Гурман: История американского кулинарного журнала

American magazine

Gourmet magazine was a monthly publication of Condé Nast and the first U. S. magazine devoted to food and wine. Founded by Earle R. MacAusland (1890–1980), Gourmet, first published in January 1941, also covered "good living" on a wider scale, and grew to incorporate culture, travel, and politics into its food coverage. James Oseland, an author and editor in chief of rival food magazine Saveur, called Gourmet "an American cultural icon." The magazine's contributors included James Beard, Laurie Colwin, M. F. K. Fisher, Lucius Beebe, George Plimpton, Anita Loos, Paul Theroux, Ray Bradbury, Annie Proulx, Elizabeth David, Madhur Jaffrey, and David Foster Wallace, whose essay "Consider the Lobster" appeared in Gourmet in 2004. On October 5, 2009, Condé Nast announced that Gourmet would cease monthly publication by the end of 2009, due to a decline in advertising sales and shifting food interests among the readership. Editor Ruth Reichl, in the middle of a tour promoting the Gourmet Today cookbook, confirmed that the magazine's November 2009 issue, distributed in mid October, was the magazine's last. The Gourmet brand continues to be used by Condé Nast for book and television programming and recipes appearing on Epicurious. com. Its main competitor at the time was American Cookery, formerly the Boston Cooking School Magazine, also known as the “Boston Cooking school Magazine Of Culinary Science And Domestic Economics”, which had been published since 1896. In 1965, the magazine established its own test kitchen.

MacAusland died in 1980. Montant was succeeded by Gail Zweigenthal, who has been working at the magazine since 1965. In January 1999, it was announced that Ruth Reichl would leave her post as restaurant critic of The New York Times to become editor in chief of Gourmet. (Reichl had joined the Times in 1993; previously, she had been the restaurant critic for The Los Angeles Times.) Gourmet then had a circulation of about 880,000. Reichl was seen to raise the ambition level of Gourmet, introducing stories on such subjects as the plight of migrant tomato pickers in Florida, not so sustainably farm raised salmon, and the ethical questions generated by boiling lobsters alive (in David Foster Wallace's now widely read piece "Consider the Lobster"). The magazine went on to win a number of National Magazine and James Beard Awards, and, with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt publishers, brought out The Gourmet Cookbook in 2004. The book featured 1,200 recipes published in the magazine over the previous 60 years. (In 2002, the Modern Library published Endless Feasts: Sixty Years Of Writing From Gourmet.) The magazine poured extensive resources into developing and testing recipes, with 12 test kitchen chefs and an in house photographer. Food costs alone ran to over $100,000 a year. The English journalist and food writer Jay Rayner noted that "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." In January 2008, Gourmet launched its own website. (Its content had previously been funneled into Epicurious.) The site included stories, reviews, videos, recipes, and archival material dating to the magazine's launch in 1941. Contributors included John T. Edge, Michael Pollan, Eric Ripert, Heston Blumenthal, and Colman Andrews. Reichl had been lobbying Condé Nast for a standalone Gourmet site since 1999. (To the chagrin of the magazine's staff, Gourmets recipes would continue to appear on the Epicurious site.) Townsend acknowledged the difficulties for magazines in the wake of the economic meltdown of 2008. The decision to close the magazine was unexpected; the chef and restaurateur Alice Waters is said to have nearly cried when she heard the news of Gourmets demise. The cookbook included over 1,000 recipes for everything from vegetable dishes to cocktails. In September 2010, Condé Nast revived the brand as an app, but stopped updating it two years later. In 2019, Reichl published Save Me the Plums, a memoir of her time at Gourmet.

Gourmet's Diary of a Foodie premiered on PBS in October 2006. The series won a James Beard Foundation Award in 2008. In October 2009, Gourmet's Adventures With Ruth premiered on PBS as a follow up to Gourmet's Diary of a Foodie. The show featured Reichl visiting cooking schools around the world with well known chefs.