my friend was torturing me by giving me a magazine filled with places that I’m not able to go to – at least not at the frequency I would like. Don’t get me wrong, I like to travel, but there are bills to paid, jobs to hold, and only so many vacation days in the year. Within a few months though I was hooked and I look forward to each new issue. Perhaps like many things, the old Gourmet was better, however I don't see myself cancelling my subscription anytime soon.

When I got home this Monday night after a bad day, for both professional and personal reasons, and saw that December’s issue had arrived, I breathed a sigh of happiness and said to my husband “Oh, it’s a Gourmet night. Now the day is better.”

[BeeZee]

I started reading Gourmet in my 20's...living in my one BR apt., having potatoes for dinner 'cause I was unemployed and broke...relishing each exotic page and dreaming of a time when I might visit these locales...trying to imagine what the recipes would taste like.

I used to savor each issue when it arrived, rarely sitting down to read the whole thing, but spending time over a week or two to slowly savor each article.

[Carrot Top]

I remember sitting on the hard red vinyl leatherette sofa in my Great Aunt's den in the 60s in suburban Philadelphia--and getting lost in her stacks of Gourmet--imagining the dinner parties with pheasant and five different wine glasses that i would attend some day--never even considering that i could cook such a feast--or maybe imagining the servants who would do it for me!!

It is curious to wonder who did buy those annuals in your town--maybe a farm wife used her egg money to enter that world in her free time, too.

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I love that image of you and the sofa, Zoe (those things were so slippery, weren't they?!) . . .I wonder, too, if your Great Aunt made recipes from those stacks. . .or if she was a "reader" only, which is a fine thing to be.

These were actually not the annual "books" I found but individual magazines, which were then carefully placed between the silver holder inside these thick black binders (which one used to be able to buy separately). Like jewels in a quiet black leather case.

Yes, it certainly could have been a farm wife that spent her "egg money" on these. I'll always wonder.

I am forcing myself to stop in the middle because I MUST run,

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And here I thought you just sat around eating bon-bons all day, Lori. My image is dashed, dashed.

When I got home this Monday night after a bad day, for both professional and personal reasons, and saw that December’s issue had arrived, I breathed a sigh of happiness and said to my husband “Oh, it’s a Gourmet night.  Now the day is better.”

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Isn't it amazing that this sense can happen just through anticipation of the good things within the pages?

I started reading Gourmet in my 20's...living in my one BR apt., having potatoes for dinner 'cause I was unemployed and broke...relishing each exotic page and dreaming of a time when I might visit these locales...trying to imagine what the recipes would taste like.

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Did it make the potatoes taste better at the time or worse in comparison, I wonder. Sometimes when I read things about fantastic things to eat the very words and images sort of "wear off" onto whatever it is that I am eating, sort of like standing in front of the window of Bendels, the mirror reflection of oneself pictured as being dressed exactly like the mannequins.

Edited November 29, 2006 by Carrot Top (log)

[JeanneCake]

I subscribed for many years, starting in my 20s when I had my first apartment and couldn't afford much. I could travel all over the world in a week, armed with that magazine and later, when I had advanced at work and was travelling a lot, I could go back in time and find articles on the places I was heading to. The zenith for me was reading Laurie Colwin's columns and when she died, I was bereft. It was nice to have a whole year of her columns to look forward to, but when they stopped, I found I didn't feel the same way about the magazine. Now I don't read it as closely or as thoroughly as I used to, but I have decades of the magazines stored here at home. Whenever I decide to part with them (not any time soon, mind you!), it'll be someone's motherlode!

[Carrot Top]

I have decades of the magazines stored here at home.  Whenever I decide to part with them (not any time soon, mind you!), it'll be someone's motherlode!

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Yes, it certainly will be!

It's interesting to watch the progression of "styles" both in the ads and in the articles presented. The older magazines seem to have much less of a focus on desserts or pastries than in recent years.

I remember reading somewere that the original magazine audience focus was male, during the 1940's post-war period. Kind of a high-life, hunting with the hounds with beef wellington and brandy afterward sort of crowd.

