Novelist Amy Bloom on the Death of "Gourmet"

On Monday, Conde Nast announced it would stop production of four of its glossy titles [2]: Gourmet, Cookie, Modern Bride, and Elegant Bride. Over the week, writers have mourned those magazines' passing on DoubleX. Read our roundup of Conde eulogies [3].

I realize it’s not the end of the world; it’s not even tragic, strictly speaking. Nevertheless, the demise of Gourmet is a sad and bad thing for people who cook, who eat, who read, who write—and who publish.

There were really two Gourmet magazines, the sleepy, blancmange-and-Nun’s-Lemon-Layer-Cake version that began in 1941, and the one Ruth Reichl re-created in 1999, for which I wrote occasionally. My mother’s friends would smack me hard around the head and ears for saying that the magazine was sleepy in the '50s and '60s and '70s. (My mother had no opinion; she didn’t cook.) They loved the recipes, they loved the elegance, and when the magazine added more travel pieces in the '80s, they loved that too and talked about olives in Provence and that little café outside Ravenna. They loved their Gourmet the way I loved mine.

Ruth Reichl cares about food and cooking and writing more than most people—and there wasn’t a page of the magazine that didn’t show that: clever, compelling layouts, charming photographs of some baker in Yountville, or a pair of goat cheese aficionados in Vermont, or a clambake for 60, made by people who loved clams and had some money. She looked for fine writers and told them that their essays mattered more than the recipes they included. She hired David Foster Wallace and published the essay “Consider the Lobster” in 2004, for which we should all be grateful, and The New Yorker should be pea green.

There’s no need to defend Gourmet against charges of elitism; Gourmet was certainly an elitist magazine, if by that we mean not any old mundane and familiar crap would do. Good writers, good recipes, good photographs—and sometimes, better than good. There were articles about cheap eats, articles about the best heirloom tomato, and articles about the exploitation of farm workers. You could also choose, from Gourmet’s enormous pool of recipes, the exact Thanksgiving recipe you were looking for, including boneless roast turkey, and more things to do with chestnuts and oysters than anyone really needed to know. And you could find, online or in the pages, an essay on sustainable fish farms side by side with a piece on the best street food in America or a great Cajun place in Fort Worth.

We have a world now of thin-sliced niche magazines, for the surfer, the PC fanatic, and the scrapbooker, magazines that are really nothing more than a folder to hold advertising and a few articles that could be written by anyone with tunnel vision and a search engine. Gourmet had become a magazine of general interest for people who did not eat just to live. There will be people—in this world, there already are many, and many of them writing blogs—who blame Gourmet for its own end. They’ll write that the beautiful pictures and the fine writers and the attention to detail and the trips to Laos as well as East Los Angeles were just too “too,” and in these hard times, the magazine deserved to have the plug pulled by the Newhouses (heretofore not exactly champions of the common man).

There is nothing wrong with Bon Appétit; I’ll probably read it more often now. I may even get to write for it—but I am not likely to take out an issue from five years back and leaf through it on a rainy day, with my husband peering over my shoulder, the two of us enjoying a very good article and then a very good recipe and then a very good meal.

Thanks, Ruth.

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