Yes, I confess! I admit that I am a foodie. I’m even a #foodie! Most of my life revolves around food. I love to eat it. I usually eat food to satisfy my heart and soul, not just because I need nourishment and I’m hungry. I love to cook it. I love to go to local restaurants (preferably not chains) where I already know many of the chefs and owners. However we do venture out to try new ones whenever possible. I love to entertain and spend weeks researching, planning and presenting it at foodie events to our friends who seem to humor me. I take pictures of everything I cook and eat plus everyone else’s – much to their dismay……….well almost. Doesn’t everyone have 25,000 photos on their phone? I really can pull myself away from my iPhone camera when it comes to cereal, cold cuts, ice cream, etc. and that sort of mundane thing. And after the pictures comes the constant social media posting of the food! There are countless people who SAY that they enjoy following all of my never ending posts on my personal Facebook and Instagram pages plus all of those #foodie group pages I belong to. How could I ever disappoint them? They are counting on me, right?
Planning a menu to me means deciding what wine(s) to pair with it. It’s almost a mystical experience. Many times that goes in reverse order. First the wine and then the food!! I even used “Building Websites for Dummies” to develop my own website back some years ago to record it for posterity ….even if no one else reads it! It’s called www.forkandcorkdivine.com if that is any indication of my obsession. And if you are reading this article now, I thank you very much for checking it out. Cooking and dining in general continues to evolve through the years……just like me. I majored in “Food and Nutrition” for my BS college degree because my aunt suggested it as an excellent profession. Guess she didn’t know about the salary! Most of those professors at Carnegie Mellon University (Carnegie Tech way back in those days!) weren’t specifically trying to teach us how to cook. They really wanted me to know all about food chemistry and other exciting stuff, but there was quite a bit of cooking along the way. The people dining in our Institutional Foods class tearoom were probably never the same after we cooked and served them. Then there were those 50 plus years of actually enjoying my profession as I labored away at Dietetics, Food Service Management and Hospitality. After I learned how to make things like meat loaf, mashed potatoes and gravy just like Mom made and having my college instructors telling me that my technique was all wrong (guess I did finally learn the correct way), I moved on to try my hand at Julia Child’s culinary adventures. I could almost see myself as “The French Chef”! Then came ethnic cuisine, authentic cooking, back to our roots cooking, farm-to-table, “leave no animal’s parts behind” cooking. Yes it is a very long way from those days in the 1960s to the 21st century.
Our house is filled to overflowing with almost every single piece of cooking equipment there is – rice cooker, air fryer, instant pot, deep fryer, tagine, stovetop smoker, etc.; however I still have yet to succumb to my desire to buy a sous vide cooker. There are hundreds of dishes and glassware of every kind, and every ingredient, etc. that will help me experience a world of tastes, flavors and textures. There are large pieces of furniture dedicated to storing cookbooks; reams and reams of pages of recipes plus foodie magazines and foodie adventure articles can be found on just about every shelf and many tables. Got to have Bon Appetit, Food and Wine and Milk Street just to name a few. Did I outlast Gourmet? Open any cupboard or closet and you might have an avalanche of it all. There are wine glasses of every description on every shelf and in numerous boxes. Ingredients such as miso paste, gochujang, sumac, za’atar and pomegranate molasses became my new best friends. And don’t forget those eight shelves of herbs and spices and other glorious condiments that any respectable foodie worth their “salt” MUST have. By the way how many salts can there possibly be, anyway? However I should mention that you don’t have to be a culinary whiz kid to be a bona fide foodie. You just have to like and appreciate it all.
Obviously I am not the lone foodie. There are many of us out there! It seems that the “foodie” concept began way back in the early 1980s. In fact there was even “The Official Foodie Handbook” published in 1984 by Barr and Levy of England’s Harpers and Queen Magazine. I could also write an entire article on types of restaurants and dining but will save that for another day.
So now that my foodie confessional is out of the way, you are probably wondering what this all has to do with “Cooking The New York Times” . That’s easy. Like any good foodie worth their miso paste, my inbox is flooded daily with messages and recipes from cooking websites, magazines, other foodies, ads for meal kits, and on and on. One of those that found their way to me quite some time ago was “NYT Cooking”. In fact as I sit here at my laptop the very first message that just arrived on my iPhone inbox is NYT “What to Cook Right Now”. I used to just scroll right down through them until one day I decided to open and read it. Not surprisingly I found many really interesting recipes and of course, they required ingredients like that wonderful miso paste. How in the world did I ever do without it? Next I actually tried to download a few of those recipes, and discovered that to be easier said than done. How frustrating was that! And then was the dilemma of needing to sign up for yet another digital service. Sometimes I could download a recipe, but so often I could not unless…………..you guessed it, pay your $5 a month which they will gladly deduct from your checking account for the rest of your life, and you too can not only see but print the recipe. I finally succumbed after several years of telling myself that I refuse to pay for one more digital streaming service or app, forked over my necessary personal information, set up passwords that I was doomed to forget, and felt like I had arrived in the next century! Now my good old fashioned collection of some pretty interesting NYT recipes continues to multiply —-because I really need more stacks of paper in my life, and I just don’t feel right without that hard copy to take to the kitchen with me. Since I usually try to have a theme in mind when planning a dinner party, I decided to do some research about the NYT food pages and somewhere along the way my next dinner party theme was borne quite appropriately titled: “Cooking The New York Times”.