"Editor and Publisher: Earle R. MacAusland" - For years those words on the top of the first page enticed me. It always made me think of images of fishing for salmon with a Scottish hat, a walking stick, and a dog by my side, the mansion house in the far distance that I could just barely see where of course the maids were making shortbread and ironing linen sheets. . . .

Edited December 1, 2006 by Carrot Top (log)

[Carrot Top]

but the voices of the wise ones--James Beard and Laurie Colwin and all the others are sadly absent.

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The zenith for me was reading Laurie Colwin's columns and when she died, I was bereft.  It was nice to have a whole year of her columns to look forward to, but when they stopped, I found I didn't feel the same way about the magazine.

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Two mentions of Laurie Colwin made me realize that she was one of the writers I've never read a lot of (she wrote mostly in the 90's, didn't she? I wasn't reading Gourmet hardly at all them. . .).

Since she seems to have really been someone important to read (based on your thoughts), I ordered "Home Cooking" - a collection of her essays. It just came and even without delving in too far, I am totally thrilled.

Thanks!

[zeffer81]

my mom has a huge stack of gourmets from the 60s and 70s. I've convinced her not to get rid of them. i can't wait to cuddle up and see how it's changed and stayed the same.

on another note, do you think they're worth any money? i mean, I'D probably pay for them...

[Carrot Top]

on another note, do you think they're worth any money?  i mean, I'D probably pay for them...

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Don't ask me. I'm sitting here wondering why on earth I ever gave away my first four issues of Art Culinaire which they're saying on another thread are selling for six hundred fifty dollars or so.

[zeffer81]

ouch!

[Carrot Top]

Yeah. . .there goes that idea I had for taking myself out for dinner at The French Laundry. Oh well. Another time.

If you want to really see the difference between the older Gourmets and the newer ones, zeffer81, find some of the old issues for December and compare them with more current issues. I think you'll see a big difference not only in overall content but also content amount. . . also tone. . .and finally, recipes - in tone, amount, *and* content or "style".

December 1971, for example, has articles on Christmas in Vienna (by Lillian Langseth-Christiansen); Christmas in Cornwall (by Derek Tangye); A Dutch Celebration (by Dale Brown); The Bachelor Chef (Donald Aspinwall Allen); Foods for Holiday Giving; Cooking with James Beard - Frozen Desserts; A Thai Christmas (by Elizabeth Lambert Ortiz); Dark Rum Cookery (Elizabeth Lambert-Ortiz); Gourmet's Christmas Gifts; Gourmet's Menus Christmas Dinner; The Art of the Mandoline; and Stuffed Potatoes for "The Last Touch".

I'm wondering what this year's December's issue holds. Might have to go out and get it to compare. (It's possible that I am just enamoured of a certain style, and that there *is* just as much and just as good in the current issue. Eh. How could that be?)

P.S. I'm actually getting a bit spooked by these 1971 magazines, because there is a guy I used to date (a few years after that, 1975 or so) who was one of the most popular male models then, smiling at me here and there in ads through the issues. There is Jim with a martini glass, holding it up with a demure grin. There he is again, waving a hello to someone out over the side of the yacht where of course one drinks gin. He squints out in a macho sort of way from behind a cigarette. Yikes. Grownups were so very grownup then.

Edited December 11, 2006 by Carrot Top (log)

[MarketStEl]

Two separate observations, related only by the fact that they have to do with Gourmet:

1. Once again, I'm late to the party. Maybe had it been copies of Gourmet, with their tales of haute cuisine and fine living around the world, that were stacked high in the basement, attic and any other free space, my interest in things culinary would have been stronger sooner. But instead, it was National Geographic and its iconic yellow-bordered copies that were at hand, so instead I became interested in geography, and maps, and the physical features (human and otherwise) of distant places, and the conveyances that took you to and around them.

My very first subscription copy of Gourmet arrived in the mail last week. Apparently I've just become part of an iconic community whose icon has changed form. It may have something to do with the democratization of high culture, I suspect.

