The United States of Arugula: How We Became a Gourmet Nation By David Kamp Published by Broadway Books; September 2006;$26.00US/$35.00CAN; 0-7679-1579-8

But with more women in the professional workforce and more people amenable to the general idea of "gourmet" eating, especially if it had the imprimatur of a prestigious shop like Dean & DeLuca or E.A.T., prepared foods started to take off -- Rob Kaufelt, who grew up in the supermarket business and now runs Murray's, the beloved New York cheese store, calls the rise of prepared foods "the biggest change in the grocery-store business over the last thirty years."

Dean & DeLuca's secret weapon in this regard was Felipe Rojas-Lombardi, who for a time was a partner in the store with the namesake owners and Ceglic. Peruvian by birth, Rojas-Lombardi had come to Dean & DeLuca by way of the James Beard Cooking School, where he'd risen up through the ranks to become the master's right-hand man in the kitchen. Rojas-Lombardi had also worked as New York magazine's in-house chef, their go-to man for testing recipes. This pedigree proved helpful not only in eliciting constant plugs for the store in Beard's syndicated column and in New York but in the fact that Rojas-Lombardi was a skilled, inventive cook: he roasted chickens tandoori-style, grilled salmon on cedar planks, and went out on a limb with such oddball entrées as elk steak and his notorious rabbit with forty cloves of garlic. "Felipe did some of the first pasta salads that people had ever seen," says Ceglic. "He did everything with the products we sold, and people cottoned to it."

"The idea was that if you didn't know what a sun-dried tomato was, well, here it was, in a pasta salad," said Dean.

The third point in New York's prepared-foods triangle, with Dean & DeLuca downtown and E.A.T. serving the Upper East Side, was the Silver Palate, a tiny shop on the Upper West Side, on what was then a drab stretch of Columbus Avenue.

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