Gourmet (magazine)

Based on Wikipedia: Gourmet (magazine)

The Magazine That Taught America How to Eat

In 2004, the novelist David Foster Wallace accepted an assignment that would become one of the most celebrated pieces of food writing ever published. He traveled to the Maine Lobster Festival and returned with "Consider the Lobster," an essay that asked, with devastating philosophical precision, whether it was ethical to boil a creature alive for our dining pleasure. The piece ran in Gourmet magazine.

This was not what anyone expected from a food magazine.

But that was precisely the point of Gourmet. For nearly seven decades, from 1941 to 2009, it occupied a singular position in American culture—a publication about food that was really about everything else. The New York Times would later observe that "Gourmet was to food what Vogue is to fashion." The comparison captures something essential: just as Vogue used clothing as a lens for examining art, culture, and society, Gourmet used recipes and restaurants to explore how we live, what we value, and who we want to become.

Born Into War, Dreaming of Luxury

The first issue of Gourmet arrived in January 1941, eleven months before Pearl Harbor thrust America into World War Two. This timing seems almost perverse—launching a magazine devoted to refined pleasures on the eve of rationing and sacrifice. But founder Earle MacAusland understood something about human nature. In his inaugural editorial, he announced that Gourmet would serve "the honest seeker of the summum bonum of living." That Latin phrase—"the highest good"—signaled his intentions. This would not merely be a collection of recipes. It would be a philosophy.

MacAusland came from an era when culinary aspiration meant looking across the Atlantic. His magazine was printed on expensive paper, lavishly illustrated in color at a time when most publications were black and white, and its recipes carried French names. The editorial focus landed squarely on Europe and New York City, treating American cooking as something to transcend rather than celebrate.

This wasn't snobbery for its own sake. It was ambition. MacAusland drew inspiration from S.S. Pierce, the legendary Boston grocer who had built an empire by offering Americans access to foods they couldn't find anywhere else. Gourmet would do the same for ideas about food—importing sophistication one glossy page at a time.

The Competition Fades

When Gourmet launched, its main rival was American Cookery, a publication that had been running since 1896 under various names, including the wonderfully Victorian title "Boston Cooking-school Magazine Of Culinary Science And Domestic Economics." The two magazines covered similar territory—recipes, reader submissions, culinary advice—but they occupied different worlds aesthetically.

American Cookery was printed on newsprint, illustrated in black and white, focused on practical domestic cooking. It was useful. Gourmet was aspirational. By 1947, American Cookery had folded, unable to compete with MacAusland's gleaming vision of the good life.

The Plaza Hotel Years

From 1945 to 1965, Gourmet's offices occupied space in the Plaza Hotel, that French Renaissance château overlooking Central Park. The address was not accidental. Everything about the magazine—its location, its production values, its editorial voice—reinforced a single message: this is how civilized people live.

The magazine attracted writers whose names would become synonymous with American food culture. James Beard, the man often credited as the father of American gastronomy, came on as an editor in the 1940s and became the magazine's restaurant critic in 1949. He left after a year, feuding with MacAusland, but the two eventually reconciled and Beard returned in 1969. At some point during these years, a young Craig Claiborne—who would later become the legendary food critic of the New York Times—worked as a receptionist at the magazine. Even the front desk led somewhere.

The magazine developed features that invited readers into conversation. "You Asked for It!" tasked the staff with hunting down recipes that readers requested—perhaps a dish they'd encountered in a restaurant, or something their grandmother used to make but never wrote down. "Sugar and Spice" allowed readers to answer each other's culinary questions, creating a community of devoted home cooks years before the internet would make such connections commonplace.

From Illustration to Photography

In the 1950s, Gourmet underwent a visual transformation under Jane Montant's supervision. The magazine shifted from illustration to photography, a change that seems inevitable now but was significant at the time. Illustrations offered an idealized, almost dreamlike vision of food. Photography promised something different: proof. Here is the dish, exactly as it appears, exactly as you might make it.

Montant would rise to become executive editor in the early 1960s and editor in chief from 1980 to 1991. Under her leadership, circulation grew from 671,000 to 895,000. These numbers matter because they represent something beyond business success—they measure how many Americans had come to care about food as more than fuel.

The Condé Nast Era

MacAusland died in 1980 after serving as publisher and editor in chief for nearly four decades. Three years later, Condé Nast purchased the magazine, folding it into a stable that included Vogue, The New Yorker, and Vanity Fair. The company understood prestige publications—how to nurture them, how to monetize them, how to position them as essential rather than optional.

The transition might have homogenized Gourmet, turned it into just another glossy in the corporate portfolio. Instead, the magazine entered its most ambitious phase.

