Art in a cup

After a long day-into-night of judging the first annual White Chrome Barista Throwdown put on by  Flat Black Coffee in Dorchester, here are a few things I remember:

–About 2/3 of the way through tasting espressos and lattes made by 11 contestants, Annie Copps, of Yankee Magazine and one of my fellow judges, counted that we must have consumed 24 shots. She started spitting, just like a wine tasting.

— Gerra Harrigan, the expert from New Harvest Coffee Roasters in Providence and the other judge, managed to keep her cool composure and sort through the contestants through about 5 hours of tasting.

— All 11 contestants were really good — and some could talk while making excellent espresso. Even if their hands shook when serving the coffee.

— Alison Novak, from Simon’s Coffee Shop in Cambridge, who won, made a signature dessert coffee that by now I can no longer describe, but I’d have every night if I could.

— The reason I can’t describe it, although my palate memory is excellent, is because even taking tiny sips of more than30 espressos and espresso-based drinks makes you a bit forgetful. Drunk, even. Not only that, I couldn’t spell.

Gerra judges barista and coffee contests all the time. Today, recovering from an event that was a lot of fun plus included dinner at Tavolo down the street, I’d have to think about it doing another very soon — at least until my ability to spell returns.

By now, everyone who’s anyone in the food world has opined on the closing of Gourmet. It’s sad, true. But that’s almost more from an historical perspective — 69 years is a pretty impressive run — than its current standing in the world of food. In this Twitter-Food Network-Chowhound era, did anyone wait breathlessly for the latest issue of Gourmet — or any other magazine?

What I’ll miss: Barry Estabrook’s pieces on the politics of food, especially one tracing  the e coli outbreak in spinach and its results.  And the travel articles (unfortunately few of late).

What I won’t miss: Although Gourmet always looked stylish, the design changes veered so wildly that beyond the pretty cover, it was hard to tell sometimes what you were looking at. And I particularly disliked the photographs of farmers over the last years who seemed to be purposedly “dirtied up” to match somebody’s notion of agricultural reality (this is done elsewhere and it’s sooo annoying. As though everyone  in rural areas neglects to wash their hands or faces when a photographer shows up.)

And the A-Z redesign with copious recipes recently looked like a last-ditch panic — which I guess it was.

Connecting the dots between food and our larger world was the greatest service of Gourmet. That blurred sometimes when the fattest issues seemed to only trumpet the excesses of restaurant extravagance or the thinnest only comfort food. But by knitting together travel, food memory, the restaurant world, and food politics, Gourmet could make a statement and do it stylishly. 

I’ll keep as many issues of Gourmet as I have room for — I’ve saved holiday issues for ideas and recipes for decades, and often refer or find old issues when I travel. In a Food Network magazine era, that information and that style unfortunately won’t be matched.