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says Florence Fabricant, The New York Times food scooper, who has written about the store almost since its inception. “Jack Ceglic was responsible for a lot of that, the industrial look. And Giorgio and Joel were really fanatical about product research. It all tied together. The other big thing they took advantage of was the need for prepared foods.”

Indeed, the time had finally come when it was socially and economically acceptable for young professionals—and even suburban moms—to take home fresh appetizers, along with salads and side dishes bought by the pound. In an earlier era, prepared foods were a problem: They looked expensive and overpriced (as Jean Vergenis discovered during his brief experience with Stop & Shop in the 1960s), and, to women, they seemed like a betrayal of their homework. But with more women in the professional workforce and more people responding to the general idea of ​​”gourmet” dining, especially if it has a permit from a reputable store like Dean & DeLuca or EAT, deli is starting to take off – Rob Kaufelt, who grew up In the supermarket business and now runs Murray’s, a beloved New York cheese shop, he calls the advent of prepared foods “the biggest change in the grocery business over the past 30 years.”

Dean & DeLuca’s secret weapon in this regard was Felipe Rojas-Lombardi, who was for a while a partner in the shop with the namesakes and Ceglic. A Peruvian by birth, Rojas Lombardi came to Dean & DeLuca by way of the James Beard School of Cooking, where he rose through the ranks to become the right-hand man of the master in the kitchen. Rojas Lombardi has also served as a chef for New York Magazine, and her go-to guy for recipe testing. These proportions proved instrumental not only in obtaining steady store stoppers at Beard’s Column Joint and in New York but also in the fact that Rojas-Lombardi was a skilled and inventive cook: he grilled tandoori-style chicken and grilled salmon on cedar planks, and came out on one of End with exotic appetizers like elk steak and the infamous rabbit with forty cloves of garlic. “Felipe made some of the first pasta salads people ever saw,” says Ceglic. “He did it all with the products we sell, and people took it in cotton.”

“The idea was if you didn’t know what sun-dried tomatoes were, well, there they are, in pasta salad,” Dean said.

The third point in New York’s deli triangle, with Dean’s & DeLuca’s downtown and EAT serving the Upper East Side, was Silver Palate, a convenience store on the Upper West Side, on what was then a faded stretch of Columbus Avenue. The Silver Palate has its genesis in a mid-1970s catering company called The Other Woman, a one-man operation run by Sheila Lukens, a young mother of two who cooks from her Central Park West apartment. As her company’s name and motto suggested (“So discreet, so delicious, and I deliver”), Lukins’ clientele was predominantly male: professional men who wanted their own dinner parties catered but not in the reckless Edith Whartonian fashion.

Lukins was a self-taught cook, in a sense—she took a course at London Cordon Bleu while she and her husband lived there, but she says: Her greatest inspiration wasn’t Childe and company’s mastery of the art of French cooking, but the more practical, less labor-intensive recipes for cookbooks. In the New York Times by Craig Claiborne and his Sunday pieces for Times Magazine. Lukins’ cooking was eclectic but somehow it was all piece-ambitious comfort food: moussaka, lasagna, ratatouille, stuffed grape leaves, and Lukins’ quintessential dish, chicken marbella, a quartered bird baked after a long marinade in a Mediterranean-style marinade in oil and vinegar. Garlic, plums, olives and capers.

While managing The Other Woman Catering Company, Lukins became acquainted with Julee Rosso, a young professional who worked in the advertising department of Burlington Mills, a textile company. Rousseau had attended several events presented by Lukins, and was so impressed that one day she performed for Lukins. She said, “A lot of women are working late now. What if we open a store for them? Lukins recalls. The two went into business as Silver Palate in the summer of 1977, with Lukins as the cook—delivering food from her apartment several times a day to the then-kitchenless store—and Russo as the marketer and front woman.

“Two women getting into business together in 1977 was a big deal,” says Lukins, who believes the angle helped the shop get as widespread press coverage as Dean & DeLuca’s. Zabbar was the odd man out in the matter of journalism. EAT was thriving, and offered a more comprehensive and impressive line of prepared food than Silver Palate, but the owner’s provocation prevented it from being a permanent press favorite, a circumstance only worsened in the 1980s, when it gave up its venue. Writer Julie Baumgold, wife of then-New York editor Edward Kosner, for trying to return some items she had purchased. (“I told her to go into herself, ’cause there was nothing wrong,” Zabar says.)

