see your food

It's been another weirdly warm and thus slightly carefree weekend in Chicago. Today was spent in part dining at a lovely Hyde Park institution* famous in story and song, then in a trip to my local way-gour-may store that resulted in an expensive bagful of helpful staple groceries like one can of sugar-free Red Bull and a box of lemon pizzelle. A single croissant. So glad I crossed those off my list.

I read about 1/3 of the new Nora Ephron book at the Hyde Park Border's (I'm liking it, but that seems about right so far for committment levels). One thing that made me really happy was coming upon her description of the photos in Gourmet: "the splendid, reverent, slightly lugubrious photographs of food that the magazine was famous for." I thought she really nailed it there. I've tried to describe or refer to those photos' qualities with other people before, and had no luck. They were always a little stodgy, or conservative. Almost as if the registration was just the tiniest bit off, like an old-fashioned cookbook, with a haze of blue hovering unappetizingly above an otherwise attractive table. Only they weren't off-register, but still there was that feeling. Just a little too...static. Full frame focus from close-up to slightly old-fashioned styled background. Clearly I can't stop trying to describe these photos, because the feeling they gave was so specific, but "splendid, reverent, slightly lugubrious" is damn close.

This is all before le règne de la Reichl, of course, or as the French shorthand it--la Terreur. Hah! No no no! I kid. The magazine's photography seems to have caught up with contemporary style, all foregrounded n shiny n stuff.

*I'd put up a photo, but I can't for the life of me remember for some reason what the new signage looks like--since the renovation, I mean. And sorry about the Amazon linx, that's tacky I know.