Editor of Food Arts, Michael Batterberry Passes On

It was with great sadness that I just learned of Michael Batterberry's very recent death. Michael Batterberry was an early influence in my evolving view of food experience and good food. My first encounter with Michael was when he started up Food and Wine Magazine. I would devour that early food publication and loved to read Michael's editorials often written with his wife, Ariane. After Michael and Ariane sold Food and Wine to American Express, the publication declined for me, but as a food periodical, I kept reading it.

Later, Michael And Ariane started Food Arts, a publication for the food industry. I was also an avid follower of this publication and Michael's practical, sometimes philosophical editorials. Michael knew the food scene well, how the trends in cuisine were evolving and who the players were. He loved the experience of good food, a l'ancienne, traditional or nouveau. Food Arts also kept up with all of the openings and closings of significant restaurants around the United States, one way for me to keep abreast.

I was introduced to Michael and Ariane, many years ago, when I was a house guest of my good friends, Peter and Amy Meltzer, at their country house in Wainscott on Long Island. Michael and Ariane were there simultaneously. We enjoyed speaking about our common interests of good food, and travel experiences eating our way through the many countries we both had visited. Michael was such an elegant, well spoken and erudite man, such a pleasure to be with. Although we were not close, his passing left a hole in my world and I am sure for many of his admirers, they felt a great loss.

Remembering Gourmet Magazine

Posted by Jennifer

I was a teenager and already interested in cooking when I first saw Gourmet. It was in my oldest sister’s kitchen. She no longer remembers why she not only had a subscription for many years, but kept every issue in the blue binders which had to be ordered specially from the magazine.

The food in the magazines which came to my childhood home every month--Ladies Home Journal, Good Housekeeping, McCall’s - was all about speed. With a plethora of products from Kraft and General Mills along with your handy electric frying pan, dinner could be on the table in minutes. The advertising was as enticing as the editorial content.

Gourmet offered a whole different world in which time was definitely not of the essence. It seemed one often needed to know on Monday what one wanted to eat on Thursday given the shopping, marinating, and multiple preparations that one had to perform. The would-be cook really had to pay attention since the ingredients were not separated out from the body of the recipe. There were no miniature marshmallows

to be seen.  Like the New Yorker, the advertising was discrete. If I remember correctly, the photographs were all together in the centre of the magazine, proto gastroporn in all its glory.

At the time, Gourmet was as much about travel - Eurocentric travel - as food. In this alternate world, the chill of the Cold War, the Vietnam war, and racial upheaval had no place. Crisp linens and smiling service, perfect oeufs en gelee and iles flotante were, reassuringly, what counted. What I loved were the letters in which members of the new jet setter class begged the editors for the recipe of a dish they had sampled in some far off place, or, offered up their own recipes for admiration from the less affluent.

When I first started reading Gourmet, I did not dare try cooking anything. Many of the ingredients cited - clam juice, sweet butter - were not available in the grocery stores that served the rural community where I grew up. Instead, it showed me the possibilities of the world I might grow into, the world my sister, then a young faculty wife, already inhabited. Of course, she also never cooked anything from the magazine. I suspect just having it in the house gave her enough confidence to help survive the new milieu in which she found herself.

It was a whole decade later that I finally did start to cook from Gourmet’s recipes. By that time, I had picked up enough skills from Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French of French Cooking to get a job cooking. The first dish I made was a zucchini pie, sort of a savoury clafouti, which I still occasionally make.

Gourmet was a magazine that changed gradually, often almost imperceptibly. It was a real revolution when the ingredients were broken out from the body of the recipes. The travel articles began to include Latin America, Southeast Asia, Africa, the world. It was where I first read Laurie Colwin. The editors recognized that their readers no longer had days to prepare a meal. Though recipes requiring painstaking preparation remained, there were many others that could be on the table within half an hour, without using convenience foods.

Hired as editor a decade ago, it was Ruth Reichl who really pulled Gourmet into the contemporary world  with younger writers, more attention to issues affecting modern food production and consumption, and greater understanding to how her readers really live. The quality and the beautiful photographs were always the enduring elements.

With only four editors in its almost 70 years of operation, Gourmet was the voice of record in food matters, a New York Times for the culinary world. Conde Nast, in announcing the closure of the magazine vowed that the book publishing program and television series will continue. Yet, without Gourmet’s monthly presence and without a successor of its stature, the culinary world seems suddenly and seriously adrift.

In Memorium: Keith Floyd, British Television Cook

Posted by Alison Gorman (aka Irish Alison)

By the time I discovered Keith Floyd it was sometime past his heyday on British television. Every Saturday morning I would get up early to watch the BBC weekend cookery show ‘Saturday Kitchen’, and it was there that I had my first Floyd encounter. In the midst of smiley presenters and oh-so-pleasant guest chefs would come an episode of one of Keith’s shows from the BBC vaults. He would appear on screen, rakish and charming, a glass of wine in one hand, gesticulating wildly with the other, issuing orders and commands to his longsuffering cameraman Clive. His shows were just as famous for their often surreal nature as for the food prepared; memorable moments include him cooking in the middle of a field on a South African ostrich farm, cooking an ostrich egg omelette, surrounded by ostriches. As the birds get more curious the piece descends into chaos; the ostriches overrun the field, the food and utensils are on the ground, the camera has been abandoned, and Floyd is off in the distance, looking fairly unperturbed and sipping a glass of wine, the obligatory glass one of the few constants in his television career.

Although he certainly made for great television, his importance to modern British cooking shouldn’t be underestimated; he introduced the nation to world cuisine, taught them that French food could be cooked at home, that Asian food was exciting and accessible, that garlic wasn’t anything to be afraid of. If Delia was responsible for imparting technique, then Keith offered passion. There was no editing in his shows; when a French housewife berated his food he translated her criticisms faithfully, looking heartily amused at her obvious disgust with his cooking skills. He would happily tell his audience that the BBC wouldn’t pay for expensive ingredients, so he would buy them from his own pocket. He flirted shamelessly, he drank voraciously, he swore occasionally. In an age when much of television cookery seems homogenised and predictable, Keith was a breath of fresh air. He played a large part in making it more acceptable for men to be interested in food and cooking in Britain; and indeed on one of his visits to the store Jamie Oliver cited him as his favourite tv chef.

Keith Floyd was probably the least professional chef on Saturday Kitchen every week, and always the one you’d want to have a drink with. On Monday 14th September, at the age of 65, he suffered a heart attack and died in Dorset, England. It is reported he enjoyed a last meal of oysters and partridge, along with several glasses of champagne. He will be missed by many, and it would be a shame to watch his passing without raising a glass to one of Britain’s true kitchen pioneers.

Sheila Lukins, of Silver Palate fame, dies.

Posted by Alison

We are saddened to hear of Sheila Lukins death.
Sheila had been diagnosed with brain cancer three months ago and passed away Sunday August 30th.

With her business partner Julee Rosso, the duo awakened North Americans to a whole new era of cooking and ingredients (raspberry vinegar anyone). Their seminal, and tiny, food shop in New York city called Silver Palate was an extension of their catering business, which in turn lead them to write the groundbreaking book The Silver Palate Cookbook in 1982.

We hosted a party for the dynamic duo in honour of the book's 25th Anniversary in 2007 and both Sheila and Julee were in attendance. What a time we had!

In honour of her passing we should all head to the kitchen and make the Chicken Marbella recipe from The Silver Palate Cookbook.