The New York Times
The Times is a daily newspaper based in New York City since it’s founding in 1851 by Henry Jarvis Raymond and George Jones and was initially published by Raymond, Jones and Company. Today it has a circulation of about 5,496,000 news subscribers and 4,665,000 digital only subscribers. There were 1, 398,000 subscribers for games, cooking and audio as of November 2020. Today it is owned by the New York Times Company, which is publicly traded.
We all know that digital communications is now fairly normal in our lives. That includes our email, phone calls, TV, video games, web pages, social media, etc. and for many people ALL of their news. The NYT saw their vision for the future and decided that not only did they have a big enough audience of foodies to merit a standalone cooking section but that they would also PAY to use it! And that is exactly what happened. The app launched in September 2014 featuring 16,000 recipes available at no charge, and just one year after launching the digital “NYT Cooking” (cooking.nytimes.com also available as an IOS app), they had about 120,000 subscribers. And as of June 2017 they charge $5 a month ($40 a year) for access to it! Yes, we foodies are indeed special people because it’s not included in a basic monthly digital subscription to the Times. All of this meant that they had better have a product worthy of the cost. Sam Sifton, the founding editor of “NYT Cooking“, and his team scoured through decades of Times recipes that seemed suitable for more modern times. Guess it was quite a success as about 3 million people now subscribe to its main Cooking newsletter – which does not require a subscription – and comes to your inbox weekly. The recipe library has grown to 20,000+. The Cooking team continues to expand with additional innovations and features. The NYT Cooking YouTube channel had 300,000 subscribers, 2.8 million Instagram followers and overall 600,000 subscribers as of a February 2021 article. The NYT has also published several cookbooks, some of which reside on my shelves. It seems that foodies and cooking are a very big business!
Here are some names you may recognize if you have ever seen the NYT Cooking app and those never ending email posts. Lots of interesting and delicious recipes have come from these folks..
Sam Sifton is the founding editor of NYT Cooking and an assistant managing editor for The Times. He has been the national editor, restaurant critic and culture editor of The Times.
Melissa Clark has been a columnist for the Food section since 2007. She’s written dozens of cookbooks.
Florence Fabricant has been contributing for a long time when she wasn’t writing some 13 cookbooks.
Dorie Greenspan is a columnist for The NYT Magazine and written 13 cookbooks, one of which – “Around My French Table” – is a favorite of mine and has a special place on my cookbook shelves. I would happily cook every recipe in the book and am well on my way!
Eric Kim is a cooking writer for the Food section with his “Korean American” cookbook coming in March 2022 and hosts on the NYT Cooking You Tube channel.
Genevieve Ko is a senior editor for the Food section and has contributed to more than 20 cookbooks.
J. Kenji López-Alt writes a monthly column for the Food section and is a restaurant chef/owner.
Julia Moskin has been a Food staff reporter since 2004 and was named after Julia Child. She was also part of their 2018 Pulitzer Prize winning team.
Yotam Ottolenghi is a writer and chef/owner of a number of restaurants. He also writes a monthly column for the NYT Food section.
Tejal Rao is the California restaurant critic at The NYT and a recipe columnist for The NYT Magazine.
Kim Severson has been reporting food news since before the phrase “farm-to-table” was invented.
And who are we “Cooking” from The New York Times team?
A little amuse bouche:
Julia Reed gave us a recipe for “Hot Cheese Olives”. Julia passed away in September 2020 after contributing more than 100 recipes to The NYT.
Amanda Hesser provided us with “Roquefort Cheeseballs”. Not only was Amanda at one time the food editor of The NYT Magazine but left the Times in 2008 to become co-founder and CEO of Food52, another foodie digital platform constantly in front of us in our digital media.
Soup course:
Yewande Komolafe is a Nigerian born food writer, author and food stylist who joined the NYT as a cooking editor in February 2021. She has 2 cookbooks published or on the way including “My Everyday Lagos Kitchen: Nigerian Classics at Home and in the Diaspora,” and a cookbook inspired by “Waffles + Mochi,” a Netflix children’s show. We will be cooking her recipe for “Spicy Tomato-Coconut Bisque with Shrimp and Mushrooms”.
Salad, Main Fare and Dessert courses:
David Tanis was the one who really got me going on this idea for a special NYT recipe dinner. We will be cooking his “Curly Endive Salad with Mustard Dressing, Egg and Gruyere”, “Pork Chops with Sage, Dates and Parsnips”, “Savory Potato Tart” and last but not least “Tangerine Flan”. David writes the City Kitchen column for the Food section, has had a long professional cooking career (including chef with Alice Waters at Chez Panisse) and authored several cookbooks featuring seasonal home cooking. I can’t wait to feature and cook his recipes!
How will our “Cooking The New York Times ” dinner turn out, you may ask? Since I rarely take my new-to-me recipes for a test drive before practicing on my dinner guests, we will just have to wait and see. But with all of this NYT talent and the foodie skills in our kitchen, I am willing to bet that dinner will be a spectacular success. And in case you are wondering, yes indeed each course will be perfectly paired with an excellent wine. Sorry there are no more reservations available! But you can be sure there will be plenty of pictures………and a forkandcorkdivine.com article.
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Definition of a foodie:
A person with a particular interest in food; a gourmet. (Oxford Languages)
A foodie is a person who has an ardent or refined interest in food, and who eats food not only out of hunger but also as a hobby. (Wikipedia)
A person having an avid interest in the latest food fads. (Merriam Webster)
Linda Rakos
2.18.22