2. Confidential to Carrot Top: Who said they had to be bachelorettes dining with those bachelors? Back in the bad old days, before "the love that dare not speak its name" found its voice, men of a certain character had to rely on codes and subtle clues to find kindred spirits, and the taste for the finer things in life that continues to be a character trait among a certain stratum of gay male society was no less prevalent back then. Tips on how to win over such men, being incitements to illegal and immoral activity in most of the 50 states even in the late 1960s, were not likely to be found in the pages of Esquire, Playboy, GQ or the other men's magazines of the day, so it's highly likely that a male homosexual looking to impress a would-be date or life partner might well turn to columns like "The Bachelor Chef" for advice and counsel. This territory having been usurped by Genre, Out and a slew of 1-900 lines, it is no longer necessary for a publication like Gourmet to offer this service; besides, we read Martha Stewart Living just like you do. But maybe we should be grateful that, however sub rosa, there was a place of sorts for us in the pages of Gourmet as well.

[Carrot Top]

2. Confidential to Carrot Top: Who said they had to be bachelorettes dining with those bachelors?

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You're absolutely right, Sandy. I was just writing along there and didn't stop to think of all the possiblities in that moment.

It was the words I was thinking about, not the reality. Often a problem with me.

It was that cigar/cigarette thing. The diminutive of the word seems to follow along unquestioningly.

*Maybe* (heh) what should be asked here is why the diminutive of the word always infers "female"?

But anyway, after I read Secret Ingredients - Race, Gender and Class at the Dinner Table which just arrived yesterday I'll probably be more in shape to find the right words. Maybe.

Wanna borrow it after I read it?

[MarketStEl]

But anyway, after I read Secret Ingredients - Race, Gender and Class at the Dinner Table which just arrived yesterday I'll probably be more in shape to find the right words. Maybe.

Wanna borrow it after I read it?

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You bet. Especially with an endorsement from former colleague Janet Theophano, author of "Eat My Words: Reading Women's Lives Through the Cookbooks They Wrote," on Amazon.com.

We all know that The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook is really an autobiography, but it looks like there is a growing body of literature examining how cookbooks and related guides actually communicated a lot more than the instructions on how to prepare food.

[Carrot Top]

We all know that The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook is really an autobiography, but it looks like there is a growing body of literature examining how cookbooks and related guides actually communicated a lot more than the instructions on how to prepare food.

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Yes, hints of "how things are" and "how things are *supposed* to be" are often found in bits of writing that go beyond the simple recipe format. It's rather wonderful and sometimes scary.

I'll PM you when I finish reading this book, to send it along.

[Carrot Top]

the physical features (human and otherwise) of distant places, and the conveyances that took you to and around them.

My very first subscription copy of Gourmet arrived in the mail last week. Apparently I've just become part of an iconic community whose icon has changed form.  It may have something to do with the democratization of high culture, I suspect.

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Partially the democratization of high culture, partially the post-war availability of "conveyances that took you to and around them" that has grown by leaps and bounds since then (allowing travel to all places in the world fairly easily if one has the $ - and desire - to do so), partially by the fact that when the magazine was first published, those that read it probably had within their lives a place in the kitchen that they knew and understood, i.e. they knew how to cook for the most part, or had spent time around people that did in their homes. That is not so today. Many people do not grow up knowing the basics of cookery. The place where people come into the home to spend time is no longer in the kitchen, around the table. It is in other rooms, in front of the computer or television, or outside the home at planned weekly self-improving activities. Even dining out could be said (and is) to fit in this category.

Kitchens themselves got smaller for a while, not seemingly needed for large tables where people would loll and nibble and do homework and maybe even help cook a thing or two, "just because it was there". Then they got bigger and showy. Sometimes, now, it's all about the buzz, baby.

