Excerpt
The following is an excerpt from the book The United States of Arugula
by David Kamp
Published by Broadway Books; September 2006;$26.00US/$35.00CAN;
0-7679-1579-8
Copyright © 2006 David Kamp
Chapter Seven
The New Sun-Dried Lifestyle
"What Dean & Deluca did was give the food market a clean artistry that
made
it very now, very tied into the moment when SoHo was being noticed," says
Florence Fabricant, the New York Times food-beat scoopmeister, who wrote
about the store nearly from its inception. "Jack Ceglic was responsible
for
a lot of that, the industrial look. And Giorgio and Joel were really
fanatic
about ferreting out product. It all tied together. And the other im****tant
thing they tapped into was the need for prepared foods."
Indeed, the time had at last arrived when it was socially and economically
acceptable for young professionals -- and even harried moms in the
suburbs -- to take home freshly prepared entrées, along with salads and
sides purchased by the pound. In an earlier era, prepared foods were
problematic: they seemed too fancy and expensive (as Jean Vergnes found
out
during his brief experiment with Stop & Shop in the sixties), and, for
women, they seemed a cop-out, a betrayal of their domestic duties. But
with
more women in the professional workforce and more people amenable to the
general idea of "gourmet" eating, especially if it had the imprimatur of a
prestigious shop like Dean & DeLuca or E.A.T., prepared foods started to
take off -- Rob Kaufelt, who grew up in the supermarket business and now
runs Murray's, the beloved New York cheese store, calls the rise of
prepared
foods "the biggest change in the grocery-store business over the last
thirty
years."
Dean & DeLuca's secret weapon in this regard was Felipe Rojas-Lombardi,
who
for a time was a partner in the store with the namesake owners and Ceglic.
Peruvian by birth, Rojas-Lombardi had come to Dean & DeLuca by way of the
James Beard Cooking School, where he'd risen up through the ranks to
become
the master's right-hand man in the kitchen. Rojas-Lombardi had also worked
as New York magazine's in-house chef, their go-to man for testing recipes.
This pedigree proved helpful not only in eliciting constant plugs for the
store in Beard's syndicated column and in New York but in the fact that
Rojas-Lombardi was a skilled, inventive cook: he roasted chickens
tandoori-style, grilled salmon on cedar planks, and went out on a limb
with
such oddball entrées as elk steak and his notorious rabbit with forty
cloves
of garlic. "Felipe did some of the first pasta salads that people had ever
seen," says Ceglic. "He did everything with the products we sold, and
people
cottoned to it."
"The idea was that if you didn't know what a sun-dried tomato was, well,
here it was, in a pasta salad," said Dean.
The third point in New York's prepared-foods triangle, with Dean & DeLuca
downtown and E.A.T. serving the Upper East Side, was the Silver Palate, a
tiny shop on the Upper West Side, on what was then a drab stretch of
Columbus Avenue. The Silver Palate's genesis lay in a mid-seventies
catering
company called The Other Woman, a single-person operation run by Sheila
Lukins, a young mother of two who cooked out of her apartment on Central
Park West. As her company's name and slogan ("So discreet, so delicious,
and
I deliver") suggested, Lukins's clientele was mostly male: professional
men
who wanted their dinner parties catered but not in an inordinately fussy,
Edith Whartonian fa****on.
Lukins was a self-taught cook, more or less -- she had taken a course at
the
London Cordon Bleu while she and her husband lived there, but "it was the
dilettante course," she says. Her greatest inspiration was not Child and
company's Mastering the Art of French Cooking but the more practical, less
labor-intensive recipes of Craig Claiborne's New York Times cookbooks and
his Sunday pieces for the Times Magazine. Lukins's cooking was eclectic
but
somehow all of a piece -- aspirational comfort food: moussaka, lasagna,
ratatouille, stuffed grape leaves, and the quintessential Lukins dish,
Chicken Marbella, the quartered bird baked after a long soak in a
Mediterranean-style marinade of oil, vinegar, garlic, prunes, olives, and
capers.
While running The Other Woman Catering Company, Lukins became acquainted
with Julee Rosso, a young professional who worked in the advertising
division of Burlington Mills, the textile company. Rosso had attended many
events catered by Lukins, and was so impressed that one day, she hit up
Lukins with a proposal. "She said, 'So many women are working late now.
What
if we opened up a shop for them?'" Lukins remembers. The two went into
business as the Silver Palate in the summer of 1977, with Lukins as the
cook -- carting food over from her apartment several times a day to the
then
kitchenless store -- and Rosso as the marketer and front-woman.
