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Let me start by staying I was never an Amanda Hesser fan. At best I scanned her articles in The New York Times every Wednesday and smirked at her Sunday "Food Diary" columns, which chronicled her one-year courtship and food battles with her now husband, Tad Friend, the famous Mr. Latte. Recently I was reading a Q&A thread on eGullet.com in which someone asked Hesser the cause of the anti-Amanda sentiment swirling around her. She was at a loss. When she asked the forum members for their thoughts, no one came forward. It was then that I embarked on an e-mail correspondence with Hesser, admitting fully that I wasn't a fan and explaining I didn't know why. Had I simply jumped on a bandwagon, I asked her? Determined to figure this out, I began reading many of her articles, as well as her two books, The Cook and The Gardener (W.W. Norton, 2000) and the just-released Cooking for Mr. Latte (W.W. Norton, 2003). I wrote Hesser informing her I had come to some conclusions, and asked if she would be interested in meeting for an interview to discuss the book, Amanda bashing, and her relationship with Friend. To my surprise, she agreed.

David Leite: I'm curious. Why did you agree to meet with me, especially since you know we were going to talk about the "trouble with Amanda"?

Amanda Hesser: I agreed to meet with you because I wanted to see what one of you mean eGulleters were like in person. No, I agreed because you sent me an honest e-mail and seemed genuinely interested in a good conversation.

DL: Okay, then. A conversation it is. Whose idea was it to publish the diary in the New York Times Magazine?

AH: It's kind of a long story, but what happened was Amy Spindler, who is the editor of the style pages of the magazine, called me up and asked me to breakfast. And she and Andy Port, the deputy editor, wanted to change the food page, and they asked me if I had any ideas or thoughts on whom to hire. I made some suggestions, and they had already considered the people I had recommended. Then Amy asked, "Would you ever consider it?" I hadn't really thought about it. I had my job, I liked my job a lot. So we began chatting, and I said, "One thing that would be fun for me would be a diary." At the time I had just begun dating Tad, and I told them the story of our first date — how he took me to Merchant's for dinner — and they thought that it was really funny. They loved the idea. They thought it was comedic and could go in any direction, and I felt it was something I could do with my job that wouldn't be a time crunch. You couldn't do this at the newspaper. Yet it was an appealing change of style, a kind of challenge. It seemed like it could be fun. They said, "It would great if you could make this have a beginning, middle, and end, something with a story arc, so you're not writing 10 years without a sense of where you're going. Why don't you try it and see how it goes?" So I wrote the first two columns and handed them in, and they really liked them. And [laughs] all the stars aligned, and the first column began with our first date and  the last one ended with our wedding. Tad and I joked about it at the time, but we were nowhere near getting engaged. We were both hoping it would lead in that direction, at least I was hoping it would, because I really liked Tad. And it did seem like the perfect ending, to end with a joyous moment. more >