Food&Kisses: Gourmet Magazine, R.I.P.

It’s the end of an institution: Gourmet Magazine will be no more after the November issue. And, I had just re-subscribed two months ago!

It feels like someone has died and I never told them how much they meant to me. True, upon reading the last to issues, I could see this was not the magazine I cut my teeth on way back when. The substance was gone. The pieces seemed puffy. The recipes were uninteresting.

We do have interesting food writing to read – it’s on the internet. But, it’s not the same as that monthly ritual of getting something in the mail and making some time for a nice leisurely pass through the pages – touching and studying the glossy photographs.

There is nothing out there that really fills the space that Gourmet once did – it was a terrific cross-section of what was “happening” on the food scene, what people wanted to cook from their favorite restaurants (“Readers Requests”), and beautiful photography – and not just of prepared food: back in the day, it could have been a photo of some gorgeous radishes (I still have that cover) or a Swiss chalet blanketed by snow (I had that cover framed and gave it as a gift).

When I was first getting into cooking, I clipped tons of recipes from Gourmet and my early experiments were successful. I remember two in particular: Chocolate Chip Meltaways (a shortbread crossed with a chocolate chip cookie recipe) and Pecan Blue Cheese Crackers. The recipes worked even for a novice such as myself.

One of my deepest food-related regrets was that I once had several years of bound copies of Gourmet from the late sixties and early seventies and I discarded them when preparing for one of my relocations. They were unwieldy and took up a lot of space. Plus I’d had them for about twenty years and had hardly looked at them. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve regretted that rash decision to discard them. They were so evocative of that time because of the photography and there was some top notch food writing there.