This is what I notice in the difference between some older publications on food and some of the newer. Buzz buzz buzz pretty pretty. Somehow, the actual work of cooking has been cleaned up and made doll-like. The recipes are no longer written for an audience that presumably understands concepts of cooking - they are written to be idiot-proof and codified to a place sans personality, sans *any* potential error by the inexperienced (for there are so many).

That's okay, I guess. It is what it is.

[Carrot Top]

But anyway, after I read Secret Ingredients - Race, Gender and Class at the Dinner Table which just arrived yesterday I'll probably be more in shape to find the right words. Maybe.

Wanna borrow it after I read it?

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You bet. Especially with an endorsement from former colleague Janet Theophano, author of "Eat My Words: Reading Women's Lives Through the Cookbooks They Wrote," on Amazon.com.

We all know that The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook is really an autobiography, but it looks like there is a growing body of literature examining how cookbooks and related guides actually communicated a lot more than the instructions on how to prepare food.

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Just finished the book, and it was fascinating. It covers women stuff, ethnic stuff, redneck/white trash stuff. . .("stuff" yeah, intellectual word there). . .race stuff, all within the parameters of the cookbooks written.

I'll have to think about where these old Gourmets might fit into these concepts of looking at the thing from these aspects. It's not immediately apparent to me. (Surprise, surprise. )

......................

I did, however, just get the new Gourmet holiday issue and am extremely pleasantly surprised. Something good is going on here, moreso to my mind than in perhaps several years past. I stopped reading it entirely for a while there due to extreme boredom with whatever it was that it was doing. This issue does not bore me at all.

[MarketStEl]

Kitchens themselves got smaller for a while, not seemingly needed for large tables where people would loll and nibble and do homework and maybe even help cook a thing or two, "just because it was there". Then they got bigger and showy. Sometimes, now, it's all about the buzz, baby. 

This is what I notice in the difference between some older publications on food and some of the newer. Buzz buzz buzz pretty pretty. Somehow, the actual work of cooking has been cleaned up and made doll-like. The recipes are no longer written for an audience that presumably understands concepts of cooking - they are written to be idiot-proof and codified to a place sans personality, sans *any* potential error by the inexperienced (for there are so many).

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Wading through this thread anew, I realized that this observation is reinforced somewhat by a bus-shelter ad I saw early last year (I had to correct myself from saying "earlier this year") that is one of the most inadvertently hilarious ads I've ever run across.

The ad promotes a new housing development in Brewerytown, a somewhat rundown neighborhood about half a mile north of the Philadelphia Museum of Art that is experiencing significant stirrings of gentrification, this new development being one of them.

The ad shows a beaming black couple (significant because the developer's first ads for this project in a mostly black neighborhood had pictures of youngish white folks and the legend "It's your turn now," which many black Brewerytown residents took as a sign that they were to be driven out of the neighborhood) standing in the spiffy new kitchen of their (presumably equally spiffy) new home, with text quoting them as saying: "We've started watching cooking shows!"

I nearly doubled over with laughter when I first saw this. It struck me as a perfect encapsulation of the transformation of cooking into a status symbol: In order to cook, one must have a sufficiently fashionable kitchen, or else it's pointless. Even now, the thought of this ad brings a smile to my face.

[marlena spieler]

I too discovered a cache of Gourmets during a time when I had moved to a culinary wasteland, had a baby to tend to and no friends or other stimulations in the area. During baby's naptime my fave thing to do was: hot bath, big mug of milky tea, and a plate of either m and ms or fresh sliced mango. And a small stack of Gourmets.

I remember one ussue whose cover photo showed a photo of a Greek harbor I had once lived in; i could even see my little window on the world up there on the right hand side. Reading it was redolant of memory and greek flavors. i'm thinking: was that the moment i decided to become a food writer?

There were so many things between the covers of the many issues i relaxed my way through, absorbed in all of the wonderful things i would taste or make, someday. the places i would go too and if i never went there, at least i could cook the dishes people ate there..........the late elizabeth lambert ortiz wrote appealingly of mexican foods (and later generously offered me a quote on one of my mexican books). i remember reading about truffles and wondering what they really tasted like (no doubt the reason that now i'm always pitching articles to write about truffles. I love them so!and want to share that love....).