“Eli is a wonderful merchant, and his shop was always amazing, but I don’t think he ever liked us,” says Lukins. “I think he thought we copied him – and we didn’t. I mean, we were a little corner of his shop! But we got the publicity and the good reviews.” Within a year of opening, Silver Palate was selling its own line on Saks Fifth Avenue, including items like winter fruit compote, Damson peach in brandy, and blueberry vinaigrette.

Four years later, The Silver Palate Cookbook was published by Workman and became the cookbook of the 1980s, not only in Manhattan but across the United States. More disciplined and down-to-earth than The Moosewood Cookbook, but less intimidating and mature than their two-volume Mastering the Art of French Cookbook, Lukins and Rosso’s book was perfect for the do-it-all and multitasker who wants to cook well but not all the time. The book’s introduction recalled the situation that led the two women to decide to open their shop: a new era in which women found themselves juggling “school schedules, business appointments, political activities, art projects, sculpting lessons, going to the movies, aerobics, theatre, chamber music recitals, tennis Squash Weekends in the country or at the beach Friends Family Fundraisers Books to read [and] shopping,” yet they still had to “prepare creative, balanced meals and the occasional dinner party at home.” The Silver Palate lifestyle offered two solutions: You could use Lukins and Rosso’s recipes, or purchase their produce and prepared foods.

The advent of the word “lifestyle” in the late 1970s signaled a breakthrough in food culture in America. The elegant life wasn’t for the well-heeled of the streets anymore, but for anyone who considered themselves upwardly mobile – eating, cooking, and food shopping were just as lively as things. In 1976, when The New York Times expanded from two to four daily sections, introducing a new daily business section and a rotating fourth section devoted to soft news and service journalism, the first two “fourths” to appear were the Weekend (Fridays) and Living (Days Wed), both of which contain food-heavy ingredients. The Weekend section carried the Restaurant Review column, which ran longer and carried more weight than when Claiborne introduced the column in the early 1960s. Whereas Claiborne’s early columns were mostly reportage, devoting just a blurb or a short paragraph to each restaurant, the new edition rated no more than two restaurants at once, with more intimate first-person critiques by the new Times reviewer, Mimi. Sheraton.

The Living section was more slanted on taste, with shopping news and product reviews from Florence Fabricant; a wine column by Frank Brial (a reporter at the Metro desk who also happens to be a wood lover); health and nutrition news from Jane Brody; recipes, essays, and travel stories from Claiborne; And a new column by Pierre Frany, finally highlighted, is called “60 Minutes Gourmet.” Put in charge of the new cultural sections by the newspaper’s executive editor Abe Rosenthal, Arthur Gelb wanted to appeal to time-strapped traveling home cooks by running a column called “30 Minute Gourmet”; Gelb and his wife Barbara admire Frannie’s ability to whip up quick, simple, and delicious Hamptons meals—flounder in butter sauce, for example, or pork chops with capers—after a long day of hunting.

But Frannie was still too extreme to be limited to thirty minutes. (Like a lot of chefs, he, too, was sickened by the word “gourmet” and preferred the title “60 Minute Chef,” but succumbed to Gelb on this.) The first “60 Minute Gourmet” column featured a recipe for a steak margarita—Frannie’s invention that He called for shrimp cooked in a tequila-shallot-and-cream sauce with sliced ​​avocado at the end—and began with a statement of intent (written by Claiborne) that stated, “With creativity and a little planning, there’s no reason why a working wife, bachelor, or husband who loves to cook can’t whip up an elegant meal in Less than an hour.”

Excerpted from The United States of Arugula: How We Became a Gourmet Nation by David Kamp Copyright © 2006 David Kamp. Excerpted with permission from Broadway, a division of Random House, Inc. all rights are save. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without the written permission of the publisher.

excerpts

Excerpted from The United States of Arugula book

by David Camp

published by Broadway Books; September 2006; $26.00 USD / 35 CAD; 0-7679-1579-8

Copyright © 2006 David Kamp

Chapter VII

The new sun-dried lifestyle