Receta Karaoke vs Cooking:How to Make the Cover of Bon Appetit

Gwyneth Paltrow on June 2011 Bon Appetit Cover

I refer regularly to Jim Harrison’s collection of food essays the Raw & the Cooked because even though they were written more than ten years ago their relevance to contemporary culinary trends persists. In one such essay, Harrison writes about the tens of millions of chicken legs and thighs the US ships to Russia annually because the domestic market has a preference for the breast. Mocking America’s stupidity and wastefulness, he imagines the ship sinking and the surprise of a frenzy of sharks as they bite down on tons of frozen dark meat.

When in this month’s issue of Bon Appetit I noticed a side-by-side of features on Fergus Henderson and Gwyneth Paltrow, I recalled Harrison’s…