Kennyz wrote:[I dunno, I don't read the magazine regularly*, but count me a fan of Chris Kimball and CI. I always learn at least a little something, and as a person who once spent 10 full hours in search of the perfect cherry tomato, who made gnocchi 25 times before I thought I got it right, and who forced his wife to eat no fewer than 5 virtually identical batches of mac and cheese before entering a "smackdown," I'd say the CI style is geared toward at least one LTHer's tastes.



*maybe that's why it doesn't bother me

I'm with you Kenny. I get lots of good tips and info from CI, and many times use its recipes, at least as a starting point. Their crispy skin chicken recipe is my go to method for a quick, weekday roast chicken dinner.

Money talks: Bon Appetit has more readers than Gourmet, 1.3 million to 950,000, Conde Nast said.

stevez wrote:

Kennyz wrote:[I dunno, I don't read the magazine regularly*, but count me a fan of Chris Kimball and CI. I always learn at least a little something, and as a person who once spent 10 full hours in search of the perfect cherry tomato, who made gnocchi 25 times before I thought I got it right, and who forced his wife to eat no fewer than 5 virtually identical batches of mac and cheese before entering a "smackdown," I'd say the CI style is geared toward at least one LTHer's tastes.
.....

I'm with you Kenny. I get lots of good tips and info from CI, and many times use its recipes, at least as a starting point. Their crispy skin chicken recipe is my go to method for a quick, weekday roast chicken dinner.

I've received more good intel from CI than from any other food magazine. As steve said, a "starting point" is exactly how I think of most CI recipes. They tend to work perfectly the first time and lend themselves well to further modification to suit my tastes or preferences.

That being said, I let my subscription lapse last year and switched to a "digital only" subscription. I gave away my huge stack of print copies and I'm quite content with the full archives online.

Best,
Michael

Nice little remembrance of Gourmet here...

http://www.aldenteblog.com/2009/10/gour ... iving.html

although it does suggest why the magazine seemed stuck in a rather tweedy 1953 to a lot of people.

One deep (or not so deep) thought about the closing of Gourmet: I keep hearing that "It's the end of an era." What era? What era is Gourmet's closing ending?

Am I missing something or am I being too literal in reading into an off-the-cuff, meaningless colloquialism spewed by folks who otherwise don't know what to say?

end of an era = no more of this

Pierogies and bow-tie pasta on one plate. Not something I thought I'd see on the plate of someone above 8 years of age. (Pretty crappy looking pierogi, too.)

I was bummed when I heard this yesterday. Personally I like Gourmet better than Bon Appetit or Food and Wine, I like the feel of the magazine and layout and always took it as a magazine for the love of cooking and all things food. I have such a collection as well, kept every one of them. Too bad.

Has anyone else seen the cover of the Oct issue..beautiful photo of caramel apple. I read the Oct issue yesterday before hearing the news and I too will miss this foodie magazine. More info on the decision by Conde Nast to cease publication in today's WSJ. I hope they will continue with Gourmet Diary of a Foodie on PBS. Here's the link.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125475373996964695.html

I hope they will continue with Gourmet Diary of a Foodie on PBS

I saw an ad recently for a new show coming on PBS called something like Ruth Reichl and Friends. Seemed like a next generation Diary of a Foodie.

My wife and I have subscribed to Gourmet continuously since 1972. Some of our happiest moments - before our children showed up - involved spending an entire weekend cooking the main meal from Gourmet - especially the Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner. The magazine taught us to creatively think about cooking, and so over time we relied upon their recipes less and less, but I always enjoyed the writing and the illustrations.

As it happens, the staff Gourmet noticed one of my photographs on Flickr for Moto's Doughnut Soup and was planning to publish it in the December issue (I had just signed a contract for which they would pay me $150 for the rights), and it was thrilling to know that I was going to be "in" Gourmet. Well, I must leave the announcement here, rather than in LTH Total Media Domination. I wonder if I will be paid.

Noooooo!

Man, I'd have paid to see that! Not that you aren't in print already...

