Afew years ago, I came across a cookbook called “Carry-Out Cuisine: Recipes from America’s Finest Gourmet Food Shops,” first published in 1982. The forward begins, “Followers of what’s new in food fashions are familiar with names like Dean & DeLuca of New York, San Francisco’s Oakville Grocery, Jamail’s in Houston. These gourmet food shops . . . represent an important trend in convenience food preparation.”
According to the New York Times obituary for Sheila Lukins, a co-founder of the Silver Palate—an archetype of the gourmet food shop, which opened in 1977, on the Upper West Side—that trend arose to accommodate city-dwelling professional women (plus some hapless bachelors) “who were interested in good food but lacked the time to produce it.” At a gourmet food shop, you could buy curried squash soup or lemon chicken to reheat and plate as you wished, and feel almost as if you’d made it yourself.
It may be a stretch to say that “Carry-Out Cuisine” or “The Silver Palate Cookbook,” which was also published in 1982 and has since sold millions of copies, rendered these shops largely obsolete by giving away trade secrets—the recipes, which tend to emphasize Mediterranean rather than French techniques, are not particularly complicated—but they did help usher in a new era of home cooking. They also popularized a style of prepared food and a standard for ingredients that many less specialized supermarkets adopted.
To read the rest of the story, please go to: The New Yorker