Charlotte Druckman Beats the Door Down for Pastry

Senior Editor at Medium, an epicure but not a bemoaner

Charlotte Druckman, a senior editor at Medium, loves pastry. She lives in New York, but if you suggest taking her out for the best coffee-and-croissant in San Francisco, expect a reply along the lines of, “Oh, at The Mill? Or Craftsman and Wolves? b. Patisserie? Tartine? Knead?” Anything you think you know about pastry, Druckman knew it long before. She comes by her culinary obsession honestly:

“My passion for food comes from my dad. I was born and raised on the island of Manhattan, in a typical Jewish family where food is love. Every meal was about criticizing or praising what was on the table and then talking about what’s for the next meal. My father has a sincere joie de vivre, which you see most in food. And my mother is a total culture vulture, so I grew up with parents who were always trying the newest restaurants.”

As a teenager, Druckman loved magazines—Vogue, Sassy, Gourmet—and interned early at New York Magazine and W. “I originally wanted to be a magazine editor-in-chief,” she laughs. “Not that I had any idea what that entailed.”

An English major with an art history minor at the University of Pennsylvania, Druckman worked briefly as a junior ad copywriter at Estée Lauder after graduation. While drafting copy for a new cologne formula targeted at the Middle East, “I started thinking about Brancusi and writing about sculpture” she says. “It was completely irrelevant to the cologne, but it was a reaction to being in a place that felt stifling and unchallenging.”

She ditched the job and got accepted to a PhD program in art history at NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts. “I wanted to mix academia and pop culture,” Druckman recalls. “It turns out that you usually have to pick one of those two, so I decided to go with the Trojan horse method of infusing intellectual discourse into pop culture.” She left grad school after receiving her masters degree but contends, “I love critical theory, and that nerd in me will never go away.”

Druckman held on-staff positions at DailyCandy and then Town & Country before landing at Food & Wine magazine. Her foray into food writing happened “not accidentally but not deliberately either. I specialized in design and entertaining, but eventually I thought, one thing I would really enjoy writing about is food. So I just started pitching food stories. I think that’s when I found my voice as a writer.”

She also found a cause. The former magazine journalist admits, “I tend to get a little bit feisty. I went to a really progressive all-girls school in New York for thirteen years. They taught us to question everything and be really curious.” One of the first things that Druckman got feisty about as a food writer was the status of female and pastry chefs:

At Food & Wine, I started asking myself what wasn’t quite right in coverage of the food world. The pastry thing and the woman thing became bees in my bonnet. No one’s inherently sexist, but our idea of what the food world should look like comes from France. Even now, in France, you don’t see a lot of female chefs, and you definitely don’t see a lot of female pastry chefs. I’ve always had a sweet tooth, but I also noticed that there’s no food writer out there who specializes in pastry. In food coverage, pastry tends to be underrepresented as an art. Until it gets saturated and everyone is writing about it, I will be beating the door down for pastry.

Underdogs—specifically, women chefs and pastry—became Druckman’s beat. “In life,” she says, “I find that it’s best not to complain but to come up with an alternative.” This belief led to a book, Skirt Steak: Women Chefs on Standing the Heat and Staying in the Kitchen. The “collective memoir” is based on extensive interviews with seventy-three female chefs. In it, Druckman poses the question, “Why, when we’re obsessed, as a culture, with chefs and their output, has that fixation landed on those who are decidedly male?”

Characteristically, however, Druckman asks the reader to avoid bemoaning the status quo—“Why are there no female chefs?”—and instead to “begin with a simple premise: female chefs are the norm.” The book vows to skip over the questions “typically posited to the gals of the galley” and “raise the ones that aren’t asked.”

While working on Skirt Steak, Druckman sustained a healthy freelance career, writing for the New York Times Magazine, Bon Appetit, and the Wall Street Journal, among others. Less than six months after the book’s publication, she joined the editorial team at Medium. “I took all these tangents and somehow ended up exactly where I meant to, but I wouldn’t have made it here without that breadth of experience,” she observes.

Druckman, who admits that she’s always had “more story ideas than I can write myself,” is now taking full advantage of working at a platform designed for a spectrum of writers and stories. “There’s no rubric, and we can bring in stories that don’t fit any particular theme” she says. “Everyone at Medium is open to experimenting and trying stuff out, which is amazing after working in print publishing. In traditional publishing you can’t, say, be a food writer and also write about TV.”

At its core, Druckman notes, Medium is about “investing in technology and content simultaneously”:

“We’re building a place that’s about showcasing the individual voice and surfacing new voices. Just think about all of the stories people can tell that they wouldn’t have been able to tell elsewhere!”

Including, of course, but not limited to, pastry.