Launched in January 1941, Gourmet started “not a food magazine as such, but something more like a general-interest magazine with an emphatic take on one of life's great pleasures,” according to a history published on its Web site. Earle R. MacAusland, a publishing veteran, ruled the magazine for its first 40 years. The first few issues covered topics that were related to food only tangentially: hunting and fishing stories, travel writing, theater reviews, and articles about savoring food instead of the technical aspects of preparing it. French cuisine took center stage, along with American; topics like Asian or Mexican foods were considered too exotic to cover at the time.
The 1950s meant the rise of the narrative at Gourmet. Obscure topics were turned into stories. A 1952 article about cranberries, for example, started out with Charles II yelling “Zounds, my sweet.” The writing started to include allusions to literary figures like Virgil and Wodehouse. In 1953, science fiction author Ray Bradbury wrote for the magazine. Coverage expanded beyond traditional French cuisine, with recipes for exotic dishes such as Chinese sweet-and-sour carp, Yucatan chicken pibil, and Moroccan b’stilla being served up for an American audience. Another innovation was the shift in travel coverage toward tourist-related information such as restaurants and hotels.
By the 1960s, once exotic foods were considered everyday foods, and the magazine embraced the shift. Full-page layouts of several menus, along with wine suggestions and color photos of meals, debuted. Paris à Table, a column first published in 1965, chronicled writer Naomi Barry’s gastronomic adventures while traveling. As commercial jet travel became more accessible, so did European cities and their restaurants.
Gourmet responded to the ‘70s rise in conspicuous consumption by giving readers suggestions about what to spend their money on. Features like “Shopping in Venice” clued people into expensive things worth their attention. Overall interest in food also rose, with gastronomic headlines making national news—and the foodie community was born.
French bowed to Italian as the hot cuisine, and organic American chefs like Alice Waters became superstars. And food became a political issue, with critics focusing on how the meal was presented just as much as on how it tasted. It was in this period that Gourmet changed ownership. After Earle MacAusland’s death in 1980, his widow sold the magazine to Condé Nast Publications.
Foods that had previously been available only to chefs—artisanal cheeses and organic produce—were now embraced by the masses in the 1990s, and Gourmet celebrated the best of everything. That meant regular people were now talking about food, and throwing out esoteric words like “confit” or “bruschetta.” In 1999, the magazine hired former New York Times restaurant critic Ruth Reichl as editor-in-chief, the first ever from outside the magazine’s staff.
For the past decade, with Reichl at the helm, the magazine has embraced the Web, where it will continue to post content at epicurious.com. Though the magazine will be closed, it will also continue its book publishing and television programming divisions, which have included Gourmet’s Adventures With Ruth and Gourmet’s Diary of a Foodie. And like all great meals, Gourmet leaves behind an indelible aftertaste.