Reading through the August 2006 literary supplement of Gourmet was a delight. very personal writings, autobiographical in style and very evocative.

And Laurie Colwin: like so many other food writers, I too was a big fan. She wrote honestly, observantly, humorously, and deeply, all the while making it look light and breezy. And she always got me eager to cook and eat whatever she was writing about.

[jess mebane]

It struck me as a perfect encapsulation of the transformation of cooking into a status symbol: In order to cook, one must have a sufficiently fashionable kitchen, or else it's pointless. Even now, the thought of this ad brings a smile to my face.

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Yes, but isn't it marvelous that there are no 'musts' to your sense of passion for food and cooking? It's like eGullet and my own kitchen are both unapologetically unfashionable, and never happier than when we're elbowing one another to get to the last clear space of countertop in this narrow galley. For the sharing of opinions recipes and food, I'll take old salts in small spaces any day, and God bless us every one!

[Carrot Top]

The ad shows a beaming black couple (significant because the developer's first ads for this project in a mostly black neighborhood had pictures of youngish white folks and the legend "It's your turn now," which many black Brewerytown residents took as a sign that they were to be driven out of the neighborhood) standing in the spiffy new kitchen of their (presumably equally spiffy) new home, with text quoting them as saying:  "We've started watching cooking shows!"

I nearly doubled over with laughter when I first saw this.  It struck me as a perfect encapsulation of the transformation of cooking into a status symbol: In order to cook, one must have a sufficiently fashionable kitchen, or else it's pointless. Even now, the thought of this ad brings a smile to my face.

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That's hilarious. That initial sense of dissonance and disbelief conveyed by the *first* ad with the white faces. Phew. And then the move right into "Marketing 101: Our Lives Defined". Sigh. Yes, an odd upside-down feeling to the whole thing. Not alien, entirely, to me though (though alien as far as kitchen or food life goes). I remembered clearly when reading your line about the "sufficiently fashionable kitchen, or else it's pointless" times past when I would literally spend several hours getting dressed to go on a date. Not just several hours, really, but even more time before that, shopping for the "right" clothes, from skin on out. It was more about the dressing up than it was about the date or the guy. A most feminine perspective perhaps? And now the kitchen is all dressed up, and perhaps for only the final, real, reason of "getting dressed up". (Well, one can always hope, but life being what it is, sometimes the dressing up is actually more interesting in the long run. . . )

I too discovered a cache of Gourmets during a time when I had moved to a culinary wasteland,  had a baby to tend to and no friends or other stimulations in the area. During baby's naptime my fave thing to do was: hot bath, big mug of milky tea, and a plate of either m and ms or fresh sliced mango. And a small stack of Gourmets.

I remember one ussue whose cover photo showed a photo of a Greek harbor I had once lived in; i could even see my little window on the world up there on the right hand side. Reading it was redolant of memory and greek flavors. i'm thinking: was that the moment i decided to become a food writer?

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Your story is touching, marlena. A window on the world, showing more windows on the world, endless vistas, really, in ways big and small.

Interesting, too, for to my mind, you just were "always a food writer". I guess I thought you had been born a food writer. The genesis of how these things *do* happen are most fulfilling to imagine.

You reminded me of MFK Fisher, too. And Julia Child. How women find themselves in unusual spots, sometimes odd or slightly disconcerting spots personally, from the ways in which we (at least in the past) have followed the men in our lives to places as their supports. MFK followed her then-husband to France, Julia the same - and both found things unexpected there, that were "just for them". A sideways, winding, mysterious path. I wonder if the next generation of women who write about food will do the same, finding this sort of surprise unexpectedly, or whether they will mostly just start out clearing their own paths from the very start. . .

I'll take old salts in small spaces any day, and God bless us every one!   

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I'm with you on that, jess, and you've said it most beautifully!

Edited January 2, 2007 by Carrot Top (log)

[Carrot Top]

Marlena's post made me think of the very first Gourmet magazines I'd ever seen.

