dropped me back at
Newsweek
in a cab that couldn’t have taken more than three minutes to cover the ten blocks downtown from La Côte Basque. It was time enough, however, for her to get to the point: “You could probably have this job if you want it,” she said. “But since you’ve never written about food or restaurants, you’ll have to do some tryout pieces. We’ll pay you for them, of course, and cover your expenses. The whole thing will be completely confidential. Are you interested?”
“Why not?” I replied.
Where was the harm? Why wouldn’t I want to eat out on the
Times
and get paid for my trouble, which amounted to writing three short pieces that couldn’t be spiked because they weren’t supposed to be printed? It all seemed like some surreal lark. I assumed the
Times
would never hire me.
I told my wife exactly that. And my colleague Charles Michener also told me exactly that. His Yale friend Bill Rice, who had professional food training and lots of food clips, was clearly a better candidate.
But we were both wrong.
A few weeks after the Côte Basque lunch, after I’d handed in two restaurant pieces and an interview with Piper Laurie, then the wife of
Newsweek
’s movie critic Joe Morgenstern, about her baking skills, Charlotte Curtis called me at home. I was in the Forty-second Street library checking citations for a book I’d translated from French to be called
Imperialism Now
. It was an updating of Lenin’s 1917 tract
Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism
written by a French economist of Maoist tendencies called Pierre Jalée. His previous book had been
The Pillage of the Third World
.
I had spent hundreds of hours at this task for a pittance, acquiring a transient competence in French financial lingo, including the French equivalents for “mutual fund” (
fonds communs de placement
) and “carbon black” (
le carbon black
). My publisher was a Nigerian, and his firm was called Third Press. I’d met him at a party and agreed to translate the Jalée book so that I could tell my lefty friends from Harvard, who accused me of selling out to the capitalist press, that I worked for
Newsweek
to support my Maoist activities.
This is not what I told Curtis. When I called her back, she wanted to know why I was in the library. I made something up.
“Congratulations,” she said.
Pause.
“You are going to take the job, aren’t you?”
“Why not?”
* See Robert Alan Goldberg,
Back to the Soil: The Jewish Farmers of Clarion, Utah, and Their World
(University of Utah Press, 1986), pp. 67–68.
Two
The Ungastronomical Me
In the month I insisted on taking off before starting work at the
Times
, I spent much of each day worrying about what lay ahead. I knew I was about to take a blind leap. My wife wouldn’t let me forget that. She knew that I was radically, hopelessly unqualified for the job, because she was an excellent cook, and she knew me to be an enthusiastic novice, at best. If I really did go to the
Times
, the world would assume, or expect, that I was an expert, self-taught perhaps, but with years at the stove behind me. There’d be no way I could fake that, not for long. If people came to our house for dinner, did I expect Margaret to pretend I’d made the dinner she’d actually prepared?
I’m a journalist, I countered—an observer, not a participant. Does anyone care if Clive Barnes can dance? As the
Times
ballet critic, his pirouettes were verbal.
Yes, she snapped back, but he’d spent his life studying pirouettes and arabesques. He was an informed observer. I was hardly his equivalent in food.
In fact, my fears were largely unfounded. After an initial bit of hazing from a couple of TV reporters, I settled into the job and discovered that both
Times
readers and even food professionals were eager for a fresh voice. Also, I had a test cook to make sure that the recipes published under my name actually worked.
The
New Yorker
salutes me with a cartoon that
Newsweek
in a cab that couldn’t have taken more than three minutes to cover the ten blocks downtown from La Côte Basque. It was time enough, however, for her to get to the point: “You could probably have this job if you want it,” she said. “But since you’ve never written about food or restaurants, you’ll have to do some tryout pieces. We’ll pay you for them, of course, and cover your expenses. The whole thing will be completely confidential. Are you interested?”
“Why not?” I replied.
Where was the harm? Why wouldn’t I want to eat out on the
Times
and get paid for my trouble, which amounted to writing three short pieces that couldn’t be spiked because they weren’t supposed to be printed? It all seemed like some surreal lark. I assumed the
Times
would never hire me.
I told my wife exactly that. And my colleague Charles Michener also told me exactly that. His Yale friend Bill Rice, who had professional food training and lots of food clips, was clearly a better candidate.
But we were both wrong.
A few weeks after the Côte Basque lunch, after I’d handed in two restaurant pieces and an interview with Piper Laurie, then the wife of
Newsweek
’s movie critic Joe Morgenstern, about her baking skills, Charlotte Curtis called me at home. I was in the Forty-second Street library checking citations for a book I’d translated from French to be called
Imperialism Now
. It was an updating of Lenin’s 1917 tract
Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism
written by a French economist of Maoist tendencies called Pierre Jalée. His previous book had been
The Pillage of the Third World
.
I had spent hundreds of hours at this task for a pittance, acquiring a transient competence in French financial lingo, including the French equivalents for “mutual fund” (
fonds communs de placement
) and “carbon black” (
le carbon black
). My publisher was a Nigerian, and his firm was called Third Press. I’d met him at a party and agreed to translate the Jalée book so that I could tell my lefty friends from Harvard, who accused me of selling out to the capitalist press, that I worked for
Newsweek
to support my Maoist activities.
This is not what I told Curtis. When I called her back, she wanted to know why I was in the library. I made something up.
“Congratulations,” she said.
Pause.
“You are going to take the job, aren’t you?”
“Why not?”
* See Robert Alan Goldberg,
Back to the Soil: The Jewish Farmers of Clarion, Utah, and Their World
(University of Utah Press, 1986), pp. 67–68.
Two
The Ungastronomical Me
In the month I insisted on taking off before starting work at the
Times
, I spent much of each day worrying about what lay ahead. I knew I was about to take a blind leap. My wife wouldn’t let me forget that. She knew that I was radically, hopelessly unqualified for the job, because she was an excellent cook, and she knew me to be an enthusiastic novice, at best. If I really did go to the
Times
, the world would assume, or expect, that I was an expert, self-taught perhaps, but with years at the stove behind me. There’d be no way I could fake that, not for long. If people came to our house for dinner, did I expect Margaret to pretend I’d made the dinner she’d actually prepared?
I’m a journalist, I countered—an observer, not a participant. Does anyone care if Clive Barnes can dance? As the
Times
ballet critic, his pirouettes were verbal.
Yes, she snapped back, but he’d spent his life studying pirouettes and arabesques. He was an informed observer. I was hardly his equivalent in food.
In fact, my fears were largely unfounded. After an initial bit of hazing from a couple of TV reporters, I settled into the job and discovered that both
Times
readers and even food professionals were eager for a fresh voice. Also, I had a test cook to make sure that the recipes published under my name actually worked.
The
New Yorker
salutes me with a cartoon that
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