From the Editor: Feast Your Eyes

“You eat with your eyes first.”

Food stylist Debi Shawcross shared that theory with us. On Page 40, she proves it.

There you’ll find the latest, and most lavish, installment of Virginia Magazine’s reformulated books section, VM Bookshelf. We use it to curate works for you around a UVA theme, this time cookbooks by alumni authors.

Freelance writer Sarah Lindenfeld Hall (Col ’96) did the research, selected the recipes, and reported and wrote the piece. Then the visual team took over—Shawcross, photographer Adam Ewing and Creative Director Steve Hedberg. The same trio brought to life Hall’s Winter 2020 feature offering COVID-19 comfort food.

Despite the job title, Shawcross’ role isn’t just style; it’s also substance.  She did all the cooking, and with it all the sourcing of ingredients, all the prep work—and all with a visual sensibility. Every dice, every sear, needed to be ready for its close-up.

Food styling means food scheduling. Shawcross had to sequence the multiple phases of eight different dishes around a single all-day shoot. She triaged what she could cook ahead and still have look fresh on picture day, what she could prefabricate for later assembly, and what she had to create on set.

The creative team told us the gingerbread Bundt cake was to die for. Here’s how they also made it drop-dead gorgeous: Shawcross sliced it at just the right angle and arranged the crumbs just so. Hedberg slowly rotated the plate so Ewing could capture optimal light and contrast. Because everything was deliberate, nothing left to chance, they discussed at length precisely where to casually place the fork.

The burrata posed its own challenges. “There was a lot of moving little pieces and parts around so it just didn’t look like a big pile of stuff, because that’s what it is by definition,” Hedberg said. Shawcross used forceps, a gift from a heart surgeon friend, to pull to the fore pieces of caramelized squash, pine nuts and golden raisins.

A simple bologna sandwich can be complicated. For ours, prepared on set, Shawcross inserted metal pins to keep the towering layers together and cut and inserted small makeup sponges to keep them level. To get the right amount of cheese melt, she used a heat gun, the kind a plumber uses to apply some je ne sais quoi to a PVC joint.

We used the same session to shoot this issue’s Retrospect (See Page 76), the story of an 1840s fruitcake recipe, excavated from inside a wall of Pavilion X. It’s the only recipe Shawcross doctored, re-baking it with extra dried fruit to aid the visual appeal.

How’d it taste? “I’m not a fruitcake person,” she said. Ewing wouldn’t try it. Hedberg offered: “It wasn’t dry.”

Maybe there’s a reason someone disappeared the instructions behind plaster. The other delicacies, we promise, won’t disappoint. At least not visually.

Richard Gard (Col ’81)
Vice President, Communications, 
UVA Alumni Association