As a younger man, Gourmet opened my eyes to places, food and restaurants that I never would have experience
In my early 20s, after moving to Manhattan, I was surprised and delighted to find Etat Unis, the excellent eight table, father and son restaurant that focused on daily menu dictated by the freshest of local fare far before doing so was fashionable, was only a block from my apartment. I had first read about Etat Unis in Gourmet a few years earlier.

I was always amazed and wowed by the food at that restaurant. As I began to travel more, I began to use Gourmet as my guide for good eating in my travels. I also found so many wonderful recipes in it. Many of them I still use to this day.

Bon Appetit was the black sheep cousin of Gourmet at the time. It wanted to badly to be the star of the foodie publishing family. But, never could achieve the sophistication and excellence of Gourmet.

I have an aunt, now well into her 70s, who has every issue of Gourmet since 1972, tattered, splattered on, dog eared and stored in a closet in her house. Perhaps I can request those issues as an inheritance.

The night of the announcement of the closure of Gourmet, I was having dinner with a friend who is a bit of a of foodie, too. His response to the news was, "They probably needed to clear the magazine display case for another Rachel Ray publication." Truly a sad statement (but true) regarding the reverse evolution of the food press in this country.

I realize that Gourmet evolved over the years and probably will end its publication as a sad shell of its former self. That fact won't dull my memories or appreciation of what it provided me over the years.

YourPalWill wrote:As a younger man, Gourmet opened my eyes to places, food and restaurants that I never would have experience
In my early 20s, after moving to Manhattan, I was surprised and delighted to find Etat Unis, the excellent eight table, father and son restaurant that focused on daily menu dictated by the freshest of local fare far before doing so was fashionable, was only a block from my apartment. I had first read about Etat Unis in Gourmet a few years earlier.

I found Etats Unis through Steven Shaw, who later started eGullet, when he just had a little, informal website where he posted his own reviews (there weren't blogs back then, if I recall). Etats Unis was one of my favorite restaurants when I lived near NYC.

Etats-Unis Restaurant
242 East 81st Street
New York, NY 10028
Tel: 212-517-8826
http://www.etatsunisrestaurant.com/contact.html

Thought-provoking piece by Christopher Kimball in the New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/08/opini ... mball.html

Darren72 wrote:Thought-provoking piece by Christopher Kimball in the New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/08/opini ... mball.html

It is always amazing how professionals complain when they have to face competition, especially in the field of ideas.

What can one say in response to that... except, here's a blog post about it:

The closing of Gourmet has led to a number of articles noting the irony that the healthiest food magazine out there is the one that was bought by Gourmet's owner two decades ago, promptly killed in part to help protect Gourmet, and then resurrected on a business model 180 degrees from Gourmet's: Cook's Illustrated. If Gourmet was the New Yorker of food, Cook's Illustrated has long been the Chilton's— a no-gloss how to guide low on romance, high on practicality. Their editorial approaches were manifestly opposite, but more significantly now, so were their business models: Gourmet existed to sell glossy ads to food companies wanting to reach old money, Cook's Illustrated sells subscriptions directly to people who want solid information and will fork over their own money for it.

So you might expect Christopher Kimball, editor-publisher of CI, to make that point when asked why his magazine flourishes in the face of Gourmet's demise. You might expect pretty much his whole life to be built on that difference, in fact. But you would be wrong. Kimball's response, in a NY Times op-ed, basically is... "Gourmet would have gotten away with it if it weren't for you pesky bloggers!" Not only did free writing on the internet hurt paid writing at Gourmet (that much seems true at least to a certain point), but in the process, Kimball claims, it killed a culture of quality food writing, only to replace it with democratized dumbth (as Steve Allen called it when he would rant about how pop culture had sunk since his day of... bringing Mexican dialect comedians to America).

