All the Ingredients

Ode to Gourmet Magazine

When I was ten years old, I had to write a Social Studies Report on Germany. Something about the Black Forest perhaps. I was the fourth child in the family, and our set of encyclopedias--Funk and Wagnalls--had been purchased by my parents before I was born. Their entries were brief and boring, and there were no pictures. It was late the night before the report was due, and I complained about my lack of resource material.

My mother said, "I just read an article in a magazine about Germany. I'll get it for you." She brought me an issue of Gourmet.

"This is a cooking magazine, " I said.

"Yes, but read the article. It will make you want to go to Germany." The article was a travel piece with food commentary thrown in, and it helped me finish my report in time. When, as a  junior in high school, I was preparing to go on a tour of Europe with members of my class (and several spoil-sport nuns), instead of buying me a tour book, my mother painstakingly went through her back issues of Gourmet, and pulled issues with articles about the countries I would be visiting.

Unfortunately, on this packaged tour we had few opportunities to eat unplanned meals, but I was prepared enough to go into local bakeries in Italy for their version of pizza, and I had been warned that Viennese pastries often aren't as sweet as you think they ought to be by the way they look.

My mother read Gourmet all of my life, and each issue was stacked carefully in the back hall closet. My mother scribbled on the pages of recipes she had tried, marked recipes she wanted to try with scraps of paper sticking out of the top, and eventually just started writing on the covers. I don't know what happened to all those magazines when my parents' house was finally cleaned out. I know one of my brothers wanted them.

I only have one issue of my mother's--August 1985--that was on the bedside table in the guestroom when my husband and I got back from our honeymoon. On an article entitled: "Jellied Consomme: A Reminiscence" she had written and underlined: "Please Read." My  mother could never teach me to appreciate consomme or aspic, and this article didn't do it either. However, there was also an article on peaches in the issue, and I swiped the magazine to take home with me. I made the recipe for Amaretto Peach Ice Cream as soon as I had bought our first ice cream maker (electric!) at the hardware store. I starred the recipe and still remember how wonderful it tasted.

I don't remember an essay in that issue, "Nursery Food," by Laurie Colwin, but I read it and decided to try her novels. I loved them all, but loved her two collections of food essays the best. She was the first food writer I read. That is one of the things that has always set Gourmet apart, and that kept me subscribing even in the days when I couldn't afford it--there were great writers tucked into those pages!

When David Foster Wallace died last year, booksellers where I work talked about their favorite books of his. One of them asked me if I had read any of his books. No, I answered, but I had read his piece in Gourmet, "Consider the Lobster," about the aesthetics and morality of cooking lobsters, and had been quite impressed with it. When his collections of essays by the same name had come out, I had  flipped through it, disappointed to discover that essay was the only one about food!

My last issue of Gourmet arrived in the mail today, with its card offering me, a loyal subscriber, the chance to give the magazine to others for Christmas. It pictures the December issue that will never arrive, and I am sad. The December issue with its outrageous cookie recipes was always my favorite of the year. Every Christmas I make chocolate hazelnut biscotti for friends and family. But first I have to look through my many years of Gourmet to find the pink note that sticks up from the cover, marking the issue that the recipe is in.

I know enough about the trends in publishing these days to understand why Conde Nast is abandoning Gourmet. We get our recipes from so many places these days. But I wish they had let us go out with the holiday issue. With a few more cookie recipes to tide us over the long, Gourmetless winter.

Bacon Jam

A friend who knows how much bacon is revered in my household sent me the link for the Homesick Texan's recipe for Bacon Jam. Bacon in jam form? Hmm. The recipe seems pretty simple, although the preparation steps leave out how to add several ingredients. I wasn't bothered by the fact that the recipe didn't seem complete. I have reached a stage in my cooking life where I often read a recipe and drastically change it in my head before I even start to prepare it. This is one of those recipes.

The original recipe called for lots of garlic and a little onion. Since my husband is not a huge garlic fan, I flipped those quantities. I also like the way onion and bacon compliment each other in recipes, so I wanted about an equal amount of each. One of the liquid ingredients in the original recipe was coffee. I am the only person in our household who drinks coffee, so I substituted something else that I thought would work: root beer. I think you could use coffee or cola with success.

So the ingredients as I reshaped the recipe became:

• 1 medium sweet yellow onion
• 1 clove garlic
• 1 lb bacon, sliced

Now I am sure you can make bacon jam quite nicely with the bacon you can find in your local grocery store. However, if I was going to go to this much trouble, I was going to shell out $6 for a pound of meaty local bacon from the farmer's market, made from pigs who wore crowns of flowers and gamboled in green meadows. Okay, so these pigs were raised on Iowa farm in a barnyard. But they were antibiotic free, and actually saw the light of day until they became a jam ingredient.

• 2 chipotles en adobe (found in a can on the grocer's shelf) 
• 2 teaspoons adobo sauce (from the can)
• 1 tablespoon cocoa powder
• 1 cup root beer
• 1/4 cup apple cider vinegar
• 1/4 cup balsamic vinegar

Dice the bacon into 1/2 inch pieces and cook in a heavy pot or skillet over a medium-high heat until the pieces start to crisp. Remove the bacon pieces and drain on a paper towel. Pour out all but 1 tablespoon of the bacon fat. Chop the onions into medium pieces, and mince the garlic. Add to the bacon fat and saute until the onions are clear and soft. Remove the chipotles from the can and chop as fine as you can (they are smooshy and slippery). Add them and the rest of the ingredients to the pot and bring to a boil. Reduce to a simmer and stir periodically. You want the mixture to thicken to the consistency of a nice jam. Cool and put into a jar and refrigerate.

There are numerous on-line postings to tell you where to put your bacon jam: on egg breakfast biscuits, on BLTs, in baked beans and so on. So far, we haven't got past burgers. The jam was fabulous on bacon-cheeseburgers. It was also quite tasty on patty melts made with marble rye and swiss cheese. My husband thinks the jam is a little too spicy; my son, not an adventurous eater, thinks it is just right. You can certainly only use one chipotle or add more depending on your heat tolerance. I liked the bacon jam exactly as I made it. You taste the onion and the bacon, and then finish with a slight sear across the tongue that makes you want another bite. And another.