I’m waiting to meet Dana Cowin, editor-in-chief of Food & Wine magazine, for lunch at Aureole in midtown Manhattan. I was her assistant at the magazine early in my career, but I haven’t seen her in almost 11 years. When she walks in, she looks the same as I remember her. She’s still charming and enthusiastic, and, today, she’s excited to talk about her latest project, Mastering My Mistakes in the Kitchen (Ecco), a cookbook all her own, after many years spent working with food, restaurants, and chefs.
Cowin is credited as the editor of several Food & Wine cookbooks, but this one, she says, “feels like the first one.” She can be humble, in spite of her enormous success: her new book is all about mistakes. In the book’s intro, she writes, “I am going to be honest: I am not a great cook. I come by my incompetence genetically. I am descended from a long line of non-cooks.”
Cowin was born and raised on New York’s Upper West Side, and still lives there with her husband, Barclay Palmer, and her two children, Sylvie and William. She graduated from Spence (which her daughter attends now) and Brown University. Cowin worked at several magazines after college; she was an associate editor at Vogue and a managing editor at both House & Garden and Mademoiselle, before becoming Food & Wine’s editor-in-chief in 1995.
The self-proclaimed “terrible multitasker” oversees the magazine’s monthly publication, as well as its website and books division. Cowin is also on the board of City Harvest, a New York hunger-relief organization, and appears on national television as a judge on the hit television show Top Chef. “I love being a judge,” Cowin says. “I love coming clean with the truth.”
In 2012, Cowin was inducted into the James Beard Foundation’s Who’s Who of Food and Beverage in America, one of the most prestigious honors in the food industry. And her staff surprised her by praising her in the magazine’s Best New Chef issue, on the only page that she doesn’t edit—so she wouldn’t see the comments until the issue was published.
What inspired her to write the book, Cowin says, was that, even after all her time at Food & Wine, she “had to admit” that she still didn’t know how to cook. She says she’s “messed up” almost every kind of recipe at one time or another and wanted to learn from her mistakes. For help, Cowin turned to several of the world’s great chefs. “It’s such a gift to know all of the extraordinary chefs I know,” she says. “I wanted to learn from them—I learn something every time I talk to one.” Originally, she wanted to write a book about cancer (Cowin was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2008 and is now cancer free) but her agent persuaded her to stick to food, and so she did.
Cowin asked her chef friends to help her with her favorite recipes, and they were understandably happy to offer their assistance. The result is an honest, endearingly written, beautifully photographed collection of accessible dishes, filled with the author’s recollections. “It’s my life through failure in the kitchen. And though I don’t think writing is my greatest strength, I really enjoyed telling these stories because they’re so personal,” Cowin says. “It started in grade school when I put a pot on a Formica countertop and it exploded! And it goes all the way back to cooking for my dad.”
The journey Cowin took into the kitchen for this book taught her technique, but it also taught her a lot about herself. “The big thing, cooking at the level that I’m cooking at, which is very basic, is not the technique—that’s not what is going to mess you up. It’s the concentration. I ended up having this big life lesson, doing the book, about being in the moment. I expected to become a better cook, but got [instead] this notion of applying focus to my life at large.”
Cowin asked nine chefs (including Jean-Georges Vongerichten, David Chang, Andrew Zimmern, Eric Ripert, and Mario Batali) to cook with her, and she corresponded with several others via phone and email. Cowin says she had great help: she wrote the book with Julia Turshen, who tested the recipes; Susie Theodorou styled the food; and John Kernick took the photographs. “My team was part of the magic,” Cowin says.
The photos were taken in a studio meant to look like Cowin’s home kitchen, and she wore her own clothes. They began in July 2013, and Cowin says she worked on the project “in my free time—weekends.” She loved the process of creating the cookbook, calling it “enlightening,” and says she would be thrilled to do another.
“Julia made the recipes and a task rabbit would bring the food to my office where I would taste it with my editors. Tina [Ujlaki, Food & Wine’s executive food editor] tasted every recipe.” Cowin is pleased with the result. “I tried to have a balance with the food. I generally like healthy and light, and I don’t have a lot of time, so the recipes in general are quick. I was trying to become a home cook, not a chef, and I want to help people make things that are doable”.
The book includes “chef tips,” like which tomatoes are best for bruschetta, by José Andrés; how to make the juiciest dumplings, by Ming Tsai; and how to add brightness to pesto, by Maria Sinskey.
On the Food & Wine front, Cowin says, “We are doing so much; we’re always thinking of ways to go beyond print.” The latest is a deal with a website that sells artisanal products—Food & Wine will pick products we like and help the producers increase their sales.”
Asked what she’d like to accomplish with My Mistakes, Cowin says she hopes to change the way people think about certain recipes. “I’d love for there to be an obsession around a dish.” With her newfound cooking know-how, Cowin is now doing the kind of cooking she likes best—making food for her family and friends, especially at her house in upstate New York. Does she have a secret to success? Almost immediately, Cowin replies, “I do think there’s a secret. I only do one thing at a time. If I’m at the magazine, I’m at the magazine. After that, I’m with my kids. I try to give each thing my full attention.” Well done.
Ruby Cutolo is a freelance writer in New York City.