They were in a thrift shop. It was a wonderful little thrift shop that had baskets of things like antique pink satin slips, and patterned crumpled dresses from the 1940's tucked in odd corners, for ten to fifteen cents.

It was in Darien, Connecticut. Sometime around. . .1977? I was married to a guy whose mother, native to Italy, used to cook amazing things that I'd never heard of or seen . . .her kitchen was a sort of wonderland to me, having grown up without having any serious cooking done at home.

There were piles of old Gourmets and Bon Appetits there in the book section at the little happy thrift shop run by the serious Methodist women with their tightly curled hair and quietly bustling ways, so I picked some up. The Bon Appetits rather scared me. They were filled with photos of people around tables eating and smiling hugely in what seemed to me to be odd, slightly ominous ways. And the recipes were dull, the stories nonexistent. I bought some but threw them away almost immediately.

I tried to cook something from Gourmet. It was some sort of stew, and I didn't know that you could not cook a stew in a Pyrex pot on top of the stove. It smelled wonderful, till the pot broke all over the stove, exploding onto the kitchen ceiling. Sigh. What a mess.

Thank goodness for Gourmet. Yes, I think without having found that magazine it's likely I never would have become a chef.

I wonder where or how other people ran into their "first" Gourmet.

[marlena spieler]

marlena says very humble-y to carrot top:

a million thank yous for your kind words, of which i especially love the comment: that I have been "always a food writer". you are too too right, though even when it didn't dawn on me, when i thought i was an artist and would one day be a famous artist with much to offer the world, even then as a self-absorbed teenager, i was writing recipes in my artists sketchbook, the things i was tasting as i was travelling for inspiration, in that way that the writer henry miller (who i admired hugely) did. i was much younger and much stupider then henry miller, however. which i'm kind of grateful for, because otherwise, i might not have been brave enough to scribble the words that became my first cookbook. i was as obsessed with food as henry miller was with sex.

whether in gourmet, or on the road, or speaking with someone from a strange and far off land, or even in my own garden, everything i discovered foodwise was such a treasure, every little discovery a delicious morsel that i knew--in that overexcited adolescent way--would enrich my life forever. this has turned out to be correct in fact!

our food worlds were much different from our mothers, and from their mothers, and this generation is no different in that their experiences and expectations and tastes are different from ours. unlike in (continental) europe where there is more of a tradition......but even there, even there......

i worry that in general both in the usa and europe there isn't enough care for good food writing, that there is too much hype, much attention to celebrity at all costs. not enough care for good food either. that people won't know the difference.

meanwhile, i look forward to my next meal. as always. (right now its pureed winter vegetable soup, a good antidote to christmas celebrating).

I too discovered a cache of Gourmets during a time when I had moved to a culinary wasteland, had a baby to tend to and no friends or other stimulations in the area. During baby's naptime my fave thing to do was: hot bath, big mug of milky tea, and a plate of either m and ms or fresh sliced mango. And a small stack of Gourmets.

I remember one ussue whose cover photo showed a photo of a Greek harbor I had once lived in; i could even see my little window on the world up there on the right hand side. Reading it was redolant of memory and greek flavors. i'm thinking: was that the moment i decided to become a food writer?

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Your story is touching, marlena. A window on the world, showing more windows on the world, endless vistas, really, in ways big and small.

Interesting, too, for to my mind, you just were "always a food writer". I guess I thought you had been born a food writer. The genesis of how these things *do* happen are most fulfilling to imagine.

You reminded me of MFK Fisher, too. And Julia Child. How women find themselves in unusual spots, sometimes odd or slightly disconcerting spots personally, from the ways in which we (at least in the past) have followed the men in our lives to places as their supports. MFK followed her then-husband to France, Julia the same - and both found things unexpected there, that were "just for them". A sideways, winding, mysterious path. I wonder if the next generation of women who write about food will do the same, finding this sort of surprise unexpectedly, or whether they will mostly just start out clearing their own paths from the very start. . .