Saveur’s Q&A with Sara Moulton

Sara Moulton’s culinary career is long and storied. After graduating top of her class at the Culinary Institute of America, Sara worked in fine dining restaurants, cooked for Julia Child, and was the food editor of ABC’s Good Morning America and was Gourmet magazine’s executive chef before the magazine shuttered. She’s also written several successful cookbooks. Somehow I missed an interview from 2022 when she sat down with Saveur’s Benjamin Kemper to dish on the 90s food scene. Even though the interview took place nearly two years ago, I found it entertaining enough to share now.

Some of the tidbits Sara shared from her days on the nascent Food Network in the mid 1990s were news to me but were (sadly) not surprising. She said there was a real gender divide at the network: “They didn’t really want women at Food Network,” she told Kemper. “Every male chef had his own set, graphics, music, and tools. Not me. I had no oven, and the counter came up so high I had to stand on a riser. I remember recommending Michael Lomonaco for a show, and he got his own set.”

Sara also reminisced about how rapidly the food world was changing at the time. When she first started at Gourmet, if they used an “exotic” ingredient like sesame oil, they needed to put an asterisk next to it and stay that it was “available at specialty food shops.” This struck a chord with me, as I remember reading recipes in magazines like Gourmet, not having the ingredients, and needing to plan trips to major cities with such specialty stores in mind. At the time I had to drive at least four hours to find any ingredient that was marginally out of the ordinary because there was no internet to order from. We’ve come a long way, baby.