Early Food Porn and Other Things I Really Miss

Early food porn, arriving in a brown paper wrapper with my name and address at the bottom. I slid the latest Gourmet magazine from the wrapper, opened and turned it upside down, allowing advertising postcards to fall into the post office mailbox trash. A quick scan through it, I rushed. Opening other mail, usually business related, now I had an idea of which articles I’d read first.

These were not coffee shop reads or ones to inhale in company.

I wanted to be alone with Gourmet, just me and the columns, sneaking away from everyone and my responsibilities, cowering under a down comforter, firm pillows behind my back, a glass of sturdy red to my left, and reading light on the right. Then I was ready, set to travel with Paul Theroux on the California Zephyr through Colorado, contemplate replicating Elizabeth David’s Tomatoes a la Crème, or dream about dining at Thomas Keller’s then-new restaurant The French Laundry.

Sometimes I challenged myself, trying out a recipe Gourmet shared from a highly rated restaurant. While some were complex, I never failed with them, trusting and believing in them more than any other food magazine. I wanted to live Jane and Michael Stern’s lives touring the country, discovering the best out of the way, casual dining experiences. Ruth Harkness and MFK Fisher enjoyed a writing and dining life I envied.

Macrobiotic diet, ground broccoli stems, perhaps healthy, but dull, beige food at a Bahamas Paradise Island yoga retreat, warped my taste buds. I sneaked out, caught a ride on runabout boat, crossing back to Nassau, dining Graycliff ‘s five-star restaurant, watching a Texas table of six flip their plates to learn where they had been manufactured. Housed in a 1740 mansion, the setting was the opposite of the yoga retreat’s fare. Entertainment, the other diners provided while I savored the last drop of conch soup, a restaurant’s specialty. Sublime was my conclusion. Of course, Gourmet had been my guide, telling me how superb the restaurant. Accurate they were.

Back home in Portland, I veered from Gourmet’s recipes, baking eggplant using another food magazine’s guidance, only to serve what has become known among friends, as dried dinner disks. Next, my Thanksgiving dinner guests tolerated Peking Turkey, a recipe from another source. That was enough. I never left Gourmet again.

Each month the brown wrappers continued to arrive.

A cross country lover visited, an ideal time to make caponata. Love making ceased while I added more olive oil to the eggplant. That’s what the recipe said to do — -not about the lovemaking, of course, but likely the recipe author would have understood and condoned.

A couple of decades passed. Julia Child, Marcella Hazen, James Beard and a host of other culinary kings and queens consumed print real estate on my cookbook shelves. Perla Meyers encouraged me to wear boots, look tall and thin as she did on her cookbook cover, carrying home fresh vegetables. Anthony Bourdain’s show introduced me to his staff’s Mexican grandmothers, cooking in small country villages. Lesser known names guided me to cook and serve Japanese and Indian treats. Fine, but only if Gourmet would give its approval, I thought.

Laurie Colvin, a novelist, but ultimate food writer and observer, neared being an idol, I determined as I consumed her column. The Sterns continued traveling the country, telling us of the best back of the barn barbeque place in Nebraska, the only crab shack worth visiting in Maryland. I couldn’t get enough.

And then it was no more. Closed. The end. No more to be.

I miss Gourmet.

No shortage of recipes exists these days. Nor is there a cookbook shortage. In fact, the opposite has occurred with everyone and his or her best buddy writing books, doing food podcasts, or television series. But I didn’t read Gourmet to find a recipe for this evening’s dinner. I read Gourmet because it transported me to another life. It took me around the world, to new cuisines, to meet folk I’d never heard of, fixing and eating foods I could hardly imagine. It took me to a life I didn’t live every day.

Snooty, some said. And what’s the problem with that, I ask. What, really, does that mean? Maybe it wouldn’t hurt most of us to find a new way of thinking about whatever?

Ruth Reichl, Gourmet’s last editor told us about the magazine’s final days. I read her book, pretending it was fiction. I didn’t want to accept the truth of Gourmet’s doors closing. I still long for my early days of food porn.

Some things I miss really aren’t things. They are people.

Here are two.

One is my old friend, Bob. Tall, lanky, extra teeth crowding his jaws, he was a Texan, transplanted from Kansas. Sporting an easy smile, he was the consummate salesmen, the old kind, the kind you could trust. He loved his customers, driving miles every week, selling the achievement tests that no school child liked but administrators loved. He wanted the tests to be well written, to measure what they were supposed to measure. He knew not every kid was above average.

