Hey, I'm Bruce Weinstein, and this is the podcast Cooking with Bruce and Mark. And I'm Mark Scarborough, and together with Bruce, we have written so many cookbooks. We've published, I don't know, probably written tens, literally tens of thousands of original recipes. If not hundreds of thousands. No, it's not that high, but it's in the tens of thousands. I used to keep track. I don't even keep track anymore. Um, we've had a long career, about 25 years in the food business, and this is our podcast about that passion, food and cooking. We are so glad you've joined us. We've got a one minute clip. cooking tip up ahead. We're going to talk about our career in writing for food magazines, something that has gone away. Mostly food magazines. Most of these are now gone by the wayside, but we'll tell you some actually funny stories from the two decades in which we wrote for food magazines. And then we'll tell you what's making us happy in food this week. So let's get started. Our one minute cooking tip. If you're buying meat at the supermarket and it's pre wrapped, pre shrink wrapped, not like it's been wrapped behind the butcher counter, but you know they brought it in shrink wrapped like the way a turkey is or a duck or a leg of lamb. Don't be afraid to ask the butcher to open that package for you. You want to make sure it smells good. You know how many times I have brought a leg of lamb home and opened it and it smelled like rotted meat. So if you ask them to open it and it's good, they could just rewrap it and put a price on it for you. And you don't get home and get stuck with some rotten.

Yeah, this particularly goes for turkeys, as you say, for legs of lamb, for those lamb shoulder roasts that are prepackaged. Oh, it happened with a

rabbit once. It was so nasty.

Yeah, it happened with a rabbit. Not that, again, as Bruce says, not the stuff that's sitting on the styrofoam trays that's wrapped in the meat counter. But if you know this thing came in from afar, just ask them to unwrap it. There's a butcher back there. And they'll do it in a minute if they don't want to go to another store. Yeah. And mostly they're looking for things to do. So just ask him to do it and they'll be glad to do it. And you can tell immediately if the thing has gone off, don't waste your money. All right. Before we get to that next segment of this podcast, let me say that we do have a newsletter. It comes out. I don't know. I used to say every two weeks, maybe now once a month, because I'm in the middle of the design of our next cookbook, which is out in July of 2025. So I, I haven't had a minute to spare to write a newsletter. But if you want to sign up for that newsletter, which is not really connected to this podcast, you can find how to do so on our website, bruceandmark. com or cookingwithbruceandmark. com. Scroll down the splash page or the landing page that you'll see at the bottom, a way to sign up for the newsletter. Just to remind you, I don't collect your email, nor do I allow the provider MailChimp to collect it so it can't be sold to other services. You can always unsubscribe. at any time. We're happy to have you along for the newsletter too. Okay, let's tell some tales about writing for food magazines. I get to start. Okay. Um, so I want to talk about writing for cooking light, which is now long gone. Oh, we

used to write so much for them. Every issue we had a column. Yeah. We had a column in every issue, and we got to write other features for them, and it was a really, really nice relationship we had, and we had a great relationship with our editor there.

We did, and she was a great editor to have. She was very forthright and honest, which is what you want in an editor. She was very serious about pitches as writers. You want this, somebody who looks over the pitches and goes no or yes, which you don't want. As a writer, in case you don't know this, is you don't want equivocation, or you don't want long delay, like a month later, she hasn't even said anything about your pitches. For feature articles, you want somebody who's, you know, back in a few days and goes, nope, no thanks for all of these, or yeah, this is great. The third one looks good, and let's talk about it. That's what you want. It's just a fast, easy response.

