Julia Reed
My Articles
My Bio
Julia Reed is a contributing editor at Newsweek, where she writes the “food and drink” column, and creative director of taigan.com, a retail website where she also edits the site’s “magazine,” Fetch.
She appears regularly on CNN and is a contributor to Garden and Gun, Conde Nast Traveler, Elle Décor, The New York Times and Vogue. From 1988 to 2008, she was senior writer at Vogue, where her profile subjects ranged from George and Laura Bush, Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Edwards to Robert DeNiro, Carolina Herrera and Oscar de la Renta.
She is the author of: Queen of the Turtle Derby and Other Southern Phenomena; The House on First Street, My New Orleans Story; and Ham Biscuits, Hostess Gowns and Other Southern Specialties: An Entertaining Life (With Recipes).
She is chairman of the board of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans, where she lives with her husband John Pearce and her beagle Henry.
My Favorites
I Don’t Care What They Say:
- I love fur
- I read National Enquirer
- I rarely recycle
- I thinkPrince Charles and Camilla deserve to be happy
My Drinks:
- Dewar’s
- Pimm’s cups from the Napoleon House in New Orleans and Pimm’s Royales from the bar at the Paris Ritz
- Whiskey sours from the bar at Duke’s Hotel, London
- Pol Roger Champagne
My Shoes:
- Manolo Blahnik, of course
- Christian Louboutin flats
- Nikes
- White Canvas lace-up Sperry topsiders
- Flat espadrilles from Manual Alpargatera in Barcelona
My Foods:
- Steamed artichokes with lemon butter
- Salmon raw, smoked, grilled or poached
- Fried chicken
- Squash casserole
- My mother’s vegetable soup and cornbread
- My mother’s fried eggplant
- Just-picked white corn
- Campbell’s tomato and chicken noodle soups
- Oysters on the halfshell
- Fresh gulf shrimp
- Caviar on blini
- Souffle potatoes from “21“
- Mackerel tartar with ossetra caviar and sauce remoulade from Le Bernardin if only they’ll put it on the menu again
- A perfect filet of sole with boiled new potatoes and sauteed spinach, preferable at Wilton’s in London
- Hot tamales from Doe’s Eat Place in Greenville, Mississippi
- Vietnamese beef pho and cha gio
- Porcini mushrooms
- A good Roman steak, preferably from Nino in Rome
- Serrano ham from Spain
- Smithfield ham from Virginia
- Leg of lamb
My Remedies:
I Love(d) Reading:
- Harriet the Spy and The Long Secret by Louise Fitzhugh
- Last Notes from Home and Pages from a Cold Island by Frederick Exley
- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
- The Collected Short Stories of Chekhov, the Modern Library three-volume edition edited and with an introduction by Shelby Foote
- The Theory and Practice of Rivers by Jim Harrison
- 100 Love Sonnets by Pablo Neruda
- The Novels of Walker Percy
- The Travis McGee series by John D. McDonald
- The novels of Elmore Leonard , except the westerns
- Ninety-Two in the Shade and Something to be Desired by Tom McGuane
- M.F.K. Fisher’s The Gastronomical Me
- Cookbooks late at night
I Love(d) Listening To:
- Bob Dylan especially “Blonde On Blonde” and “Blood On the Tracks”
- Crystal Gayle’s version of Rodney Crowell’s “Til I Gain Control Again”
- Robert Earl Keen singing “Merry Christmas from the Family”at any time of the year
- Robert Earl Keen singing “Feelin’ Good Again”
- June Christy singing “Something Cool”
- Ray Charles singing anything
- Jerry Jeff Walker singing “London Homesick Blues”
- Joan Baez singing “Yellow Coat”
- Stephen Sills singing “Sugar Babe”
- Lowell George singing “20 Million Things”
- The Allman Brother’s “Ain’t Wasting Time No More”
- Rita Coolidge’s version of Bob Dylan’s “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight”
- The songs of Kris Kristofferson
