Seven Sons

I’m not sure that the rule-of-threes applies to the death of a magazine. But it deserves an obituary.

I’ll start by saying I’m not much of a food magazine guy. I love to cook, but only because I love to eat. I like photos of food, and appreciate “food porn” as much as the next person, but every photo I have taken of something in my kitchen ends up looking like pancakes. I get Cooks Illustrated, but that’s more like an instruction manual for cooking engineers as opposed to a celebration of the artistic aspects of cooking.

I love to read about food. I came of age in my love for food writing with Bourdain’s seminal “Kitchen Confidential,” but quickly discovered more true artistry in Ruth Reichl and Molly O’Neill. I read MFK Fisher’s translation of Brillat-Savarin and then listened closely when she taught me how to cook a wolf. Lately I have been enthralled by Rochelle Bilow and this weekend I plowed through the Julie/Julia book by Julie Powell (can’t imagine the movie is as satisfying).

And today, maybe not so much tomorrow, but today… I am forced to confront a death of something important that I knew, but not well. Like losing a famous aunt whose home you have never visited. A magazine, silly enough, that I have bought maybe once or twice at the news stand, and ignored every ad in it. A periodical I cherished in absentia because of the name on the masthead. I’m not idealistic enough to feel any guilt about helping cause the downfall of Gourmet, but I am enough of a history buff to recognize the need to celebrate its 70 years of history, the comfort it provided in spite of its commercial nature, and the headlines that its death will garner in contrast to its lack of widespread notoriety in life.

Ruth Reichl, the erstwhile editor of Gourmet and the protagonist of several incredible (meaning hard to believe but nevertheless true), poignant books centered around food, may retire in comfort tomorrow. One can only hope that the passion she exudes in her autobiographies is real enough to keep her written word in constant circulation in a post-Gourmet world. With the charity of history her epitaph will not read “the last editor of Gourmet magazine.” It will read “an artist whose palette was taste and whose media was the written word.”

Rest in peace, Gourmet magazine.