Goodbye, Gourmet

Yesterday, National Public Radio’s All Things Considered commented on the demise of Gourmet magazine, stating that the public reaction was vaguely divided into two categories: those who didn’t know the magazine and therefore didn’t care, and those who were in mourning.

I am in mourning.

Gourmet’s publisher, Condé Nast, cited insufficient ad revenue, and, on 5 October, the title was dropped, along with three others. Without doubt, Gourmet was just one of many print publications shuffling along a mortal coil that terminates in a vortex of online media. I shall loathe the day when recipes take the standard form of a Tweet’s 140 characters.

How hypocritical, you say?

Yes, I feel as the pads of my fingertips hit the keys of my laptop that I am methodically tapping away at the nails of a larger coffin containing the struggling print media industry itself. Not that the words on this blog deserve consideration along those carefully chosen and printed in Condé Nast’s collection of titles, but it cannot be disputed that with the creation of every new food blog, our relation to cookbooks and gastronomic printed literature inches one step further towards obscurity. Nintendo DS’ ‘Personal Trainer: Cooking’ boasts ‘a DS Chef, your own private cooking instructor who talks you through 245+ recipes from more than 30 countries worldwide’ who will have you ‘cooking like a pro, even if you’ve never lifted a ladle before’. That ‘worldwide’ is superfluous is just the beginning of my problem with Nintendo’s school of cooking.

In the not so distant future, kitchens will be computerised, armed with a plethora of gadgets able not only to mollycoddle one through heaps of watered-down recipes chosen to please a 'target' consumer, but to inform one that the recipe in question calls for 1/3 cup of milk, and, having received a signal from the refrigerator that only 2/3 cups remain, a replacement litre has been pre-emptively ordered through the online grocery service and will be arriving tomorrow morning on one’s front step.

Even reading about the dissolution of Gourmet on blogs such as this one has its own twist of irony—as though the exchange of laments of the foodie blogosphere combine to create one long obituary-in-waiting that was composed using different words long before its actual death.

Yet, Bon Appétit and Epicurious.com live on, symbols of Condé Nast’s own efforts to court and pander to the ever amorphous ‘wider demographic’ and to create an online platform (and, in so doing, seal the fate of Gourmet), respectively. The sad state of gourmet.com pours salt on the wound in assuring its readership that ‘access to Gourmet recipes will also remain available via sister site Epicurious.com and the Epi iPhone application’. Joy.

For as long as I have been alive, Gourmet was the go-to reference for those who cooked good food and those who simply appreciated good food. It stood for exactly what it promised—the delights of the connoisseur, the gluttonous pleasure of the gourmand. Not every recipe between its covers seemed feasible, many brandishing preparation times in days rather than hours. And you know what? That was fine by me. I think we could do with more appreciation for what goes into traditional preparations of truly laborious and equally delicious food and less of the ‘Stoup’ (yes, I know Rachel Ray is far too easy a target) versions.

Why should the only recipes published be ‘accessible’? Surely there is room enough at the table for the home chef and the home cook; it is true that a home cook might risk feeling alienated by time-consuming, labour-intensive, complicated recipes, but Gourmet’s iconic status attests to an equally deserving reading audience that saw those same recipes as inviting challenges. One cook’s tedium is another’s bliss. Furthermore, Gourmet was the exception rather than the rule; every other magazine near the grocery store checkout deals in the business of quick, easy meals.

To those who might be rather quick to cry ‘snob’, let me say that it is thanks to literature such as Gourmet magazine that we enjoy a greater diversity of foods available today in the average American supermarket.

Lynne Rosetto Kasper hit it on the head when she spoke on 5 Oct. with Melissa Block on NPR’s ‘All Things Considered’: ‘about 10 years ago, when Ruth Reichl took over Gourmet, she took this magazine and she took an opportunity to redo a classic, and I think she did a bang-up job…food isn't just recipes. Food is far more than recipes. Food is stories. Food is stories about people. Food's politics. Food's history. And Gourmet was bringing that all in and embracing it’.