Requiem for A Magazine

Also, Gourmet's last book. The easiest cake recipe. And a vintage menu.

Txikito, one of my very favorite New York restaurants, reopened a couple of weeks ago after a long Covid-induced closing. I’ve loved this little Basque restaurant since it first opened… and as the restaurant re-opened I was reminded that in the fall of 2009 Alex Raij and Eder Montero very generously invited the Gourmet staff to one last party. I wrote this the next morning.

Sitting at La Guardia, way too early, waiting for a flight to St. Louis.  Txikito threw a party for Gourmet last night, and it felt so... final.  The last time we'll all be gathered in one room. We all drank way too much, devoured all those delicious little tidbits - crisp mushroom croquettes, pa amb tomaquet, the tomatoes tasting very much like the last fruit of Fall, and wonderfully black chiperones.  This morning I discovered that my fingers were still black with squid ink.

When the party ended, nobody wanted to go home. So we drifted, one huge amorphous group, across the street and into Grand Sichuan where we just kept eating and drinking. The chiles with black beans teased and tingled, and I realized that I'll never eat them without thinking about all the lunches in the conference room at the magazine, the table covered with little white boxes. It was always too much food; we always ate it all.

Two days later I wrote this…..

Stella's curled up next to me, purring. Hailey's at my feet. I'm getting ready to tape an interview with Terry Gross, and I've been thinking about the pieces that made me proudest at Gourmet. These are the ones that came immediately to mind:

The first produce issue, September 2001, with all the articles on hard times for farmers, and how they coped. The Latinx issue, with that terrific Junot Diaz piece.  David Foster Wallace's Consider the Lobster, which was such a turning point.  Barry Estabrook's piece on tomato slaves, which had a profound impact. His early piece on problems with fish farming, which also had an impact. Nina Teicholz’s stunning piece about transfats, and how the bad news about them was kept from the public for more than 20 years. Yvonne Durant on being Black and eating watermelon in public. Daniel Zwerdling's piece on chickens. David Rakoff on Jews and bacon. Bruce Feiler's hilarious adventures as he tried to buy his way into restaurants. All those gorgeous Ann Patchett essays.  Francis Lam on omelets. Michael Pollan on Joel Salatin. Aleksandra Crapanzano on falling in love in Paris.  Ben Cheever working at Cosi. John Haney's Fair Shares for All. Phyllis Richman on land trusts... the list goes on and on. 

I am so sad that it's over.

Speaking of the magazine… this was our last book. It turned out to be an orphan; by the time the book appeared the magazine had been closed for nearly a year. It is now out of print, but you can find used copies for as little as $1.95 and it would make a fine gift for a baker.

Gourmet’s last big idea, conceived by Jackie Terrebonne, was a series of pop-up cookie shops for Macy’s. They would have been lapidary little shops with cookies displayed like jewels. We were ready to go, but when the magazine closed the cookie shops never happened. The accompanying Gourmet Cookie Book, however, was already finished; Romulo Yanes had shot all the photographs, design director Richard Ferretti had laid the book out and I had written the copy. Even though I asked the publisher not to put my name on it, every time I see this sweet little book it makes me proud.

This isn’t just another bunch of cookie recipes. We wanted to create a mini-history of cookies in America. We tasted through our archives, selecting the best cookie from each of Gourmet’s 68 years. Then, rather than homogenizing the recipes into current recipe style (as we did with The Gourmet Cookbook), we left the recipes exactly as originally written. If you did nothing but read the instructions you’d learn a great deal about the way we were.

The book offers a tiny taste of American history. As new ingredients came into the culture they were incorporated into cookies. New equipment became available to home cooks, and that also allowed the recipes to evolve. Time passed, we kept baking cookies, and our tastes kept changing. All of this is reflected in the recipes.

Just to be clear: I do not get a penny from the sale of this book. But I think it deserved a better fate.

Since I seem to be in a nostalgic mood, I offer you this recipe. I keep reading about all the new bakers who are deconstructing cakes, creating remarkable sculptures and changing the genre. Good for them!

Here, however, is the opposite. The day before Nick’s 6th birthday I was sitting at my desk at the New York Times when it hit me that I had to go home and bake cupcakes for his class. I called Marion Cunningham and asked her to send me an easy recipe I could quickly whip up. A few minutes later this came scrolling out of the Fax machine. Scrawled across the top was “ignore kumquats.”

Sadly, Charlie Trotter passed away a year after this dinner. He was way too young. But I remember him - and this dinner that David Bouley threw in his honor - with great fondness. My favorite memory of Charlie? Watching him walking on his hands at his birthday party. Turns out he was a gymnast in a former life. Incidentally, there’s a new film about Mr. Trotter, Love, Charlie, that’s just coming out.