For almost thirty
years, I saved old issues of Gourmet magazine -- all of them. I know it’s
crazy, but until my basement flooded last year and rendered them unusable, I
had almost four hundred issues stacked in milk crates, organized month by
month. Januaries here, Novembers there…
I started saving
Gourmet in 1979 when I was twenty years old.I was working as a cook at ski lodge, and writing short
stories on my days off, when a waitress where I worked suggested that I try
writing for Gourmet.
“You cook and you
write, she said, you should write about cooking. You could travel around the
world and write about food,” she suggested.I think this was her gentle way of saying that my short
stories weren’t going to cut it.“But first,” she advised, “You’ve got to familiarize yourself with the
magazine.Buy a few copies and
study them cover to cover.When
you understand what kind of stuff they print, you’ll have a better chance of getting
them to accept your stories.”
So I followed her
advice.I studied each issue and
after almost twenty years, and five cookbooks under my belt, I felt ready to
submit something. I even imagined at one point that I might become the next
Laurie Colwin, a particularly entertaining writer who wrote a column called
“Home Cooking.” Unfortunately, the editor, Ruth Reichl wasn’t really interested
in my stories.
But with Ruth Reichl at the helm, the magazine became more interesting to me
than ever. Unlike previous editors, Reichl seemed to have a finger on the pulse
of America’s ongoing “food revolution.” She chronicled chefs efforts to make
their restaurants more sustainable; she took readers to organic farms all over
the country, and encouraged us to by sustainable products and consider the
impact our purchases would have on the people and the communities that produced
our food.
Last spring, I was
invited to appear on an episode of Gourmet’s Adventures with Ruth, a public
television series in which Ruth Reichl travels to various locations around the
globe and takes cooking classes. I was to “instruct” Ruth on how to cook fish.
We prepared several dishes utilizing a gorgeous 25-pound Copper River King
Salmon that we filleted together in the kitchen of Canlis restaurant.
Then, less than a week before Conde Nast, the publishing house behind Gourmet,
Vogue, Bon Appetit, The New Yorker, and dozens of other magazines decided to
close the magazine in the wake of our current financial meltdown, I interviewed
Ruth over lunch at Seattle’s Tamarind Tree restaurant. She was on tour
promoting the magazine’s cookbook, Gourmet Today, a splendid collection of a
thousand recipes that really do reflect the way we cook and eat today.
A few recipes from the cooking show, the cookbook and the magazine follow.