After a week of driving miles across and around Texas, he returned home to his family, tidied up his expense reports on Saturday morning, sang in the Sunday church choir and hit the road again on Monday morning.

Bob’s efforts won a huge state contract, one that changed my life, as I was hired to manage it. With my carryon, I recall struggling down Austin’s airport carpeted plank, the first time I met him. There he, his bald head above everyone else, standing next to the man who would become my boss, ready to shake my hand and welcome me to the company. He never failed to be supportive to me, to answer questions, to give the right kind of guidance, and of course, tease me endlessly.

“You take that boy home with you last night, Barbara?” The boy had been a man older than I who had whisked me around Austin’s Broken Spoke dance floor, the oldest dance hall in the town. The plate sized silver belt buckle he wore was like none I’d seen, dazzled and befuddled I was by the whole experience.

Visiting school districts, Bob and I drove across Texas together during Blue Bonnet season. As usual, he waxed on and accurately, about the beauty of the landscape, I knew he understood Texas with its various foibles, much like most of us and places. He listened to my laments and too often, tears about my hapless love life. My woes were foreign to him as he’d been in a living for years in a loving relationship, but he listened. At the right times, he offered advice.

Holidays came. I’d be alone but there’d be a call from Bob. “Just wanted to check in and see how you’re doing,” he’d say. He’d tell me what he and Nadene and the boys were doing.

Oh, he was special. Enough that I flew half-way across the country to celebrate a major birthday he had. When he wrote, telling of his diagnosis, that he had a serious case of dementia, I went into denial. Surely, he and his doctors would find a cure for it. Bob always had a solution for whatever the problem was. But no, such was not the case as I discovered when I visited him and Nadene at their lakeside house.

Looking past him, seeing the cows drinking from the lake, I didn’t want to face him. The dynamic salesman who had charmed and guided numerous school boards, administrators, and teachers toward the best assessment procedures any company could offer, he looked weak. Not the Bob I knew and respected so much. He couldn’t recall where I had lived, needed help from Nadene on basic skills. Where had my friend gone?

Years later, I still miss him.

If I knew he would answer, I’d email him frequently. I’d ask him what he and Nadene were doing, what fish he’d caught recently, and about his grandchildren. I’d tell him about my travels, my garden in Mexico, a character I’ve developed for a new fiction piece.

Most of all, I’d tell him how much I miss him.

Charlie, Charlie, where are you?

I want you to listen to me. No, you don’t need to give me any advice, I’ll figure it out on my own and I won’t listen to it any way. You know that.

I know that when I tell you about what you call my latest escapade, you’ll let air escape through your teeth, murmuring “I don’t know, I just don’t know how you do it.”

When I went to Kazakhstan, Charlie sent me Peets coffee which he knew I loved. Along with it came other food items and for some unknown reason, Crisco. Despite his Southern roots, I never knew Charlie to use Crisco. Neither did I but there it was in his care package to me.

Charlie, if you were still here, this is what I know would happen.

You’d listen to me tell you about my friend whose contractor took her kitchen make-over money, went bankrupt, leaving her to finish the kitchen, doing an excellent job I must say, herself. You’d listen to me recount my experience with the Jinan, China guy I’d never seen, arrive in a class I was teaching, him telling me he was prepared to take the final exam. You’d groan when I tell you how I forgot to add baking soda or some ingredient, creating a culinary disaster shortly before a dinner party of ten arrived.

I’d listen to you tell me how you’re going to have your wall sized Falstaff painting reframed. I would grimace silently as you share spending more money to have your tiny backyard redone — -yet again. I’d try to talk you into another reading marathon like the one we did of Saul Bellow’s work, decades ago.

You’d recount your first-class flight to New York, visiting the ballet as part of your bucket list, and staying in the Warwick Hotel where I once left my favorite pair of burgundy heels. We’d have a second single malt Scotch as we caught up on the latest theater, jazz, or book of interest. While you held far more historical knowledge than I, we’d dissect every political move of these last few sad years, ones you could not have fathomed for the US and world.

Yes, Charlie, I miss you.

My burgundy suit.

