When I was still just coming up in the world of cooking I was, like just about everyone else in those kitchens living (barely) paycheck to paycheck. Traveling abroad was a fantasy land. But I did live in a pretty cool town to ply my trade in. Key West. While I didn’t take the QE2 to Europe I did do a ton of ‘armchair travel’ via the pages of the great, late and lamentably so ‘Gourmet Magazine”! Each month during this time span, the late 70’s and early 80’s I would go to a newsstand I loved on Duval and buy the new month’s worth of writing. Writers like Jay Jacobs and Caroline Bates, among others, ‘took’ me to New York and various cities in California. I would lay on the floor of the rented houses from that time and use a ruler and a pen to underline passages that excited my imagination and enrich my growing field of study.
One day a few years later while working in a large hotel up in the Florida peninsula in Jupiter Beach I had to go to the boiler room for some long ago forgotten reason. Laying on a dusty shelf was a large reddish book with the word, “Gourmet” written upon it in the identical script I knew by heart. I looked to see what year it was published, “1959”. It had been abandoned I reasoned … and promptly made it mine. Oh what a score! Like a dog finding a heap of truffles for his master I sprang out of the basement and made my way home. I studied that book countless times and made notes along the way. This is one of the ways I got my traveling in.