And you have this relationship, usually long distance, because not everybody lives where you do. I mean, we were in New York, and you would think, oh, it's a food magazine there in New York. Nope. Cooking Light was based in

Alabama. Yeah. Well, and I want to tell you before we get to Cooking Light about a little side point about this. When I say that we pitched magazines, this is is what we did. Um, we were a contributing editor for years to, uh, eating well, but we still pitched the food editor ideas for feature articles. I mean, we had to come up with the subject matter of the content and we were out to dinner once with a very prominent and snotty couple who wrote cookbooks and food magazine articles. And I was talking about this very thing. And he, the man of this couple, looked across the table. at me with this withering look, and he said, We do not pitch. And I thought, Oh God, okay, great. You're way more important than I am. I still have to get an editor to approve of what I'm gonna write. But, okay, yes, that was us. We did pitch. So, we would pitch cooking a lot of these stories, and one time we were at the International Barbecue, Expo in Atlanta and we drove over to Cooking Light in Alabama, right? Yeah. And we drove over to where they were and we met our editor. Finally met her because we'd never, we'd

only ever, you know, email.

You know, I was deathly afraid of meeting her because, you know, it's Cooking Light. So I'm like, God, what are we going to have for lunch? I better have like celery or a glass of water or something. Half an aspirin. And I was like, are you

kidding? She's going to take us to some, you know, place where we're going to be served a carrot. Right, and I was like,

I don't want to fill up on a whole aspirin. Why don't you just give me a half of one?

Instead this woman took us to Two kind of two different barbecue restaurants because she felt that the brisket and the ribs she couldn't decide which were better So we had to eat them all at both The

second restaurant part of going to this two barbecue restaurants from one lunch and the second restaurant for cooking light The second restaurant it was

all going there also because they had this giant cream cake and she wanted to get a huge slice And eat it, and I was like, okay, so much for my theory about aspirins or carrots or celery or whatever. So, what have

we learned today?

What have we learned

today is that, uh, the editors at Cooking Light, they may have cooked light, but they didn't eat light. I was like, holy crow, I can't eat two barbecue

meals in one sitting. That woman also loved her bourbon.

Yes, she did. She

did. Loved her bourbon. She did.

Um, for years, we wrote for Wine Spectator. In fact, you might consider that really our first magazine gig is writing for Wine Spectator. And it was really a bit of a posh gig. Oh, it was fabulous. Because, uh, it was back in the day where you had to be totally anonymous, and we were writing food and travel articles for them, and we had to do the whole thing of just being absolutely under the radar. We'll tell you about that in a minute. And it was very old school. This is so old school that in writing for Wine Spectator, we were given an expense account.

Well, we had to pay for all those meals we were reviewing. But this is the best. The funniest thing about, here we are writing for Wine Spectator and we did not get to write about wine.

No.

We were disallowed

from writing about wine. We weren't the wine experts, we were the food and travel experts. We weren't James Suckling and all these really important people who raided wines. And so, we had to write this. these reviews, let's say that we did this whole piece on the Vaucluse, this region of France and we had to go to all these beautiful restaurants with these giant wine lists, oh I have to tell you about it in a minute, with these giant wine lists and then, you know, we would review the meal that we ate anonymously and stayed anonymously, paid for it, paid for ourself, we couldn't, you know, accept anything for free. They didn't get to know who we were. No, exactly. Exactly. And then. Afterwards, I would reveal myself to them and say, okay, this is who we are, but this was a great, this article and you know, I, I described the vocaloos and the hotels and the restaurants and all that, and then I literally had to leave space in the article that says, you know, copy about wine goes here because of course they would look at the wine list. And this is one of the things that I think is so funny about writing for spectator when we did it. So we would, after. eating dinner at a restaurant. Then I would call them the next day or drop by and I would say, okay, here's the truth. We were critics for Wine Spectator. We're writing an article about this region of France. We'd like to include your restaurant. And most importantly, what I need is your wine list. So I went. to this one. We went to this one restaurant, had a spectacular meal in the south of France. At the end of it, I asked, uh, well, the next day, actually, I asked for the wine list. The wine list, just to tell you, it was 175 pages long, 175 pages of wines. And we were traveling and I wasn't going to carry this thing around and they didn't offer it to me anyway, right? This is a fancy restaurant with like, Two wine lists, you know, two copies of it. So I asked her to fax it to us. Remember fax machines? Yes. Remember the

paper that rolled up? So what happened? So we got home after three weeks of this trip, and the fax machine was on my desk in the foyer of our apartment, and there were hundreds and hundreds of scrolled paper. Out of order, out of sequence, on the floor. In that, that glisteny kind of pseudo wet paper that fax machines would

spit out. We had to pick them up and put them in order. And put them in order. That was the

kicker. Is it 175 pages?

