“I haven’t heard from you, and I can only guess you’re in a catatonic state from the news. Call me—this is just awful!”
This was the message my sister Linda left me on my cell the morning the news broke. And I didn’t really have to wonder what she meant because she knows me well enough to guess that I’d be sitting here, fingers hovering above the keyboard for quite a little while, trying to think about what to say about it. The death of Gourmet magazine (and, on another, more local note, the closing of 30-year-old Chanterelle restaurant in New York City last week) is a loss that’s hard to get started on or to sum up or, quite frankly, to even grasp. No, this isn’t life and death (well, assuming you didn’t work for them and didn’t just lose your job and all the security that comes along with such a thing), and the unfortunate fact of packing billions of peoples onto one big, blue planet is that there are far worse and unfathomably devastating things happening right now as I type.
But the death of Gourmet, a 70-year-old magazine that’s lived a lifetime, and held and told a lifetime’s worth of stories, does feel like the loss of an important voice that spoke not just of food and farms and restaurants and wine and cocktails, but of the people behind them, which is exactly what I and many readers have always loved about it.
The one story I wrote for them last year wasn’t about a hot new chef or a fancy restaurant where a meal for two costs as much as your mortgage—it was about a 100 year old knife-making family in itsy-bitsy Dover, Ohio. Crafstman, Swiss immigrants, people with dreams. And that’s why I figured if any periodical would survive the current crunch, they were going to make it—because of Jane and Michael Stern’s wayward discoveries at Formica counters and picnic tables, because of Francis Lam’s heart, because of the gorgeous feasts that made you dream of cooking for your friends and family, because of lovely Ruth Reichl's vision and ability to make a collection of food stories about so much more than hand-to-mouth nourishment. This was what made Gourmet so great. And this is why it will be so terribly missed.
But who knows, maybe the magazine will rise from the ashes and come to be again one day; stranger things have happened. Oddly (or maybe better to be filed under the title of Small Mercies), November will be the last issue. Next month, we will all fill our tables with stuffed birds and overflowing dishes, maybe from recipes in that final glossy book or by digging out yellowed magazine clips with the perfect gravy recipe or the ultimate sweet-potato side we found in its pages a decade ago. What’s Thanksgiving without it? I can say with no small amount of certainty that I’m going to be a little melancholy, bidding hello to my new stove and goodbye to one of the things that made me want to use it so badly. You’ve got to wonder what it is Reichl and her staff members are doing to begin to heal their wounds; my money is on taking solace in the kitchen. Maybe the rest of us can take solace in the stories, and what’s at the source of our own—after all, even if we wanted to, we couldn’t stop making them. Our stories will continue to be cooked, stirred, simmered, spoken—and, hopefully, written. Au revoir, Gourmet. Thanks for all the dirty dishes.