This is an odd argument for Kimball of all people to be making, since his magazine is built on the assumption that you can democratize any dish by finding the optimum way to prepare it. But it gets even odder with an account of the history of food publishing that contradicts and refutes itself as he goes:

The precursor to Gourmet, and the first truly successful American food publication, was founded in the 1890s and titled The Boston Cooking School Magazine of Culinary Science and Domestic Economics. It eventually changed its name to American Cookery and then died in 1947, forced under, in part, by the founding of Gourmet... It was the end of domestic science and food economy and the beginning of the era of the gourmet

The end of domestic science... except for the literally thousands of practical recipes that continue to be published not only in the major women's magazines that existed then (McCalls, Better Homes and Gardens, etc.) and have come into existence since (Martha Stewart, O, etc.) but in the many cooking magazines that have sprung up, everything from Cooking Light to Rachael Ray magazine. That is a home ec iceberg that has always been larger than the gourmet tip, if largely unnoticed by the food elite. But keep in mind that exaggerated report of a death when considering the other death Kimball is here to announce.

Next, he poses a scary question:

Now, 68 years after its founding, Gourmet has followed American Cookery... Is American magazine publishing on the verge of being devoured by the democratic economics of the Internet?

but then immediately demonstrates that it's based on a false premise. He admires the vanished charms of an old school billionaire, Conde Nast's S.I. Newhouse:

He poured his fortune into his magazine properties and his editors, even when the prospect of return seemed dim. His was a world of philanthropic publishing.

So did Gourmet never actually make money, even in the boom times recently ended? Was it basically The New Republic of food, a moneyloser supported by a rich guy in search of influence? That seems hard to credit, but it does suggest that its high-flying ways were especially vulnerable to any downturn. I've read that pages in Gourmet went for a base rate of $90,000, where Bon Appetit, which actually had a larger (if far less elite) subscriber base, charges about a third of that. Is it really any wonder that such a magazine would prove too rich for any advertiser's blood in any economic downturn? (And will you really be surprised if, having cut Gourmet's enormous overhead by shutting it down and clearing it out, Conde Nast revives the brand in a much more cost-effective guise?) It wouldn't take bloggers to kill a magazine under circumstances like that.

The shuttering of Gourmet reminds us that in a click-or-die advertising marketplace, one ruled by a million instant pundits, where an anonymous Twitter comment might be seen to pack more resonance and useful content than an article that reflects a lifetime of experience, experts are not created from the top down but from the bottom up. They can no longer be coronated; their voices have to be deemed essential to the lives of their customers. That leaves, I think, little room for the thoughtful, considered editorial with which Gourmet delighted its readers for almost seven decades.

I find this too incoherent to entirely follow (and it goes on for another couple of grafs, without getting clearer) but to the extent I see arguments here, they seem mostly backwards. Articles in magazines may be written by experts, but they're more often written by freelancers who've interviewed experts on the phone, and often in the process simplify and dumb down and just plain screw the expert's insights up; the internet has brought us the voices of ten million non-experts, it's true, but one thing it's also done is cut out that middleman freelancer and given experts a way to talk to us directly. At the same time, by removing another mediator— the editor— the vast variety available online gives us the ability to find for ourselves the voice we trust most on a subject.

Okay, so at its best, Reichl finding and editing Laurie Colwin, say, you have that vaunted magazine experience of the editor shaping the reader's experience. But 95% of magazine writing isn't about that, it's about 5 Hot Tips for the subject of the minute that every other magazine is about this minute. In a bulletpointed, tip-driven freelance market, the reason so many writers blog is because it is their chance to write the thoughtful, considered piece, and not just 7 Great Cheeses To Pair With Giving Him the Best Sex He's Ever Had.

But Kimball's committed to the cult of the expert and the editors who love them, so he ends it with an analogy that he thinks closes the sale, but actually sends him down in flames:

Julia Child, one of my Boston neighbors, epitomized this old-school notion of apprenticeship... Her first question upon meeting a young chef was always, “And where did you train, dear?”