And I was trying to figure out, okay, wait, what's the And it's not necessarily paginated. So, I'm like, oh, my gosh, how do I put this thing in

order to give to my editor? And when we went back to that place to talk to them afterwards, to actually talk to the chef, he was like, oh, have a glass of champagne. I'm like, no. We can't even now, after the fact, we cannot even have a glass of champagne with you. Absolutely nothing. Which is why it was a little bizarre when we wrote an article for Wine Spectator about Austin, Texas. Mmm. Um, if you don't know me, if you haven't heard enough stories about me, I am always looking for a deal. And a bargain. And we were going to review these hotels in Austin and restaurants, and I wanted to stay at the Driscoll, which is a really, really nice hotel.

Really old school hotel. I mean, so old school in Austin, if you don't know the history of Austin. This is where LBJ, Lyndon Baines Johnson, would hang out in the lobby and essentially make legislative deals when he was a state legislator, and then even when he was a congressman and a senator from Texas.

You know, our expense account paid for the nice meals, but it didn't really allow us to stay in the best of hotels.

Well, okay, let me back up and say, so Spectator put us on an expense account, which is really lovely, and it would have been a generous expense account for one hotel. person. But there were the two of us. We came as a pair. So we had a split. We took what one writer would get back in the days of expense accounts. And then we had to get a double room. We had to eat twice as much food, all that kind of

stuff in the

restaurant.

So I called the marketing director at the Driscoll. And I said, look, here's the deal, Mark and I are going to be writing an article in Austin for Wine Spectator and I want to stay at the Driscoll, which was breaking the rules immediately there, and I asked him what kind of deal he could give me, and he ended up saying, you know, he gave me a really good deal on this room, and we ended up showing up at the hotel, and basically that Good deal, which I thought was per night. He was only charging us for the whole stay, and he was including dinner. Like, 99 bucks for like for three nights, three or four nights, plus one night dinner. And it was going to be a big tasting menu dinner. And

mind you, here's how unethical this is. He's charging us 99 for four nights. And yes, we're going to eat in his restaurant one night, but we're going to go to other Austin restaurants. So we're staying on his dime to review other restaurants in Austin. Oh, it was terrible. So. Uh, we weren't married yet, but we had a relationship loudness over this when I got there. So

we go down to the dining room now, and usually this is supposed to be anonymous, right? The chefs don't have to know who we are. And I told him the chef may not know who we are. Of course, he said, no, no problem. I will keep you anonymous. At our table was a little sign that says the Driscoll. Welcomes

Wine Spectator. So, right, you're supposed to be anonymous, like the old days with Ruth Reichel, when she would, like, put on the wigs and the dresses, and nobody would know who she was dining in New York restaurants. Okay, it's supposed to be like that. Not quite that bad, because we're not a known quantity like Ruth Reichel was. But still, we're supposed to be totally anonymous, and there on the table was this thing, uh, just glowed, a Welcomes Wine Spectator, and I was like, Oh my God! Oh, my God, we're going to be fired from this

gig. The chef comes out. And by the way, the head chef was off that night, but I brought him in just to cook for us. And he had planned a 12 course menu for us. Now, if you've listened to us talk before, there are certain things I don't like to eat and don't eat. And so I told him things I don't eat. He just freaked out. He ran, he thought it was a test. He ran back to the kitchen and they had to rethink it. And it was a fabulous meal. And luckily we kind of kept it as honest as we could. We did.