"It was a big deal for two women to go into business together in 1977,"
says
Lukins, who thinks this angle helped the shop get press coverage almost as
fawning and widespread as Dean & DeLuca's. Zabar was the odd man out where
press was concerned. E.A.T. was flouri****ng, and it offered an even more
extensive and dazzling line of prepared foods than the Silver Palate, but
the proprietor's truculence precluded him from ever being a press
favorite,
a cir***stance that only got worse in the eighties, when he let loose on
the
writer Julie Baumgold, the wife of New York's then editor Edward Kosner,
for
trying to return some item she'd purchased. ("I told her to go ****
herself,
'cause there was nothing wrong with it," Zabar says.)
"Eli's a great merchandiser, and his shop was always spectacular, but I
don't think he liked us at all," says Lukins. "I think he thought we
copied
him -- and we didn't. I mean, we were one tiny corner of his shop! But we
got the publicity and the good reviews." Within a year of its opening, the
Silver Palate was selling its own product line at Saks Fifth Avenue,
including such items as winter fruit compote, Damson plums in brandy, and
blueberry vinegar.
Four years later, The Silver Palate Cookbook was published by Workman and
became the cookbook of the eighties, not just in Manhattan but throughout
the United States. More disciplined and earthbound than The Moosewood
Cookbook, yet less intimidating and grown-up than the two volumes of
Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Lukins and Rosso's book was perfect
for
have-it-all, multitasking baby boomers who wanted to cook well but not all
the time. Its introduction recalled the state of affairs that led the two
ladies to their decision to open their shop: a new era in which women
found
themselves juggling "school schedules, business appointments, political
activities, art projects, sculpting cl*****, movie going, exercising,
theater, chamber music concerts, tennis, squash, weekends in the country
or
at the beach, friends, family, fund raisers, books to read, [and]
shopping,"
and yet were still compelled "to prepare creative, well-balanced meals and
the occasional dinner party at home." The Silver Palate lifestyle offered
two solutions: you could use Lukins and Rosso's recipes, or buy their
products and prepared foods.
The very emergence of the word "lifestyle" in the late seventies signaled
a
progression in America's food culture. Stylish living wasn't just for
wealthy boulevardiers anymore, but for anyone who considered himself
upwardly mobile -- and eating, cooking, and food-shopping were about as
lifestylish as things got. In 1976, when The New York Times expanded from
two to four sections a day, introducing a new daily business section and a
rotating fourth section devoted to soft news and service journalism, the
first two "fourth sections" to appear were Weekend (on Fridays) and the
Living section (on Wednesdays), both of which had a heavy food component.
The Weekend section carried the restaurant-review column, which ran longer
and held greater weight than it had when Claiborne introduced the column
in
the early sixties. Whereas Claiborne's early columns were often roundups,
devoting just a blurb or a short paragraph to each restaurant, the new
version evaluated no more than two restaurants at a time, with much more
intimate, first-person critiques by the Times' new reviewer, Mimi
Sheraton.
The Living section was even more gastronomically inclined, with shopping
news and product evaluations from Florence Fabricant; a wine column by
Frank
Prial (a metro-desk re****ter who happened to be an oenophile); health and
nutrition news from Jane Brody; recipes, essays, and travelogues from
Claiborne; and a new column by Pierre Franey, bylined at last, called
"60-Minute Gourmet." Arthur Gelb, who was put in charge of the new culture
sections by the paper's executive editor, Abe Rosenthal, had wanted to
appeal to time-strapped upwardly mobile home cooks by running a column
called "30-Minute Gourmet"; Gelb and his wife, Barbara, had been impressed
by Franey's ability to whip up quick, simple, delicious meals in the
Hamptons -- flounder in a butter sauce, say, or ****k chops with capers --
after a long day of fi****ng.
But Franey was still too much of a purist to limit himself to thirty
minutes. (Like a lot of chefs, he was also made queasy by the word
"gourmet"
and preferred the title "60-Minute Chef," but he yielded to Gelb on that
matter.) The first "60-Minute Gourmet" column featured a recipe for
crevettes "margarita" -- an invention of Franey's that called for shrimp
to
be cooked in a sauce of tequila, shallots, and cream, with avocado slices
tossed in at the end -- and began with a statement of intent (written by
Claiborne) that declared, "With inventiveness and a little planning, there
is no reason why a working wife, a bachelor, or a husband who likes to
cook
cannot prepare an elegant meal in under an hour."
Excerpted from The United States of Arugula: How We Became a Gourmet
Nation
by David Kamp Copyright © 2006 by David Kamp. Excerpted by permission of
Broadway, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of
this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing
from the publisher.
Author
David Kamp has been a writer and editor for Vanity Fair and GQ for more
than
a decade. He lives in New York.
For more information, please visit www.davidkamp.com.
|