That's right, Julia Child, who wanted us all to cook French at home, is trotted out as the advocate of only eating from certified chefs. If anyone stood for the idea that self-education was possible, it was Child— true, she might have expected expertise in a high-priced restaurant, we all would, but it was an expertise that she herself did not really have (yes, she attended Cordon Bleu, but a housewife going to cooking classes hardly constituted an "old-school notion of apprenticeship" in the feudal kitchens of 1950s France) and plainly did not consider it essential to the act of writing about food. Child may not have thought much of the best-known blog specifically about her, but I very much doubt that if she were alive now, she would so presumptively dismiss, as Kimball does, the explosion of interest in and, yes, expertise shown about food on the internet today.

Well put, Mike.

This was the oddest, most rambling piece of nonsense I think I've ever read from Kimball.

The little engine that could is Taste of Home:

Taste of Home (bimonthly; circulation: 3.1 million, in the top 10 list of monthly and bi-monthly magazines in the country)—flagship magazine focuses on tried and true family favorites.

Additional tidbits from their fact sheet:

- Taste of Home, now part of Food & Entertaining at the Reader's Digest Association, was founded in 1993.
- More than 90,000 recipes from everyday cooks across the US and Canada are submitted annually.
- Every recipe is tested before publication and features ingredients from regular grocery stores.
- 750 Field Editors representing all 50 states find and submit recipes, connecting the brand to the consumer.

I once was an early subscriber. They promised each subscriber cookies from one of their 1,000 editors. I never received it, though I did look forward to it.

Regards,

Okay, so at its best, Reichl finding and editing Laurie Colwin, say, you have that vaunted magazine experience of the editor shaping the reader's experience.

Laurie Colwin died in October of 1992; her career as a published author and essayist began in the 1970s. Ruth Reichl's career at Gourmet began in 1999 (coincidental with the magazine's precipitous slide, IMO); at the time of Colwin's death, Reichl was working as a food critic for the LA Times, and prior to that, as a contibutor to New West magazine. In other words, she had nothing to do with either finding or editing Colwin's work, ever, to the best of my knowledge. Please enlighten me if you know something I don't, but I can't see giving her credit for shaping Colwin's career in any way, based on simple logistics.

I'll tell you what I know... that somebody who died 17 years ago has been cited more times than I can count as an example of what we'll be losing when Gourmet is gone.

Now back to reading the Maxwell Perkins-Henry James letters.

Gourmet is not quite dead yet

I'd wondered about that -- since I just received in the mail a sample copy and a request to subscribe to Gourmet.

Cynthia wrote:I'd wondered about that -- since I just received in the mail a sample copy and a request to subscribe to Gourmet.

Without knowing any particulars, I wouldn't attach any significance whatsoever to the sample/request. Those things are typically printed months (!) in advance. That's one reason when you call a catalog company to take your name off the mailing list, they warn you that you'll be receiving mailings for probably another few months. Too much stuff in the pipeline to shut the flow off immediately.

Still, I for one am keeping my fingers crossed.

The gist of the "not quite dead" is that they'll be using the brand for other media, not that they'll continue the magazine.

An interesting (and light) "where are they now" article appeared in this quarter's Michigan Alumnus magazine.

The obnoxious online interface is a recreation of the physical magazine (rather than a logically-designed compendium of the articles themselves in HTML form...what a blatant misappropriation of my alumni association dues), so skip to page 29 for the article (called "Leaner Times").

Yesterday, I saw a copy of Gourmet magazine stacked with other food magazines. I eagerly grabbed it but was extremely disappointed by the magazine's current incarnation - a recipe per page with a picture and no articles. For me, Gourmet represented the best in food writing and I was very sad to see it reduced to just a collection of recipes.

Jyoti

jygach wrote:Yesterday, I saw a copy of Gourmet magazine stacked with other food magazines. I eagerly grabbed it but was extremely disappointed by the magazine's current incarnation - a recipe per page with a picture and no articles. For me, Gourmet represented the best in food writing and I was very sad to see it reduced to just a collection of recipes.

Jyoti

The print magazine is dead but CondeNast will stick the name on just about anything to make a sale.

Gourmet's last edition was November, 2009. The December issue was already finished and never published. Epicurious is now offering the Christmas menu, 2009 from the issue that never was released.

Regards,
Cathy2