Why Not Cook At Home?

The other night I had dinner with Doc – John Willoughby, who edits this site and newsletter, and is responsible, through his “tinkering” (as he calls it), for the ease with which these words pass through your eyes into your comprehension. Together we have more than 150 years of eating experience and somewhere around 85 years of food-writing and -editing experience, so we are pretty good judges of cooking. 

When we first became close, we were both living in New Haven, and I was cooking almost every night. I was writing about food and cooking, but had not yet done any cookbooks; rather, I was mostly following recipes by others, not exactly to the letter but most certainly in spirit. Doc was a very frequent guest. The years went by, and after we both worked at Cook’s Magazine and then later Cook’s Illustrated, he became executive editor at Gourmet and I settled into writing cookbooks and New York Times columns and articles.