Ruth Reichl Takes Command

In January 1999, Condé Nast announced that Ruth Reichl would leave her position as restaurant critic of the New York Times to become Gourmet's editor in chief. Reichl had previously served as critic for the Los Angeles Times and had made a name for herself with deeply personal reviews that wove memoir into criticism. She was interested in where food came from, who grew it, what eating meant beyond taste.

The magazine she inherited had a circulation around 880,000. It was successful by any measure. Reichl wanted it to matter.

Under her editorship, Gourmet began publishing stories that no other food magazine would touch. A piece on the plight of migrant tomato pickers in Florida. An investigation into whether farm-raised salmon was really as sustainable as its marketing claimed. And then David Foster Wallace's meditation on lobster consciousness, which asked readers to consider whether their dinner had suffered.

These were not the stories you expected between recipes for coq au vin and advertisements for Viking ranges. They were uncomfortable. They complicated the pleasure that the magazine had always celebrated. But they made Gourmet essential reading for anyone who cared about food as a moral and political subject, not just a sensory one.

The Test Kitchen Philosophy

What set Gourmet apart from its competitors was its obsessive commitment to recipe development. The magazine employed twelve full-time test kitchen chefs and an in-house photographer. Food costs alone exceeded one hundred thousand dollars annually. Every recipe was developed, tested, refined, and tested again before publication.

This was journalism, not content creation. The difference matters. A recipe from Gourmet was as reliable as a fact-checked article. You could trust it.

The English food writer Jay Rayner captured what it meant to work for the magazine in terms that border on nostalgia for a vanished world:

Working for Gourmet was like flying the Atlantic first class. It ruined you for other food magazines. It wasn't just the pay, which could be multiple dollars per word. It was also the awe inspiring heft of the operation: the way food photography events were organised like they were Hollywood movie shoots, complete with casting calls and on-site catering; the attentions of the many editors; the pursuit by dreaded fact checkers.

Multiple dollars per word. For context, many freelance writers today consider one dollar per word excellent pay. Gourmet was paying rates that treated writers as artists rather than suppliers of commodity prose.

The Contributors

A magazine attracts the writers it deserves. Gourmet's roster reads like a syllabus for a graduate seminar in American letters.

M.F.K. Fisher, often considered the greatest American food writer, whose prose elevated the essay form. Laurie Colwin, whose Home Cooking remains the warmest book ever written about feeding the people you love. Paul Theroux, the travel writer. Ray Bradbury, the science fiction master. Annie Proulx, who would go on to write Brokeback Mountain. George Plimpton, the participatory journalist who once quarterbacked for the Detroit Lions and boxed Archie Moore.

These were not food writers who occasionally achieved literary distinction. They were distinguished writers who found something worth saying about food. The difference shaped everything.

Elizabeth David brought the British perspective—her books on Mediterranean and French cooking had almost single-handedly transformed English attitudes toward food in the postwar years. Madhur Jaffrey introduced Indian cuisine to Western readers in ways that treated it as a complete culinary tradition rather than a collection of exotic novelties. Lucius Beebe contributed the sensibility of the bon vivant, that endangered species who believed that living well was not merely a pleasure but an obligation.

The Digital Transition

In January 2008, Gourmet finally launched its own website. This was late—desperately late by internet standards. The magazine's recipes had previously appeared on Epicurious, Condé Nast's general food site, and Reichl had been lobbying for a standalone Gourmet digital presence since 1999. Corporate resistance had kept the magazine's identity submerged within the larger brand.

The new site included stories, reviews, videos, and archival material stretching back to 1941. Contributors included Michael Pollan, the author of The Omnivore's Dilemma; Eric Ripert, the chef of Le Bernardin; and Heston Blumenthal, the British chef whose restaurant The Fat Duck had become synonymous with avant-garde cuisine. The site was ambitious, distinctive, true to the magazine's voice.

It arrived too late to save anything.

The End

On October 5, 2009, Condé Nast CEO Chuck Townsend announced that Gourmet would cease monthly publication. The economic collapse of 2008 had devastated the magazine's advertising base. Reichl later enumerated the damage: "Our biggest advertising categories were automotive, banking, beauty, travel, high-end appliances and virtually that whole market was hit."

The decision stunned the food world. The magazine's circulation stood at approximately 980,000—higher than it had been a decade earlier. This was not a publication in terminal decline. It was a victim of circumstance, killed by a financial crisis that had nothing to do with its editorial quality or cultural relevance.

Alice Waters, the chef and restaurateur who had revolutionized American attitudes toward local, seasonal cooking, reportedly nearly cried when she heard the news. James Oseland, editor of rival food magazine Saveur, called Gourmet "an American cultural icon." Competitors could afford to be generous. They knew that something irreplaceable had been lost.

