Meet Sheryl Julian

By Sheryl Julian

When the popular Watertown produce market Russo’s closed in 2021, I wrote about it for The Boston Globe with the headline, “Dear Tony Russo.” It was one of the most emailed stories for a couple of days, and that evening I was interviewed by the hosts of NPR’s “All Things Considered.” They were fascinated that a single family, generation after generation, could keep a farmstand running – and packed with customers – for 100 years.

I knew Russo’s because I had been shopping there since the late 70s, when I moved to Watertown.

Perhaps that should read: moved back, since at the time I was born, my family was living at Watertown Arsenal, where my father, a career U.S. Army officer, was stationed. It was a locked base so guests who came to visit the new baby had to stop at the gate house; the guard called our quarters to see if it was OK to send them over.

My father was soon transferred to Europe and then bases elsewhere, and eventually to Boston again. In the late 70s, after my own travels as a young adult, I settled in Watertown, which, looking back, seems to have been a very sleepy place.

So I live a mile from where I started out. I always thought that was a Boston thing, but apparently it’s what the rest of the country does too.

For most of my career, I worked at The Boston Globe, first as the food reporter, then the food editor. I retired but I still write feature articles, test recipes, photograph food, and visit new restaurants. For many years, I’ve taught a class in food writing for the Gastronomy Program at Boston University, a graduate program started by Julia Child and Jacques Pepin.

I trained as a cook at the Cordon Bleu schools in London and Paris, but I’ve always worked as a journalist. You’re probably thinking that writing about food – visiting restaurants, cooking with chefs, finding farmers all over New England working the land, driving to Maine to learn about mussel aquaculture, to New Hampshire to talk to an orchardist about fruit tree grafting, logging thousands of miles at the wheel to tell readers about someone toiling away at one tiny piece of a vast industry – that I must have had the greatest job. I did!

There I was with a front-row seat, not only to the changes in the food scene in the Boston area, but also to the dramatic metamorphosis in Watertown. Everything’s quite different now, including the Arsenal, and there are many reasons to come here, work here, live here, thrive here.

In my free time, I walk the Watertown-Cambridge Greenway often. I also work with Community Cooks, a group of volunteers who cook for the Friday Cafe at First Church in Cambridge. The organization feeds about 100 people a week. (If you want to volunteer too, contact Rev. Alex Steinert-Evoy at alex@steinert-evoy.org.)

In all the years I’ve spent writing about cooks who live in this area but may have been raised around the world in cultures I’m less familiar with, I found one commonality: They all believed that feeding people is more than nourishment. Food and foodways are deeply embedded in national and regional cultures, bring people together, and reinforce a sense of identity, dignity, and belonging. They contribute to a general feeling of well-being and social coherence.

There’s a very old tradition of leaving food for people in stressful situations. It’s more important than you think. At every Army base we lived on, we found a casserole by the door when we first moved in. I try to make a point of doing this, for an elderly person who is stretching the budget at the supermarket, or someone who has just had a huge disappointment, or is in mourning, or nursing a cold, or battling their way out of Covid, or recovering from surgery, or getting too little sleep with a newborn.

My drop-offs are never anything much, a small meal to lift spirits. It says someone out there is thinking about you and sending good cheer.

Sheryl Julian can be reached at sheryl.julian@globe.com. Follow her on Instagram @sheryljulian