We wrote about it in Spectator. But now even this many years later, this is like 20 years later. No, 25 years later, I'm still just super embarrassed by it. It just makes me cringe inside. It was, it was a great gig with Spectator. It was. But, uh, we were definitely the non cool kids on the block. Oh, I have to tell you this about Spectator. They had their big offices in New York City and the, uh, Marvin Shakin owned Wine Spectator. He owns Cigar Aficionado, several of these really high end magazines and at the time, and so we went up to the offices and you walked into the Wine Spectator offices and there was this giant glassed in wine cellar and like an. Idiot Rube from Texas, which I probably am an idiot Rube from Texas I walk up to the glass wine cellar and I look down and I see this bottle of like 1889 Bordeaux literally like 1889 1888 Bordeaux and I turn around to my editor and say is that real? Yeah, cuz they're gonna have a fake bottle there. It's like a wine spectator. It was so Overwhelming. I thought, wait, what? What is this? This cellar of wine that's in the, in the reception area of Wine Spectator. Yeah,

I will say that when we came up with ideas and we pitched our editor at Wine Spectator for articles, it was actually a lot of fun. And it was It's easier than pitching food magazines because food magazines, you're thinking about, okay, let's do an article on turkey leftovers, or let's do an article of what to do with cranberries or something, you know, really weird. For instance, with fine cooking once we had written a ham book and we said, let's do a ham thing and let's replace turkeys at the holiday with ham. And they did an article where they recreated the Norman Rockwell painting freedom from want where the mom is putting the turkey down on the table. That was me. The mom. And then I was there to carve it, and it was like him. Precious is the dad. Yeah, well, what are you gonna do? So those, it's very different when we were pitching for Spectator, so we had this brilliant idea. Look at a place like Cannes, you know, it's a fancy resort place in France. It's a fancy resort. What is it like without the festival? What, what is a city like? What's Cannes without the film festival? What is it without the festival? Are the restaurants still there? Are they still good? Well, they are, but what are they doing? Are they, what are they doing? Are they still up to game? So we pitched that and we wrote a piece on Cannes without the festival. And that whole problem of two of us and one expense account reared its ugly head, didn't it?

Yes, we could afford to eat in the really high end restaurants we were expected to eat in. I mean, we're expected to eat in two and three Michelin starred restaurants for these articles. So, really high end. You're spending a ton of money on dinner. And we were expected to order really nice wine. We had to show the bills that we had bought. Really nice bottles of wine. Even though we couldn't write about it. Even though we couldn't write about the wine. We had to show the bills that we had bought. Um, our editor preferred it when we bought two bottles of expensive wine. So there you go. So we had to do all of that, but given that there were two of us eating in these really high end places, the budget was eaten up and we couldn't afford a hotel. So we paid for a hotel out of our fee, not our expense account, our fee. And so of course we tried to find a really cheap hotel. And

we did. There are cheap hotels in Cannes. Did you know that? Oh my god, like a

hotel so cheap I wouldn't have stayed there as a traveling college student,

so come on. No, a hotel where you're going to sleep in your clothes and shower in your sneakers. And it was above some Moroccan nightclub. It was. And I could swear they were slaughtering a camel every night down there.

There were always these gangs of motorcycle guys, guys on really loud motorcycles, on the middle of the night, whipping away from this bar, and I always referred to them as the Prince of Morocco and his entourage, because I'm like, what is going on down

there? Loud music banging up in our

room.

So the dichotomy of going to these three star restaurants and eating like princes and then going back to this disgusting no star hovel.

We went to this one restaurant once for a spectator in, uh, nearby Aix en Provence. And so we're in Aix and, uh, well, outside of it. And it's this country restaurant out in the country. don't think really people intend to stay here. It is one of these restaurant with rooms in France where there's a, you know, a fancy restaurant and they have a few rooms where if you want to stay the night, you can't put the word

rooms

in quotes. Yeah, but I don't think most people really do that. They take a limo from aches or wherever out to this restaurant and back again. Okay. But we didn't cause when, you know, again, two people, one expense account. So we stayed in the rooms of this really fancy restaurant. And let me just say that I. opened the door, the room was cinder blocks, painted white cinder blocks, and there were filled, completely filled, fly strips hanging all over from the ceiling. If you're not familiar with that,

