A Gourmet Experience
In the morning quiet at our home in the Sierra Foothills, there is a movie playing in my head. I’m in New York City on a brilliant, sunny morning, walking down 7th Avenue toward Times Square. In the pocket of my long black winter coat, my gloved hand clutches a folded masthead page torn out of the March 2001 issue of Gourmet magazine—a collector’s edition devoted entirely to “The Paris you need to know; also 75 pages of recipes, tastes, and tales of the city.”
After taking the reigns as Gourmet’s editor in chief in 1999, Ruth Reichl, former NYTimes food critic, gave the culinary magazine new life. When I became a subscriber in the early 1980s, I was living with Kit, two teenagers, a dog, and two cats in an 800-square foot cottage in Los Angeles with a 1920s kitchen so small the refrigerator was in the adjoining pantry. It was hardly a dream kitchen, but it is where I recreated my mother’s recipes enhanced by new ideas from the pages of Gourmet. Mom’s great 1950s meatloaf now included a dash of horseradish as well as cottage cheese, and my potatoes were boiled and mashed with a clove or three of garlic a la Gourmet.
Under Reichl’s brilliant editorship, I began reading each issue from cover to cover and saved them all. When Gourmet’s March 2001 Paris collector’s edition arrived, I was captured by her Letter from the Editor entitled “A Little Black Magic.” It told the story of a black dress from Saint Laurent’s second collection for Dior in 1959 that Reichl had tried on in an elegant vintage dress shop in the Palais Royal the prior October when she and her staff were researching the Paris issue. She explains—
We were very busy between meals. We tasted cheeses, rented bikes, looked at art…and tried on dresses. Each of us came home richer.
In my early morning reverie, I recall a conversation with Ms. Reichl that took place in Manhattan soon after the Paris issue came out. Soon I was flooded with the magic I felt while on trips to Paris with Kit over the years. On our first visit, we stayed in a tiny apartment on Rue de Saintonge in the 3rd arrondissement—one of five neighborhoods described in “The Paris of Parisians,” an article by Catharine Reynolds in the March 2001 Collectors’ Paris issue.
As a geographer and writer myself, I was eager to tell Ms. Reichl how much I appreciated the food essays she included in each issue of Gourmet by writers who included Pat Conroy, Richard Ford, Diane Johnson, M.F.K. Fisher, Paul Theroux, Annie Proulx, Jane and Michael Stern, Madhur Jaffrey and Laurie Colwin. Their food essays provided Gourmet’s readers with a rich compendium of food and travel essays as they shared their memories of exquisite meals and experiences in far flung places.
But back to the movie in my head. New York City, 2001. I walk alone from our hotel to Times Square. Arriving at 42ndStreet I find myself beneath flashing billboards on perpetual sensory overload. In the density of the moment and intensity of the place, I finally find 4 Times Square—the address of Gourmet Publications on the folded page in my pocket.
Then, the movie becomes real. Inside Condé Nast’s cavernous lobby, I walk directly up to the security desk. “I’m here to see Ruth Reichl,” I announce confidently. And like magic, the guard picks up the phone and calls Gourmet’s receptionist.
Moments later, Ms. Reichl’s assistant Robin is on the phone, invites me up for coffee and then takes me on a tour of Gourmet’s test kitchen. Forty-five minutes later, I’m in Ms. Reichl’s office. Instantly recognizable by her gorgeous explosion of curly black hair, she stares at me in a Novocain haze, still numb from a root canal procedure earlier that morning. I thank her for seeing me and promise to stay only five minutes.
As my early morning reverie draws to a close, I am back in the present, if only for a moment. I pick up Reichl’s new book, “A Paris Novel” and begin reading. Instantly, I am transported to Paris, 1983. Curiously, I feel like I’ve read the opening scenario before. I’m sure of it. And yet this is the first time I’ve had the book in my hands. Searching my kitchen library, I find a copy of Gourmet’s 2001 Paris collector’s edition and open to Reichl’s “Letter from the Editor.” There I find “A Little Black Magic”—her tale of a little black dress she discovered in a vintage Paris shop.
As Reichl and her staff researched the issue over two decades ago, they experienced and wrote about all that was Paris then. Now as I dive into her book, I’m transported back to that elegant dress shop in the Palais Royal where I’m trying on a little black dress—the same one Stella finds waiting for her in Reichl’s “The Paris Novel.” The same one Reichl tried on in October 2000.
Like Stella, I smell lilac, rain, a hint of bitter chocolate in the small shop. Soft golden light enfolds me. And still lost in my reverie, the dress fits as if it had been made for me by Yves Saint Laurent in 1959. The experience was and remains pure magic.