Learned Intolerance

The Daily Beast talks to cookbook author Barbara Kafka about her latest volume, The Intolerant Gourmet, which is not as you might have initially thought about people who don't like what other people at the table order and therefor get all judgy and jazz, but rather about people who have technical intolerances ie allergies as in to wheat, dairy, and/or etc. What's great about the interview isn't so much the news about Kafka's cookbook, though, as just her voice when she tells stories about writing for Vogue (and then accepting an assignment from Bazaar, which led to a twenty-year unintentional absence from Vogue) and telling James Beard about lining a pan in kidney fat (he stormed out of the room) and memories of cooking an artichoke in a microwave (which is what led to another great hit, Microwave Gourmet). It's a voice from another era, one in which magazines mattered and so did the culture that wrote for them. [The Daily Beast]