News(paper) Blues

LA Times layoffs spark memories of bygone days, standalone food sections & recipes

Los Angeles Times food sections dating from 2000 to 2010. There is no longer a standalone food section at the paper, and four staffers received layoff notices last week, along with 111 other editorial folks.

Dear SOS: I’d love the recipe for Bullock’s Lemon Meringue Pie published some time back.

—Melba Colmer, Manhattan Beach

Dear Melba: It was called Heavenly Lemon Pie and served in the tearooms of the old Bullock’s department stores. It still is a heavenly pie.

—Rose Dosti, “Culinary SOS” column, Los Angeles Times, November 19, 2000

When I read last month that the Los Angeles Times was laying off 115 members of its newsroom, some 20% of the staff, my heart sank. Once upon a time in the early ‘90s I had worked at the Times and been the victim of one of the first of many layoffs there. Being walked out the door past the desks of colleagues you’ve come to call friends is an experience you never forget.

Before becoming a copy editor on the Business desk, I’d spent the first part of my career at the Times on the advertising side of the paper writing and editing copy that was referred to as “advertorial” because it was supporting advertisers, who, along with subscribers, were—and are—the lifeblood of the newspaper. Advertorial copy was printed in a different typeface so that L.A. Times readers wouldn’t mistake it for the “real,” reportage of the editorial staff.

Those sections are now mostly long gone, as, I believe, is the department I once worked for that put them out. Much of the paper is reduced in physical size, subscriptions, advertising pages and staff, of course, with many of its freestanding “zoned” sections that once aimed to cover the vast swath of Southern California from Santa Barbara to San Diego relics of a more prosperous, optimistic time for daily newspapers.

Front page of the Los Angeles Times on Tuesday, Jan. 18, 1994, the day after the Northridge Earthquake.

During my five-year tenure there, I worked in three Times satellite offices that no longer exist, including one in the San Fernando Valley that was just a few miles from the epicenter of the 1994 Northridge Earthquake. After the quake made the offices uninhabitable, reporters wrote their stories on laptops in the parking lot. It was a foretaste of the great workplace exodus to come 26 years later, its own type of earthquake, this time triggered by a pandemic.

The Los Angeles Times building on March 25,1960 (Art Rogers/LA Times). After the paper’s purchase by billionaire surgeon and businessman Patrick Soon-Shiong in 2018, the headquarters moved to El Segundo, CA, where I can see it as I drive along the 105 Freeway.

In the Composing Room

Part of my duties took me to the composing room in the basement of the striking Art Deco-style Times building, which had been completed in 1935, the fourth of three buildings that housed the Times (the second was bombed by pro-unionists on Oct. 1, 1910, killing 21 employees). The marble and limestone edifice, designed in an internationally popular style of Art Deco called Streamline Moderne, had been commissioned by publisher Harry Chandler who told architect George B. Kaufmann to build “a suitable newspaper plant and a monument to our city.”¹

The Art Deco entrance to the former Times building on 1st and Spring streets in Los Angeles. (Kirk McCoy/Los Angeles Times)

Part of a block of downtown L.A. real estate called Times Mirror Square that included five Times-owned and occupied buildings, it was an imposing yet somehow gritty place that seemed to pulse with its colorful history, which continued to be made while I worked there. I remember arriving early one morning during the Los Angeles riots in late April 1992 to find the first-floor windows broken as I walked through the lobby doors en route to my job. It seemed like the shattered glass just made us all feel more determined to keep the presses rolling no matter what.

Broken windows on the first floor of the L.A. Times building in the violent aftermath and riots that occurred following the April 1992 acquittal of four white police officers in the beating of Rodney King. (Mel Melcon/Los Angeles Times)

In the composing room, I proofread boards covered with pasted-on strips of copy in search of errors, rubbing shoulders with aging veterans of an earlier era when newspapers were put out using a Linotype method referred to as “hot type.” It required burly workers—all men—to lift heavy trays filled with rows of metal type that would become newspaper pages rolling off the Times’ mighty printing presses. It was exciting to hear their stories of earlier days when they stashed bottles of hootch under the desk to consume in the wee hours while putting the paper to bed.

Meanwhile, with nary a bottle in sight in the more buttoned-down early ‘90s, I walked around looking for mistakes to mark on the shiny columns of computerized type. When I discovered a restaurant advertorial referring to the succulence of “tender breast of children,” I was tempted to just leave it that way. Perhaps the writer was inspired by Jonathan Swift’s grim solution for population control in A Modest Proposal.

Food at the Times

Chef Michael Cimarusti, chef and co-owner of Providence restaurant in L.A., sprinkles breadcrumbs onto Oysters Rockefeller in the Los Angeles Times test kitchen in a 2013 photo. (Anne Cusack/Los Angeles Times)

Another thrill was to wander past the Times test kitchen, where something was usually being prepared or photographed that you could watch through the plate-glass window. I never did get to taste anything and I suspect the dishes were immediately spoken for or perhaps rendered unfit to eat by all the tricks employed to make them look delicious under bright lights and a photographer’s lens.

Sadly, as much as I loved food, my journalism career, which spanned some 25 years (before, during and after the L.A. Times), never included a job as a food writer, but I always loved to read the weekly multi-page Food section, which was known to metastasize to mammoth proportions—some 90 pages prior to Thanksgiving one year, according to one former editor!²

A favorite column was “Culinary SOS,” authored for more than three decades by Rose Dosti, who joined the Times Food section in 1964. Dosti left in 1992, but continued writing the column for another nine years. It’s still possible to find some of her cookbooks based on her years of writing the SOS column for the Times. Here’s a link.

