Gourmet Today (2009) — Broiled Tofu with Cilantro Pesto
Ruth Reichl, alternative pesto, and the slow death of print media.
Nick still calls almost weekly when he shops, and the surprises keep coming. A few days ago, he phoned to ask if I had a recipe for ramps. Ramps! If he wants to buy organic vegetables, he has options; just about every conventionally raised vegetable in the supermarket has an organic counterpart… These changes, of course, didn’t happen overnight, but the transformation has been so gradual that I had to see the supermarket through Nick’s eyes in order to open my own. Strolling up and down the aisles with him, I began to understand what it all means. These changes reflect the ongoing revolution in the American kitchen…
When Nick and his friends think about what they want to cook, they consider issues to which no previous generation gave a second thought. They are seriously ethical eaters, conscious of the impact that food has on both their bodies and the environment. In deciding what’s for dinner, they think about sustainability, ask questions about where the food comes from, and take both food safety and carbon footprint into account. They try to eat seasonally and locally, and many of them are vegetarians…
You may not be a vegetarian, but so many Americans are now eschewing meat that even the most dedicated carnivore is forced to occasionally cook a vegetarian meal. And so we have included a vegetarian main-course chapter, along with dozens of other recipes to make satisfying meatless meals. — Ruth Reichl, in the introduction to Gourmet Today
When Gourmet Magazine’s editor-in-chief Ruth Reichl made these observations about her son’s generation’s relationship to cooking, she had no idea her professional life was about to (temporarily) crash and burn. Gourmet Today, a brick of a book with “hundreds of all-new recipes for every budget and occasion,” was published on September 22, 2009. Thirteen days later, Conde Nast announced it would close Gourmet forever, and Reichl, along with hundreds of other people, would be unemployed. Reichl had envisioned that Gourmet Today would propel the venerated food magazine, which had published its first issue before Pearl Harbor, into the future. Instead it would be its obituary.
At the time, I remember being shocked about Gourmet’s sudden death. During Reichl’s tenure, starting in 1999, Gourmet had transformed its reputation from stuffy and archaic to something approaching fashionable. It was the first food magazine I read, the first I subscribed to, and the first piece of food media that made me excited to learn how to cook. Reichl, coming off a stint as the New York Times restaurant critic, understood that for cooking to be interesting for young, single urbanites with a little bit of disposable income and a pile of takeout menus in their kitchen drawer, recipes had to be in conversation with the food being served in the trendy restaurants where those same young people (I won’t say the h-word) coveted a Friday night reservation.
Magazines, by dint of being published monthly or weekly, had to be topical to survive. So Gourmet made recipes timely, urgent. The same ingredients (ramps!) that were being served everywhere from the West Village to Williamsburg were integrated into the recipes published in the magazine. Much like how Vogue would tell you where to buy an off-the-rack version of the collections being shown at Bryant Park, Gourmet would show you how to make an off-the-rack version of what was being made at Marlow & Sons and Ssam Bar. 2004’s Spaghetti with Ramps and 2008’s Ramp Soup (notice the minimalist, pre-social media recipe titles) both made it into Gourmet Today, as illustrative of the era as Von Dutch trucker hats.
But the trendiness and specificity (ramps grow wild only in April from roughly New York to West Virginia, and that’s about it) that made Gourmet so exciting led to its demise. Gourmet was a national magazine, and the content that excited my friends in Brooklyn was alienating and useless to most of its audience. It was still a magazine, a print magazine, and the majority of its readership was older, more conservative, and geographically diverse. Food was hyperlocal and hyperpersonal, especially before the flattening of regional culture caused by the social media explosion of the last two decades. For most people food was decidedly not fashionable, instead it was bound by custom, habit, and necessity. How do I get dinner on the table quickly? How do I stretch my budget so I can eat well all week? What can I make that my husband, parents, and children will all agree on? Gourmet, headquartered in Midtown Manhattan by a bunch of people who had made food their lives, overestimated the public’s interest in the new and unfamiliar. Subscriptions stagnated, ad revenue went down.
After the financial crisis, things got more dire. Conde Nast CEO Charles Townsend, after consulting with the angels at McKinsey, decided Gourmet would have to close in order “to navigate the company through the economic downturn and to position us to take advantage of coming opportunities." Can you imagine talking like this? A bunch of psychotic freaks.
