New England Flavor

In her four seasons as co-host of the public television documentary series Weekends with Yankee, Amy Traverso ’93 has prepared mussels au gratin with French chef Jacques Pépin, made pork and chive dumplings with celebrity chef Joanne Chang, baked a triple-layer cake with cookbook author Dorie Greenspan and rubbed elbows with dozens of other food-world figures.

The series was inspired by Yankee magazine, where Traverso is the senior food editor. She and her co-host, Emmy winner Richard Wiese, explore New England together, taping travel and lifestyle segments throughout the region’s six states. For Traverso, who is also an award-winning author (a revised and updated edition of her Apple Lover’s Cookbook, first published a decade ago, was released on September 1), the show “has been a great surprise at this stage of a long print career,” she wrote in a 2019 class note. Seasons one through four of Weekends with Yankee are available to download on iTunes and Amazon Prime Video; season five, filming now, is scheduled to premiere on PBS in April 2021.

This story appears as part of the Smithies Create column in the Fall 2020 issue of the Smith Alumnae Quarterly.

Photograph by Meg Haley