Hughes - Best Food Writing 2010

Table of Contents

Praise for the Best Food Writing series

An exceptional collection worth revisiting, this will be a surefire hit with epicureans and cooks.

Publishers Weekly, starred review

If youre looking to find new authors and voices about food, theres an abundance to chew on here.

Fascinating to read now, this book will also be interesting to pick up a year from now, or ten years from now.

Popmatters.com

Some of these stories can make you burn with a need to taste what theyre writing about.

Reflects not only a well-developed esthetic but also increasingly a perceptive politics that demands attention to agricultural and nutritional policies by both individuals and governments.

This is a book worth devouring.

The cream of the crop of food writing compilations.

The book captures the gastronomic zeitgeist in a broad range of essays.

There are a few recipes among the stories, but mostly its just delicious tales about eating out, cooking at home and even the politics surrounding the food on our plates.

The next best thing to eating there is.

Stories for connoisseurs, celebrations of the specialized, the odd, or simply the excellent.

Spans the globe and palate.

The perfect gift for the literate food lover.

ALSO EDITED BY HOLLY HUGHES

ALSO BY HOLLY HUGHES

by Holly Hughes

But Im already a Bon Apptit subscriber! I protest to the faceless woman at the other end of the phone line. I have years left on that subscription.

Then wed be happy to extend your Bon Appetit subscription to... [she checks her records]... the year 2025. A drecky 1970s pop single flashes into my mind: In the year twenty-five twenty-five, if man is still alive.... At that moment, I feel a desperate impulse to reach my arm through the telephone and inflict grievous bodily harm on that poor innocent customer service operator.

Look, Ive got nothing against Bon Appetit, I plead. Its a perfectly lovely magazine; thats why I already subscribe to it. Thats not the point. I want my Gourmet back.

A moment of silence at the other end, then a weary sigh. Yes, maam. I understand. Were hearing that from a lot of our customers.

I have the feeling that if Cond Nast had listened to its readers instead of high-priced business consultants, that landmark culinary magazinefounded in 1949would still be with us. (It still is alive, in factat least online.) I reckon that once management has paid top dollar for consultants, theyre pretty much obligated to follow that expensive advice, no matter how drastic. But stillterminate Gourmet? It just doesnt make sense.

THE DEATH KNELL of Gourmet hung gloomily over my head as I began reading for this 2010 collection. Was food writing a dying art, I wondered?

Yet the more I read, the more baffled I became. Maybe Im not one-hundred-percent subjectiveafter all, I spend a goodly amount of time every year trying to read all the food writing that is produced, in books, magazines, newspapers, and Web sites. (Best job ever.) Still, Ive been doing this for eleven years now, and from where I sit, food writing seems more robust than ever.

Reading the flurry of articles that came out right after the announcement, I saw that the Cond Nast executives who shuttered Gourmet were quick to blame the new media. The market for a culinary magazine has been steadily dwindling, they claimed, because readers nowadays generally pick up all their recipes on the internet. The very thought of this depressed me. And yet lo and behold, a few days later, I found my own teenage daughter sauntering into our kitchen, cradling her laptop, declaring that shed found a recipe for blondies to bake for her basketball team. Could the Cond Nast suits be onto something, I wondered?

Over the new few months, as her baking hobby flowered (or should I say floured?), the long row of cookbooks on our counter went untouched while she downloaded recipe after recipecupcakes, smore bars, snickerdoodles. But then her birthday came around, and lo and behold, she came home from a surprise birthday dinner loaded down with cute pastel-colored cookbooks, courtesy of her girlfriends (smart girls, to keep the stream of baked goods flowing). Shes been happily discovering new recipes out of them ever since.

The reality? Those quick-and-easy recipe sites could never be a satisfying replacement for Gourmet, not by a long shot. Sometimes we need the gorgeous photographs, the colorful writingand yes, the glossy ads to flip through. And the more I read, the more I sensed that serious foodies demand more than ever that a recipe be meticulously tested, as the Gourmet test kitchen did so superbly; they want at least a little write-up, to give the recipe context, to explain the foods history. I realized that it was time to add a new section to the book, The Recipe File, to compare and contrast different takes on this question, from Adam Gopniks essay on browsing through cookbooks (page 264), to Monica Bhides reflections on the value of simplicity in a recipe (page 294).

Its so easy to blame the internet for everythingthe death of good writing, the death of measured thought, the death of the printed word, blah blah blah. The truth is, a great deal of todays best food writing is being published online, on a proliferating number of serious food Web sites. With production costs eliminated (no paper, no printing press, no trucks hauling physical copies across the country), these sites can devote themselves to smart writing. With readers posting comments online, articles launch conversations; on timely topics, stories can be published immediately. My must-read list now includes chow.com, egullet.com, culinate.com, leitesculinaria.com, seriouseats.com, zesterdaily.com, among others. Nearly a dozen of the pieces selected for this years edition were published first on Web sitesand that doesnt even begin to dip into the crazy number of independent blogs out there, or the many online components posted by traditional print media.

Food writing has moved out of its ghetto, no longer confined to food magazines or the dining sections of newspapers (once referred to as the womens pages). Such general interest magazines as