Bullock’s Wilshire Tea Room, shown in an undated, uncredited photo, closed in 1993 after the store, once “the jewel in crown” of the Bullock’s department store chain, was damaged in the 1992 Los Angeles riots.

Dosti answered reader requests for recipes from beloved local restaurants, cafes, tea rooms or school cafeterias, some still in operation while others, like the Bullock’s tea room, long gone. The recipes were little time capsules.

Here’s a link to the one for “Bullock’s Heavenly Lemon Pie,” referred to at the top of this post.³ With its meringue crust, lemon curd filling and whipped cream topping, it does sound rather heavenly.

News blues & a Gold star

The financials of keeping a newspaper afloat have grown ever more daunting, leading to the closures, mergers and staff shrinkage via buyouts and layoffs at so many once flourishing papers of all sizes and circulations around the country; 130 of them closed last year, with more than one-third—2,900—gone since 2005, along with more than two-thirds of the folks who worked there.⁴ Many of my former colleagues and journalist friends have either moved on to other fields—like PR or teaching, television production, healthcare, business, psychology—or they have switched to online journalism as bloggers, podcasters, videographers or the like.

For those of us who once worked in the field—and for those who still do—witnessing the seismic and rapid downsizing of this industry, a seemingly immoveable pillar of our democracy, is heartbreaking, both personally and professionally. And, of course our country is the worse for it—with growing news deserts where there are no newspapers at all.

But that’s enough sad history for one little blog. Let’s get back to food—my favorite antidote for all things frightening!

The arrival of Jonathan Gold, the first and only food critic to win the Pulitzer Prize (and also the subject of a 2015 documentary called City of Gold) at the Times in 2012 sparked great excitement, high hopes and a lot of attention to the importance of Los Angeles as a diverse, creative and thriving center of food culture.

A.O. Scott, who reviewed the Gold documentary for the New York Times, called the critic the “Walt Whitman of taco trucks, hot-dog stands and pho parlors, of unassuming storefront and strip-mall joints that bring the flavors of the world to Southern California.”⁵

Since Gold’s premature death at 57 from pancreatic cancer in 2018, the section has gone through multiple structural and personnel changes, including the just announced layoffs of four talented folks, who were among the 115 Times staffers losing their jobs. Los Angeles Times Food still has a fairly strong presence online, but in print, it’s a far cry from those fat standalone sections of yore. Of course, this can undoubtedly be said of newspapers around the country. Not only do many not have food sections—scores have folded altogether. So I am grateful for the Los Angeles Times. And I’ve read that despite its troubles, the paper does have a test kitchen at its new headquarters in El Segundo.

Lately food writing at the Times has mostly migrated to a Sunday section called Weekend. As you might expect, it’s filled with ideas of what to do with your weekend, including trendy places to eat or drink in town or on a mini- vacation to Santa Barbara or Sacramento. You can also find recipes, though you have to look a little harder—mostly online—but they are still there, and the diverse staff, though dwindling, is making a special effort to include a wide range of international dishes, restaurants and hotspots that reflect the area’s enormous and varied immigrant and ethnic populations.

Hail Caesar!

Here’s a link to an excellent piece I found on the Times Food site about the restaurant in Tijuana where the Caesar salad was invented 100 years ago. It just so happened that my husband, Jefferson Graham, paid the restaurant a visit on a recent one-day trip to Tijuana. He took a food tour—without me! (Unfortunately I was otherwise engaged!) Here’s Jeff’s PhotowalksTV video about the tour. (Note: The part about the Caesar salad begins 11:37 minutes into the story, but the piece is entertaining from beginning to end.)

And, if you’re looking for an excellent Caesar salad recipe—though perhaps not precisely the one made at Hotel Caesar on Avenida Revolucion in Tijuana—you can’t do better than to check out my friend Patricia K. Rose’s take on the subject at Fresh Food in a Flash. You won’t be sorry!

And finally…

I’ve been having fun testing some very chocolaty hamantaschen for fellow Substack writer and cookbook author Leah Koenig in my very own home test kitchen! More about that and an interesting experiment with fermented bananas next time!

As always, thanks for reading, liking, sharing and subscribing. If you know someone you think might enjoy this newsletter, please do pass it along.

See you next time!

Ruth

1. Thomas Curwen, “For a brief, shining moment, Times Mirror Square was L.A.’s Camelot,” Los Angeles Times, July 20, 2018, https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-times-mirror-square-20180720-htmlstory.html

2. Joshua Lurie, “L.A. Times /Food Writers Reminisce About ‘Golden Era,’ ” Food GPS, April 12, 2010, https://foodgps.com/la-times-food-writers-reminisce-about-golden-era/

3. If you can’t access the Times link, here’s another source for the recipe: https://www.cdkitchen.com/recipes/recs/195/Bullocks-Heavenly-Lemon-Pie106350.shtml

4. Angela Fu, “U.S. Lost More Than Two Local Newspapers a Week This Year, New Medill Report Finds,” Poynter., November 16, 2023, https://www.poynter.org/business-work/2023/2023-news-deserts-report-penny-abernathy-medill/

5. A. O. Scott, “Review: Tastes of Los Angeles in ‘City of Cold,’ ” New York Times, March 10, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/11/movies/city-of-gold-review.html?unlocked_article_code=1.SU0.dnyb.6MY6jLT8slNf&bgrp=g&smid=url-share