Alumni Association University of Michigan Winter 2010 : Page 29

LEANER TIMES When a major culinary magazine closed this fall, it affected the livelihoods of three prominent alumni food writers. Find out about them, and what they’re planning next.

Leaner Times

When a major culinary magazine closed this fall, it affected the livelihoods of three prominent alumni food writers. Find out about them, and what they’re planning next.

Michael Stern and Ruth Reichl knew each other in the film community at the University of Michigan in the late 1960s.

But it was food, not film, that brought the Michigan art history graduates back together.

Stern, co-author of the Roadfood book series, crossed paths again with Reichl in the 1980s when she was restaurant critic at the Los Angeles Times. They became colleagues in 1999 when Reichl took the helm of Gourmet magazine, where Stern began writing a monthly column with his then-wife, Jane Stern, in 1993.

The connections don’t stop there. Stern and Reichl share the Gourmet tie with a third U-M alum, Sara Moulton. All three worked for Gourmet before Conde Nast announced in October that it was closing down the venerable food magazine. The news left each of them reflecting on their time with publication and figuring out what’s next for them.

Michael Stern, ’68

Michael Stern was in California on assignment for Gourmet when one of the editors emailed with the news. Stern began trying to sort out the implications, including what he and Jane would do to replace one of their favorite standing gigs, writing a monthly column originally called “Two for the Road” and later renamed “Roadfood.”

Michael and Jane have written together since the 1970s and are three-time winners of a James Beard Foundation Award, an accolade described by some as the Oscar of the food world. They divorced in 2008 but continue as writing partners, an arrangement Michael treats as unremarkable, saying plainly, “We get two rooms now when we travel.”

The Sterns’ relationship with Gourmet began when Alice Gochman, one of Gourmet’s editors, asked, “Do you think you could write a story for us about a diner?” Becoming the kind of writers Gourmet might consider lowbrow food experts was the result of an a-ha moment years earlier.

Michael Stern studied art history at Michigan and, inspired by professor David Huntington, went on to study art at Yale University. There he met Jane Grossman, a fellow art student.
Jane earned an MFA in painting from Yale while Michael realized he didn’t love art as much without Huntington’s instruction. He left to pursue an MFA in film at Columbia University instead.

After graduation, the newlywed Sterns made a documentary, then a photo book, about long-haul truck drivers. CB radios were just becoming popular, so truck stop restaurants were the best way to meet truckers.

“We kept thinking we should get a guidebook to find the best places to go around the country,” Stern recalls. “We realized that guidebook didn’t exist.”

That idea launched the Roadfood empire— dozens of books, a Web site, events including the Roadfood Festival in New Orleans in late March—all celebrating local foods, from fish tacos in California to the pasties of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

The latest Roadfood book is “500 Things to Eat Before It's Too Late (and the Very Best Places to Eat Them).” I met Stern to share one of those 500 things, a doughnut at Coffee An’ in Westport, Connecticut.

We ordered several and shortly after we began sampling, the waitress came by to replace our chocolate twist with one hot from the kitchen. As the book warns, when fresh they are crispy and moist but “take home a bag and eat one the next morning: it’s like waking up in bed next to a stranger whose night-before appeal is perplexing.”

Proving the passion local foods stir, mail carrier Joe Koproski overheard our conversation and popped over to our table to discuss the cooking technique of Blackie’s Hot Dog Stand in nearby Cheshire, Connecticut, and the best dishes at Pasta Nostra in Norwalk, Connecticut.

Stern approaches food like a sociologist, exploring what a local dish says about the culture, including agricultural and ethnic influences. It’s as much about the experience of eating a food as the taste. “Food is more than just food. What interests me is food almost as folk art,” Stern says.

The secret code to finding these regional specialties isn’t asking for the best restaurant in town, which will likely lead you to a special-occasion restaurant locals rarely visit, but instead asking, “What food would you miss most if you moved away?”

What does Michael Stern miss about Ann Arbor? He submitted a column about Krazy Jim’s Blimpy Burger for Gourmet’s December issue—an issue that will never happen— because of his affection for the place as an undergrad.

“It wasn’t so much the greasy burger but the ambiance of it,” he says.

The self-employed Sterns are looking for a new home for the regular column they used to do for Gourmet, but “as freelancers, Jane and I are accustomed to a certain amount of job insecurity.”

Sara Moulton, ’81

As a student in Michigan’s Residential College, Sara Moulton toyed with numerous careers: doctor, lawyer, medical illustrator. Nothing clicked—except at her job at the now-closed Del Rio. She waitressed, then worked in the kitchen.

“I really learned a lot about cooking there,” Moulton says. “I learned how to make soup there.”

Meanwhile, her concerned mother, Elizabeth Moulton, stepped in. She wrote to legendary food figures Craig Claiborne and Julia Child to ask what her daughter should do to become a chef. Claiborne wrote back—Moulton still has the letter, which is like getting beginning acting advice from Meryl Streep—and at his suggestion, she applied to the Culinary Institute of America. She would graduate second in a class of 450.

Moulton and I met at Cookshop, a farmto- table restaurant in New York City. We swapped plates so I could try her garlicky pasta with clams while she sampled my pizza with blue cheese, pears and walnuts. Sharing food feels comfortable with the unpretentious Moulton, who peppers her speech with colorful language and for whom no topic seems off limits.

