Save Me the Plums - Ruth Reichl Page 0,76
to mention copyediting the recipes. And we’re supposed to just hand them over for free?”
“Epicurious should at least share the costs,” said Doc. “If the recipes are going to live on their website, it’s only fair.”
“It would be simple to do,” Larry pointed out. “Just bookkeeping; no actual money need change hands. All they’d have to do is shift some of the costs on paper, put some of the expenses on their budget instead of ours.”
But when we presented the figures to John Bellando, the chief financial officer, he laughed as if we’d told a hilarious joke. “That,” he said succinctly, “is not going to happen.”
“I blame myself,” I said as we gloomily left the office. “I kept pushing for our own website. I never dreamed they’d handicap us like this.”
“It’s not your fault,” said Larry. “How could you have imagined this? How could anyone? Of course we should have our own website. Food sites are huge.”
“Yeah,” I said glumly, “but what people want are recipes.”
“We can’t have a website without recipes,” Larry agreed. “And unfortunately I can only think of one solution. The kitchen’s going to have to create twice as many.”
“That’ll be great for morale,” I muttered.
“Not to mention the budget,” he added. We stood there, the two of us, envisioning the huge piles of food the cooks were now going to require.
Looking back, I should have just said no. But, reluctant to be a squeaky wheel, I drove on like a good girl, devoting more and more resources to a money pit that could never be solvent, a hungry maw that could never be sated, a future we could never quite reach. I knew I was tilting at windmills, but I loathe confrontation and I kept hoping that somehow it would be okay.
There were high points. We were the first print magazine to hire a full-time video producer, and through her work readers came to know—and love—all the cooks. We were able to demonstrate techniques—boning fish, icing cakes, sharpening knives. We created crazy recipes for ingredients that would never have made it into the magazine: offal, insects, corn silk, and carrot tops. Best of all, for the first time we had the luxury of space. Now, whenever someone came up with an offbeat idea, it was easy to say yes. “We can always put it on the Web….” became our mantra.
And that is exactly what I said when Ian Knauer and Alan Sytsma approached me about the goat.
Ian Knauer was our most unorthodox cook. A talented chef, he was also a farmer, forager, and hunter, and this unique set of skills set him apart from everyone else in the kitchen. You never knew what he’d show up with: a deer he’d shot over the weekend, the season’s first chanterelles, a slew of ramps he’d stumbled across in Prospect Park. Ian came to us as a backup recipe tester, and when I told him we were promoting him to full-time food editor, he stared at me for one shocked second and then said, “Shut the fuck up!”
Now he was poking his head into my office. “Alan and I have an idea—” he began.
Alan picked it up. “We just saw this cool documentary called A Son’s Sacrifice—”
“Slow down,” I said.
Ian gestured to Alan to continue. “It takes place in a halal butcher shop filled with live animals; you choose your beast and then they slaughter it.”
“So,” Ian picked up the thread, “we want to do a story about how it feels to watch an animal make the transition from living, breathing creature to something that you cook.”
Five years earlier, this story would have been too gruesome to consider. Now I hesitated, wondering if Gourmet readers were ready for this.
“It could be very powerful,” Alan pleaded. “The meat movement is starting to take off; people are really interested in butchering.”
He had a point. The artisanal food movement had turned butchers into heroes, and nose-to-tail classes were selling out. Maybe this was worth doing?
“We can always put it on the Web,” I said.
* * *
—
THEY RETURNED FROM Queens carrying two huge black plastic sacks, and you could smell them halfway across the building. The reek of the abattoir was so intense it seemed they had brought the entire contents of the butcher shop with them. The goat’s body was still warm, and as they drew closer the primal scent grew stronger. By the time they reached the kitchen door, the animal funk was overwhelming. Up close, the sharp