Most people thought Condé’s sacrificial lamb was going to be its other food magazine, the slightly more downmarket checkout counter stalwart Bon Appetit. Back then, Bon Appetit was the Cosmopolitan to Gourmet’s Vogue. But, even though Bon Appetit had little cultural caché among the media elite—it’s offices at the time weren’t even at 4 Times Square, they were in mid-city Los Angeles—it had a bigger circulation and better ad sales. So Gourmet and Reichl were out.
A month later, in November 2009, I walked onto a JetBlue flight from Oakland to JFK. I was about to fly home after visiting my parents in Berkeley. My dad was sick with cancer, and I didn’t know how much time I’d have left with him. I wasn’t in the best mood, having to fly back to New York to work my hotel concierge job on Thanksgiving instead of spending it with my family. As I was maneuvering my way back to seat 34B or wherever, I noticed an older woman with a mane of thick brown hair sitting by herself in business class. Maybe I was projecting (or maybe my memory is dramatizing for effect) but she looked even more exhausted and despondent than I felt.
I thought it was her, but I wasn’t sure. I had been obsessively following the Gourmet drama, and had brought the final issue (November 2009) with me to Berkeley to cook a few things for my parents. So maybe I was hallucinating. Luckily, I had a random, quirky way to find out if I was actually sharing a plane with Ruth Reichl. I didn’t want to accost her in her seat after what was surely one of the worst months of her life. So I whipped out my iPhone 3 and logged on to a brand new social media app called Twitter. Reichl had recently become a prolific and easily parodied Twitter star.
I don’t think I yet understood the concept of a DM, and I definitely hadn’t grasped the potential danger of doxxing a niche food celebrity. Years later, when I bumped into Molly Baz et bébé at a certain Highland Park hotspot, I would be more discreet.
@ruthreichl are you on a jet blue flight from Oakland to JFK?
(I have to recall her reply from memory, since I was only able to download my own Twitter archive.)
@ruckerbry leave me alone
@ruthreichl yes! Visiting fam in Berkeley. Made jambalaya from Nov Gourmet. Loved it. Happy tgiving!
@ruckerbry die f*g
Just kidding. Just kidding. She was very sweet, despite my invading her privacy and mentioning something that must have been a raw wound for her. If you want to read more about this chapter in food media history, I highly recommend Reichl’s 2019 memoir Save Me The Plums. If, for some reason you’re here and haven’t read all of Reichl’s memoirs, do it, she’s the best in the biz.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t make “ramp soup” or “ramp spaghetti” because it’s already June and we don’t even get ramps on the west coast. But I made something else that is very very green. Broiled Tofu with Cilantro Pesto. If the 1990s were the decade of pesto, the 2000s were the decade of alternative pesto. Any herb, oil, and nut combo would do. Broiled tofu (anything broiled, really) feels very aughties as well. We were all rediscovering our ovens after two decades of grilling and stir-frying. Roasted vegetables came back in a big way during the decade, and what’s broiling but roasting on high, beneath a flame, in that weird, small drawer under the normal part of the oven.
While I would argue that this is less a “pan-Asian” dish than a “hardly-at-all Asian” dish, I will agree with Dame Reichl that the cilantro-pine nut sauce is quite sassy. The version that appears in Gourmet Today’s Vegetarian Main Courses chapter is an adaptation of a recipe from a 2004 issue of the magazine. The original version uses fish sauce instead of soy sauce, though it does mention the possible substitution if you want to keep it veg.
I had almost two tablespoons of pine nuts in the fridge left over from my long-ago Greens pappardelle, so I threw in a few walnuts as well. The rest of the pesto I made as written, except I think I forgot to put the sugar in. Whatever, you don’t need it. I’m going to confess I didn’t broil the tofu. If you had my oven you wouldn’t broil it either unless you wanted it to take 45 minutes, be raw on one side and completely black on the other. Instead, I roasted the slices at 500° until they were totally cooked through, losing most of their moisture and just starting to brown. Then I dry-fried them (thanks Thug Kitchen!) for a few minutes in a non-stick pan. They turned out perfectly firm, just shy of crunchy. The pesto is bright, without much to dim the cilantro’s pungency. The sesame oil and soy sauce add enough umami that you won’t miss the trad-pesto garlic or parmesan. I’d probably throw in a serrano if I made it again.
The recipe says to serve with rice. I was all ready to cook up some quinoa instead, just to keep going with the 2000s vibe and make everything even more pan and less Asian. But we already had leftover coconut risotto and string hopper pilau from Kurrypinch, a Sri Lankan place in East Hollywood, in the fridge. Miraculously, everything sort of worked together.
I have a jungle of cilantro in my garden that needs a purpose. I’ll give this a try.