The November 2009 issue, distributed in mid-October, was the last. Reichl learned of the closure while touring to promote the Gourmet Today cookbook, which had been released weeks earlier. In a grim irony, the news of the magazine's death drove the cookbook to significant sales increases. People wanted to own a piece of what was disappearing.

The Afterlife

Condé Nast kept the Gourmet brand alive in diminished form. Recipes continued to appear on Epicurious. The company published occasional special-edition magazines—issues devoted to grilling, Italian food, holiday cooking, comfort food. These were brand extensions, not journalism. The test kitchen was gone. The writers had scattered. The fact-checkers had been laid off.

In September 2010, Condé Nast launched a Gourmet app, attempting to translate the magazine's identity to tablets. They stopped updating it two years later.

The magazine's research library—3,500 cookbooks accumulated over nearly seven decades—was acquired by the Fales Library at New York University in December 2009. The collection represents an archive of American culinary aspiration, a record of how our relationship with food evolved from postwar abundance through the farm-to-table movement.

In 2019, Ruth Reichl published Save Me the Plums, a memoir of her time at Gourmet. The title comes from her final meal at the magazine's offices—a dish of plums from the test kitchen, eaten as the staff packed up their desks. The book is elegiac without being sentimental, an honest accounting of what was built and what was lost.

What Made It Matter

Gourmet was not the only American food magazine. Bon Appétit, which Condé Nast chose to preserve while killing Gourmet, continues to this day. Saveur still publishes, though with diminished frequency. Food & Wine maintains a significant audience. Websites and social media have democratized food writing in ways that would have been unimaginable in 1941.

But something specific ended with Gourmet. The magazine operated on the assumption that food was worth treating seriously—not as content, not as lifestyle branding, but as a subject that rewarded the same depth of inquiry you might bring to politics or literature. It paid writers accordingly. It employed fact-checkers. It maintained a test kitchen that treated recipe development as a craft requiring years of expertise.

This model was expensive. It required advertising revenues that digital media has never been able to replicate. It required readers willing to pay for a physical object and wait a month between issues. It required a cultural consensus that expertise was worth paying for—that having twelve chefs develop a recipe was fundamentally different from having an influencer post what they ate for dinner.

The editors who led Gourmet across its history—Pearl Metzelthin, who served from 1941 to 1943; MacAusland, who ran the magazine from 1943 until his death in 1980; Montant, who shepherded it through the 1980s; Gail Zweigenthal, who guided it through the 1990s; and Reichl, who oversaw its final, most ambitious decade—each understood this. They were building an institution, not producing content.

The Recipes Remain

In 2004, Gourmet published The Gourmet Cookbook, featuring 1,200 recipes from the magazine's first sixty years. Two years before its closure, the Modern Library released Endless Feasts: Sixty Years of Writing from Gourmet, an anthology of the magazine's best prose. And Gourmet Today, that final cookbook released just before the end, collected over 1,000 recipes representing the Reichl era's synthesis of tradition and innovation.

These books survive. The recipes still work. The prose still sings. What disappeared was the ongoing conversation—the monthly arrival of new ideas, new recipes, new arguments about what food means and how we should eat.

The magazine also produced television. Gourmet's Diary of a Foodie premiered on PBS in October 2006 and won a James Beard Foundation Award in 2008. A follow-up series, Gourmet's Adventures With Ruth, premiered in October 2009—the same month the magazine died. The show featured Reichl visiting cooking schools around the world with renowned chefs. It was an odd experience, watching a publication's ghost continue to flicker on screen after the publication itself had ceased to exist.

Consider the Magazine

David Foster Wallace's lobster essay worked because it took a creature most readers had never thought about—a bottom-dwelling crustacean with an alien nervous system—and forced them to consider whether it could suffer. The piece was uncomfortable. It made you think about the moral weight of pleasure.

Gourmet itself was a creature most readers never thought about. It arrived monthly; you read it; you perhaps tried a recipe or two. But the magazine's disappearance asks its own uncomfortable question: what do we lose when institutions committed to depth and expertise no longer survive?

The answer is everywhere in our media landscape. It's in recipe content optimized for search engines rather than tested in kitchens. It's in food photography designed for Instagram rather than print. It's in the replacement of writers paid multiple dollars per word with influencers paid in product samples. The change isn't entirely bad—access has been democratized, voices have multiplied, information flows more freely. But something was lost when the test kitchen closed.

MacAusland's original promise—a magazine for seekers of the summum bonum, the highest good—assumed that food was a path to wisdom, not just nutrition. Gourmet spent sixty-eight years making that case, bringing together the best writers and cooks and editors to argue that what we eat matters beyond mere sustenance. Whether we have found a replacement for that argument remains an open question.

The plums, at least, were saved.