- “Deerskin Jacket,” the CD of my dearest friend Jessica Brent, who has a voice like an angel and a songwriting gift to match
- “Mississippi Number One” the new CD by Jessica’s sister Eden Brent for which I wrote the liner notes
- Cabaret artist Steve Ross singing “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” “Ninety-Nine Miles from L.A.” and anything by Noel Coward
- Lionel Hampton playing “Flying Home”
- Dexter Gordon playing anything
- Churchill’s wartime speeches
- Mezzo soprano Denyce Graves singing “America the Beautiful” at the 9/11 service at National Cathedral
- James Taylor, period
I Love(d) Watching:
- The scene in Absence of Malice where Wilford Brimley cleans house
- Jack Nicholson in “Five Easy Pieces” and “Chinatown”
- “Nobody’s Fool”
- “Klute”
- “M*A*S*H “
- “Any Wednesday”with Jane Fonda and Jason Robards
- The nude wrestling scene between Alan Bates and Oliver Reed in “Women in Love”
- The love scene between Faye Dunaway and Robert Redford in “Three Days of the Condor”
- Sophia Loren singing “Bing Bang Bong” in “Houseboat”
- “Charade”
- Fred Astaire dance with Ginger Rogers
- Fred Astaire joust with Bing Crosby over Ginger Rogers in “Holiday Inn”
- Carole Lombard in “My Man Godfrey”
- The Thin Man movies
- “The Jackie Gleason Show” and “My Three Sons” on TV when I was little
I Wish I Lived In:
- A hotel suite with good room service and an enormous bathroom, much like the one Warren Beatty lived in at the Regent Beverly Wilshire
- Ingrid Bergman’s apartment in “Indiscreet”
I Hoard:
- Seashells and gull feathers
- Birds’ nests
- Soap, candles, bath gels
- Honeys, salts, mustards, Spanish paprikas
Things I am Miserly About:
- Cars. As much as I would like a gorgeous, sexy Jag (see “I Want to Own”), it seems a ridiculous thing to spend $100,000 on. I happily take my father’s cast-off Cadillacs, which he already buys used, as he is miserly about pretty much everything. Still, Cadillacs are great on the road, and they are amazing bargains if you buy them after someone else’s lease is up.
I Want to Own:
- Antoine’s restaurant in New Orleans so I could restore it to the gorgeous and delicious temple of Creole cuisine it once was. I stay up late at night writing the daily specials I would have in the front room.
- A house in Dark Harbor, Maine like the fabulous one Annette de la Renta did with Albert Hadley: deep chocolate brown on the outside, paper bag brown on the inside, doxens of elephant folio Audobons on the walls, and white slipcovered furniture everywhere. Heaven.
- The 19th century English diamond and emerald chandelier earrings from a La Vielle Russie that I saw at the winter antiques show….but pretty much anything from there will do.
- A Jaguar. Either an XJ Super V8 or an XKR convertible. I will drive—and have driven—anything, including a very cheap Plymouth Acclaim, a model Chrysler quit making because the median age driver was 65 and people had quit buying them. Still, long before I got my driver’s license, I had a recurring image of myself pulling up at a curb somewhere in one of those dark green Jags, and stepping out in a very chic rust and white silk print dress with a wide leather belt that my mother once owned. It was an image of glamour that I’ve never quite lived up to and that I just can’t shake.
I’m Addicted To:
- “General Hospital:” A day not knowing what Jason and Sonny are up to is a truly worrisome day
- Ginger Altoids
- Paper stores
The First Thing I Do in the Morning Is:
- Drink a cup of Twining’s Irish Breakfast tea
I Use:
- Moleskin notebooks and black Sharpie fine point pens
- The amazing Japanese knives Jason Epstein gave me for a wedding present
- The original Cuisinart
- Kitchen Aid stand mixer
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