“Gourmet was the New Yorker of food magazines back in the 1970s and ’80s,” said Jim Lahey, a Manhattan baker. In the 1940s and ’50s, the restaurateur Lucius Beebe wrote a meandering column called Along the Boulevards. Its stable of contributors included James Beard, Laurie Colwin and M. The magazine also provided a home for literate, thoughtful food writing. “It was a glimpse into another world, one that I was interested in.” “That magazine was a big deal to me growing up in Hartford, Alabama,” he said. Years later, biscuits from his own recipe would be on the cover of the magazine. Scott Peacock, the Atlanta chef who has become known for Southern cooking, made his first biscuits as boy using a recipe from Gourmet. “Growing up, my parents’ copies of Gourmet were my only window into the high-end restaurant world,” said Andrew Carmellini of Locanda Verde. For many, their dreams of a life in the kitchen were born in its pages. Reichl, who is heading to the Midwest this week to promote it.Īfter a short rest, she plans to write a book about her years at Condé Nast.Ĭhefs, too, lamented the magazine’s passing. “It feels like the last act of this magazine should be to support this book,” said Ms. The pool is so deep that Gourmet compiled a cookbook of more than 1,000 recipes in 2006, then turned around and published more than 1,000 more in “Gourmet Today,” which arrived in one of the industry’s great moments of bad timing in September. Over the course of nearly 70 years, Gourmet has a recipe database enviable in both size and quality. “Gourmet was the only resource you had other than your cookbooks,” said Judy Walker, the food editor of The Times-Picayune in New Orleans. In the decade since Ruth Reichl took over as editor, she underlined everything from the exploitation of tomato pickers in Florida to dishes like chicken and dumplings that could be on the stove, simmering, in 15 minutes.īut whatever the fashion of the time, Gourmet remained a place where people learned how to eat and cook particularly for an older generation. The magazine, founded in 1941, thrived on a rush of postwar aspiration and became a touchstone for readers who wanted lives filled with dinner parties, reservations at important restaurants and exotic but comfortable travel.Īlthough it was easy to paint Gourmet as the food magazine for the elite, it was a chronicler of a nation’s food history, from its early fascination with the French culinary canon to its discovery of Mediterranean and Asian flavors to its recent focus on the source of food and the politics surrounding it. It represents so much more,” said James Oseland, editor in chief of Saveur, a smaller, younger food magazine. “It has a certain doomsday quality because it’s not just a food magazine. How had the magazine that seemed more likely to stay home, broil pork chops and take care of the kids won out over its sexy, well-read, globetrotting sister? And what does a world without Gourmet portend for an age when millions prefer to share recipes online, restaurant criticism is becoming crowd-sourced and newspaper food sections are thinner and thinner?
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