Some days you just feel grouchy. Management grouchy. You’ve had enough of employees giving excuses for why a deadline hasn’t been met or why an expenditure is way over budget. Maybe it’s a client who has irked you the wrong way, never acknowledging all the hoops you and your team have jumped through to manufacture their products to unknown specs, fielded off inspectors when … or…

Those are the days I miss my burgundy two-piece suit.

I looked great in that suit. Fit me perfectly, like a glove but not too tight. It felt good when I put my right hand on my left sleeve, just above the elbow, and ran it all the way down to a gold bracelet I wore. The suit was solid, good wool, perfect coloring, exact measurements to fit my shape. Kick pleat in the back, two pockets in the straight skirt, just the right size for putting a post-it note or a few keys inside to keep from losing them. Waist band-exact size. Smooth zipper.

Its jacket with lapels had three, never used buttons down the front. Length just long enough to cover my back end appropriately.

Solid, rich color.

When I put that suit on, with no words I said “hang on, world. Here I come!” I was ready. Don’t get in my way. I’ve got actions to take and places to go, I told myself. Yes, I’ll smile while I wear the suit but my donning it means business and, in this case, it means I want the business done my way, when, where, and how I want it done. Now!

Geez, I miss that suit.

Why did I get rid of it? I don’t remember. Maybe because the shiny seat was assuming mirror like quality? Now I’d fret about sending it on to charity — -who would wear it? Would the fabric end up in some used clothes heap in Nigeria or Cambodia, nothing anyone there would wear, further endangering their textile industry?

Superwoman I was in that suit, like the perfect young woman executive I aspired to be…ready to leap tall buildings with a single bound…even in stilettos. Well, I was…that. I liked the way I looked. I liked how I felt, capable, industrious, knowledgeable. I didn’t say all-knowing.

With that suit, I wore burgundy leather medium height heels, sling backs, easy on and off if I needed to rest my feet under my desk while I continued phone conversations. Pantyhose, what almost no one remembers now, held everything firmly in place, making me admire my own profile. Gag, you say…get over yourself. Ok, right but you do the best you can, you know, when you’ve got a big project to manage and little support to do it. You may work for a Fortune 500 company but if they can’t provide the software to keep a budget straight, then you’ve got to be pretty nimble and a fast verbal dancer to keep it all together. A well-designed burgundy suit can help.

Get another one, you say.

Have never seen another like it and somehow, I think even a custom made one would not give me the energy that one had. It practically walked, talked, and managed on its own, regardless of whether I wore a spaghetti strap camisole under it or a blouse with a soft silk bow covering my throat. A second reason I don’t get one is that I don’t need one now. I don’t manage much besides myself these days and a burgundy suit, regardless of how well tailored it is, isn’t going to make much difference. Another reason is that I have learned a few additional management techniques, ones that allow me to manage in different ways.

But I still miss that suit.

11:35 pm with my night time buddies

Red, blue, purple, gray, glitzy curtains opened and there he stood, smiling, walking toward me. Five nights a week. At 11:35 pm.

I may have finished work, may have been drinking and dancing at the local bar, but I was always home in time to go to bed with Johnny Carson. Yeah, yeah, I know — only in my dreams.

I’d discovered his predecessor, Jack Paar, when I was in high school. Homework done, my mother soundly asleep upstairs, I settled in with Jack. Just us. His show introduced me to the nighttime entertainment industry, though I was little impressed with many of actors. But Jack, I enjoyed.

Years passed and I watched television rarely, focusing intently on my studies and work. Somewhere along the way, I rediscovered The Tonight Show…now with Johnny at the helm.

Jay Leno, David Letterman, Joan Rivers, Robin Williams, and numerous other comedians raised their comedic wings with Johnny sitting to their left. If he called them to join him, their career was made.

More years passed. As Bette Midler sang a heart rendering farewell song to him, I and the nation cried. We didn’t want to see him go. Instead of “Here’s Johnny”, now we welcomed Jay Leno. For more than a dozen years, Jay quipped, charmed, and kept us watching night after night.

And then his turn came to say farewell. Another set of heart wrenching tears.

Jimmy Fallon took over, showing us that he could play games, dance, and exhibit a host of talented skills. I can watch him, not just at 11:35 pm but any time I choose, easily via TIVO, YouTube or other online locations. But it’s not the same. While I am not a creature of many habits or routines, I did like having my day focused around 11:35 pm.

I miss it. I miss cuddling with Jack, Johnny, and Jay, my late-night television buddies.

As Julie Andrews might have sung…these were a few of my favorite things.