She talked openly about topics ranging from the challenges of losing her job at Gourmet after 25 years—the paperwork for her health care and 401(k), looking for a job in a down economy with a Manhattan mortgage—to her delayed graduation from Michigan. She should have graduated in 1974, but didn’t finish her thesis until 1975 and didn’t actually apply to graduate until 1981.

Food Network fans probably know Moulton as one of the channel’s first stars. But even as she hosted both “Cooking Live” and “Cooking Live Primetime” on the Food Network, she ran Gourmet’s dining room, hosting advertising clients, running cooking demonstrations and testing recipes.

After years working in numerous kitchens, Moulton ended up getting her start in TV thanks to Julia Child. She says her co-worker at a catering company in Massachusetts oversold her skills to Child, who offered Moulton not a volunteer gig but a job.

Moulton impersonated Child’s phone call, “Oh dearie, I’ve heard all about you and I hear you do food styling.”

“Of course I lied and said, ‘Yes, I’m very good,’” Moulton recalls. She bluffed her way through the presentation of Child’s dishes and began a 25-year friendship. “I learned so much from her not just about cooking, but about life.”

Working with Child helped Moulton get a behind-the-scenes job at “Good Morning America,” where eventually she moved on camera. Shortly thereafter, she got an audition for the fledgling Food Network, which she was sure she botched.

“I left and I thought, that’s it, my TV career is over,” Moulton says.

Lately Moulton is on a crusade: “My mission is to get middle America cooking again.” When her PBS series, “Sara’s Weeknight Meals,” was running, it built on the easy-to-prepare recipes in her second book, “Sara’s Secrets for Weeknight Meals.” She was on a photo shoot for her forthcoming “Sara Moulton’s Everyday Family Dinners” when she heard about Gourmet closing.

She practices what she preaches. Moulton says her family eats at home five nights a week, with favorite dishes including chicken or pork in a pan sauce with wine and garlic, simplified risotto that only adds broth twice instead of continuously, and fried rice as a vehicle for any leftovers.

She doesn’t have a show right now, but would love to get back on television, as it gives her the opportunity to teach. “I probably should have gone to school to be a teacher,” she says.

Ruth Reichl, ’68, MA’70

When Conde Nast announced it was closing Gourmet, foodies were shocked.

So was Editor in Chief Ruth Reichl, who posted on Twitter on the day of the announcement, “Thank you all SO much for this outpouring of support. It means a lot. Sorry not to be posting now, but I'm packing. We're all stunned, sad.”

Still, Reichl continued to crisscross the country for Gourmet. The hefty new “Gourmet Today” cookbook launched shortly before the magazine closed, and “Gourmet’s Adventures with Ruth” premiered on public television two weeks after, chronicling Reichl’s culinary travels around the world.

In an interview with Terry Gross on National Public Radio’s “Fresh Air,” Reichl talked about Gourmet’s “devoted, devoted readers,” and said, “I just couldn’t imagine that the magazine itself would go away.”

With Reichl promoting the new cookbook and television series and the intense interest in Gourmet’s demise, Publishers Weekly reported a bump in sales for “Gourmet Today.” Reichl told the New York Times Magazine that Conde Nast collects the royalties, adding, “I’m not making a penny. I did it as part of my job, and it’s a book I’m really proud of.”

Reichl earned a bachelor’s and master’s degree in art history at Michigan, but after graduation, food became her medium of expression. She was chef and co-owner of the Swallow Restaurant in Berkeley, California, from 1974 to 1977, then began ascending the ladder of food writing, including the LA Times, then the New York Times and Gourmet. She has collected four James Beard Awards, among other accolades.

Her first food book was “Mmmmm: A Feastiary” in 1972, which she followed with “Tender at the Bone,” “Comfort Me With Apples” and “Garlic and Sapphires.” Her latest book, “Not Becoming My Mother: and Other Things She Taught Me Along the Way,” is a memoir of her late mother’s life.

In November, Reichl was part of a panel discussion at the New York Public Library. Though the topic was New York’s food history, panelist and chef Dan Barber spoke what many in the audience were feeling. “I’m very sorry about the end of Gourmet,” he said, praising the magazine and Reichl personally for their influence on amateur and professional cooks alike. He said Reichl led Gourmet to a “new level of writing,” before asking what she’s doing now.

Reichl answered that she thinks there will be a second season of “Adventures with Ruth” and that the TV series “Diary of a Foodie” will continue. In the meantime, “I’m still on book tour,” she said, and “We have two more books in the can.”

I hoped to share a meal with one of the most influential women in food journalism, but when I approached her after the panel, she smiled and said, “I’m so tired of talking about it.”

She still has plenty to say about food, though. On the panel, she spoke of Americans’ tastes changing—to appreciate more spice and acidity, and to be willing to try new flavors.

“I’m very optimistic about the future of food in this country,” Reichl said.

An audience member asked about the rise of amateur food writing, from blogs to social media sites like Yelp, where anyone can submit a review, and what it means to pros like those formerly at Gourmet. Reichl responded, “It’s a fascinating time. … Restaurant critics have never been more closely read or held less power.”

- Colleen Newvine Tebeau,
MBA’05, is a freelance writer in New York City.

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