those are those sticky yellow tape that comes out of the canister that hangs on the ceiling and flies get

stuck to it. We were stuck here, we like the flies, we were stuck here because we were writing at the restaurant, so we had to go to dinner and spend the night. And eat dinner, but I was stuck in this room where literally I showered in my sneakers. Yeah, it was disgusting. I kept my tennis shoes on and showered because I refused to put bare feet on the tiles of the bathroom. Can you believe this? That you spend, I don't know, you spend 400 euros for dinner, 500 euros for dinner, and yet the room is so disgusting. You're showering in your sneakers. Oh God, it was con all over again. It was. So. We're going to tell you a couple of stories here at the end about the New York Times. Now, you know the New York Times fancies itself a serious place of journalism, but let me tell you, in our experience of writing for the New York Times, it is hardly a serious place of journalism. Instead, it was a place of really weird and far out gimmicks. So once the New York Times came up with the story, which actually, we didn't pitch. Oh, see? No, they came to us. We don't pitch. So

here's their idea. They said, so we have decided to ask a bunch of famous bestselling authors to give us a paragraph, to write us a paragraph that says the scene, and we would like you, Bruce and Mark, to come up with a drink that would be served in that scene, or that that scene is talking about, and we will photograph it. It's not

the cheesiest idea you've ever heard. So the first, I'm going to read it, and Bruce can tell you what he made. So, for example, they They picked people like Jackie Collins, and they, they said, Okay, Jackie Collins is gonna write a little paragraph scene, and then you have to make a cocktail that fits this scene. That was the assignment. Let me read you the Jackie Collins bit. Lucky Santagelo, a strikingly beautiful woman with wild black hair, olive skin, and eyes darker than night, strode into the Manhattan bar for her meeting with Silvio Mancotta. Ha, she thought. Does this poor excuse for a mob boss really imagine he can get one over on me? No way! She smiled at the barman and he nodded back, the usual Miss Santangelo. Absolutely,

she replied. That's the paragraph. What he made her, in our opinion, we called it a sweet revenge. An ounce of grappa. Topped by a teaspoon of Sambuca and a teaspoon of creme de cassis. I don't know. Why

not? It's

the

Serious New York Times that is doing this. Tamma Janowitz, which she wrote for this same assignment. Ready? It was a party of people pretending. The host, A nebbishy guy from Queens, what, nebbishy? Okay, alright, alright, you gotta be from New York to know what that means. The host, a nebbishy guy from Queens, had for years pretended to be from an old New England family. There was an artist, very, who was actually too terrified to paint a stroke unless he had his assistant standing behind him saying yes or no. A blonde. Who was really a brunette. And an English aristocrat who had spent years pretending he was a tough guy from the slums. Otherwise, no one would take him seriously as an actor. Even the drinks, shocking pink martinis with the fragrant tang of pomegranate packed a lethal bite. But who cared really? It was all such delicious pretend fun. Okay, that is the most overwritten piece of junk I've read in a long time. A blonde who is really a brunette. You know what? I'm going back to Henry James.

But, um, what drink did you come up for this with the pink pants? Well, I decided that

that pink drink was called Pink Panties. That was the shockingly pink

martini. And

it was an ounce of Absolute Courant, which is that black currant flavored vodka. Half ounce of Cointreau. A little bit of lime juice. And topped with a splash of pomegranate juice. There you are. And I'm sure it serves you up, right? Like a martini. Well, yeah, like a Cosmo. Yeah. That's sort of more like a Cosmo. Oh, God. Now, can I tell you one more

