Sometime around 1990 and not too long out of college, I held what memory tells me was my first true dinner party, in a three-bedroom brownstone duplex in Brooklyn, where the rent was approximately $1,200 a month. The menu revolved around a pork loin stuffed with sausage and dried apricots, a recipe that came from “The New Basics,” which along with “The Silver Palate Cookbook,” its predecessor, and the various musings of Laurie E. Colwin would have made up the near entirety of any young aspiring cook’s kitchen library. That evening, we were paying tribute to a friend who had recently begun working as a writer for David Letterman, and in that spirit my roommate and I purchased several bottles of Kendall-Jackson chardonnay for $11 each, feeling very grand about it.

Judged by the rigorous standards we impose today, it took very little to be considered a food person in New York 20 years ago. It was a time when it was possible to go for very long periods without meeting even one 24-year-old who could tell you anything about sea urchin or the cured meats of the southern Tyrol. With the exception of an annual birthday dinner that might be spent at the Mesa Grill or the now-closed Chanterelle, restaurants, for those of us newly inaugurated into adulthood, were not ends in themselves but rather places to go to pass the time before heading to the parties where you would lose all sense of it. I spent many wonderful hours at Bistrot Margot, a restaurant, now defunct, on Prince Street, but I could not now recall the contents of any meal I ever consumed there.