Chris Johns: If I was stunned to hear Monday that publishing giant Condé Nast would be closing Gourmet magazine, I was even more disappointed when I found out they were keeping Bon Appetit magazine instead.
I always thought of the latter as the Cracked to Gourmet's Mad Magazine, relying a little too heavily on unimaginative prepackaged, 20-minute quick and easy fare.
The 68-year-old Gourmet, meanwhile, was instrumental in my culinary education. It was always a source of comfort to know that wherever I travelled in the United States, Jane and Michael Stern had already been there and found all the great road food. David Rosengarten was sure to infuriate me with his arrogance at least once in every review he wrote, and there would always be a couple of recipes that would teach me something new about cooking.
I have piles of old Gourmet magazines kicking around my house, most of them sauce-stained and bookmarked with favourite recipes. I know for example that the first time I ever made risotto with zucchini blossoms was in July of 1996 because of my notes in that issue (“eat more blossoms”).
While it may not be a recipe I return to frequently, that was never the point of Gourmet. It was more than a glossy, bound collection of recipes; it was a guide to “good living.”
That may have been part of the problem. Gourmet suffered from a bit of an image issue. It was perceived as too esoteric and “aspirational.” But, for me, that was one of its strengths. Where else could you read 2,000-word essays on the beer-brewing monks of St. Sixtus Abbey (February, 1999), find out about the latest fusion chef in Chile (October, 2000) or discover where to find the best cheese in Sardinia (April, 2006)?
By contrast, Bon Appetit magazine this month has a roundup of pie-serving tools and a recipe for mock mincemeat pie. What is this, 1952? I half expect to find a Jell-O and olive surprise salad listed there, but that's probably better suited to Every Day with Rachael Ray, or Martha Stewart's Everyday Food or the egregious Sandra Lee: Semi-Homemade magazine, which encourages people to make “marmalade meatballs” and something called “turkey taco mac.”
Rather than teaching people that food and dining can be fun, sexy and adventurous, those dull, unambitious food magazines make cooking and eating seem like a burdensome chore best dispatched in minutes. That is a loss to anyone who loves food. (Even Gourmet was moving more toward accessibility – the current issue has recipes for pasta carbonara and chocolate mousse, for heaven's sake.) Apparently, they'll be keeping Gourmet's book-publishing arm and the TV series Diary of a Foodie and starting a new one, Adventures with Ruth . And we still have the recipes on Epicurious.com, which is some condolence.
But I'll be mourning the loss of a great magazine tonight – and serving kimchi quesadillas (October, 2009) at the wake.
Chris Johns is a Toronto-based food critic. He has reviewed restaurants for The Globe and Mail, En Route, Fashion Magazine and Maclean's.
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Alexandra Gill: Last fall, as the rest of the modern world was sinking into the quagmire of a global financial meltdown, the editors at Gourmet magazine had their heads stuck in a cookie jar.
Over at the more approachable and popular Bon Appétit, editor-in-chief Barbara Fairchild seized the zeitgeist and rushed out a prescient letter from the editor that connected the challenging economic times to the magazine's heartfelt holiday themes of food, family and tradition.
Meanwhile, Gourmet's coolly cerebral Ruth Reichl was patting herself on the back for a bizarrely abstract photo shoot of “fanciful” cookies plumbed from the archives and vaingloriously printed on eight different covers, randomly sent out to subscribers. Titled “Out of Sight,” the December, 2008, centre spread signified just how far out of touch the 68-year-old glossy had become.
Although it's incredibly sad to see the demise of any magazine – especially one with such a venerable history that continued to respect its subject – I can't say I'm surprised by Gourmet's closing.
When Ms. Reichl took over as editor in 1999, she said she wanted to make Gourmet the New Yorker of food. Can any fan recall a memorable, must-read article of substance since the late novelist David Foster Wallace filed his capricious treatise on whether lobsters feel pain in 2004?
While the rest of North America was busily catching up to the foodie revolution – shedding its freezers of processed chicken and stocking up on sustainable fish – Gourmet devolved into a smorgasbord of aspirational food-porn photography, in which the actual food (only achievable with the luxury kitchen machinery touted in its advertising pages) was trumped by the cool polka-dotted, knee-high stockings of its young fashionista models who were jetted into the Hamptons for the weekend (September, 2009).
The Upper East Side ladies-who-lunch (or wannabes) are not a viable readership for a general-subscription magazine. Does anybody actually believe that Julia Child would be anything but a fossilized slab of butter in the Smithsonian if it weren't for Julie Powell's gauchely refreshing blogs and books?
In its eulogies, there has been much lamenting and hand-wringing about the loss of the magazine's travel pages. I can't see the difference. Even from the hinterlands of British Columbia, I detected a superficial, glossed-over tone from Gourmet's recent survey of top Canadian food cities. While I may not have agreed with Alan Richmond's mockery of our fealty to locavorism in his recent Bon Appétit feature story on Vancouver, the article did at least pay props to the trendsetting scene and provide readers with a handy, accurate précis of the city's best restaurants.
And now I lay to rest Gourmet magazine. The pristine issues that layer my bookshelves look much more attractive than my dog-eared, rumpled and batter-stained copies of Bon Appétit. I guess that's what an antiquity should be.
Alexandra Gill is The Globe and Mail's Vancouver restaurant critic.