story? Sure. So, we had to go to the photo shoot for these drinks for the New York Times. We had to show up and we were going to style the drinks. So, they had all their props and all that stuff. But, really, what Bruce had to do was make the drinks. So, we got to this one, which would Bruce had titled Pink Panties, and, you know, I thought, well, this photographer was there, and I was there, and I said to him, well, what if we put a pair of pink women's panties in the shot with the drink, right, next to it? That's the New York Times. That's the New York Times, right? So, uh, he looked The photographer, but he, he was this old Russian man and he agreed to it. So we, he went to the prop room somewhere and found, believe it or not, some pink women's panties. My question, were those part of the props or did someone leave them? I don't know. These are huge prop rooms from fashion shoots. There's everything here. So he finds a pair of pink panties. We put them on the set. We take the photograph. And at this point, the editor walks in, the New York Times editor walks in. He absolutely freaks out because why? This is a serious newspaper. We do serious journalism. We're not

gonna have women's panties in a shot. I'm like, dude, no, but you're gonna print the Tamma Janowitz. You're asking paragraph

Tamma Janowitz and Jackie Collins to write crappy paragraphs and make drinks up to go with them, and you're offended at a pair of pink panties. Okay? Yeah. Take your seriousness where you need to take it

and do with it what you need to do. Absolutely lost it. In fact, I think he's so lost it with Oz that that was the last time we ever wrote for him. It was the last time. I think I had stepped over a line by suggesting actual pink panties in the shot. And then fighting him on it. Well, no, I really fight him. We just, we're done like we'd taken it and you know, listen, this photographer, I'm sure they're paying him by the second. And so he spent time setting up the shot and taking it and then they can't use it. So he's irritated. The editor is irritated at me and also believes that I don't understand the gravity of the New York times. So, you know, I mean, it's the whole thing. thing. But listen, how can you be gravitated if you've got Jackie Collins and Tamma Janowitz writing for you? I don't know. Anyway. So those were our stories about writing for various food magazines. We've got lots more that we can tell you if you're interested. There's so much to say. But before we get to the last segment of this podcast, let me say it would be great if you could rate this podcast or if you could write a review. We're unsupported, as you know, and some of the platforms like Apple Podcasts allows you to write reviews. So if you could do that, that'd be a spectacular thing. that you can support our otherwise unsupported podcast. So let's talk about what's making us happy in food this week. I can start. I, one of the things that made me happy is as you've probably heard, I am dealing with our new book in layout and design. And that means the designer has put it into page format. It now looks like it's going to be printed. I have a huge printout. of it. I'm not going to tell you what the book is about yet. I'm holding it in abeyance, but I can tell you this is probably the most beautiful book we have ever produced. The designer did a spectacular job laying it out on the page. It looks, as they say in the industry, built, meaning that it looks like a book that has some kind of heft and weight to it. The photography is gorgeous from Eric Metzger. I'm just dumbfounded as I'm going through this book, and it's making me very happy because, you know, we've written a lot of books in our career, and some of them we wrote because they fit the market, like Instant Pop books. No shine on those books, but we were catching a trend as it was happening. This book, we're not catching a trend. We're actually writing something we want to write about, and I'm so happy that the chance we got to write about something we want to write about has ended up looking so beautiful on the page. It's just kind of undoing me, and it's just to say. It takes a giant, giant horde of people to make a book, not just authors. It takes designers and editors and managing editors and traffickers and jacket designers and font negotiators, and it takes a lot of people to create a book. So this one is kind of special, and it's making me very happy. Okay. What's

making me happy is a port, a vintage port from 2003 by Taylor Freedman. It was a gift from our literary agent. And we've cellared it for a couple of years and finally opened it with friends the other night. And it was so raisiny and molasses y and grape y and rich and it tasted like the best jam with the best wine and dried fruit. And It was an amazing port and that was making me happy.

It was really crazy. Even the Brit at the table was impressed by the port, which is, is, uh, quite an accomplishment. So that's the podcast for this week. Thanks for being on this journey with us. Thanks for spending time with us. We appreciate it that you have chosen this podcast to listen to among the many about food and cooking on all of the web's airwaves.

And every week we tell you what's Making us happy in food. So please go to our Facebook group, Cooking with Bruce and Mark, and share with us there. What is making you happy in food this week? Because we want to know on Cooking with Bruce and Mark.