Post Mortem

Now that the initial shock of Gourmet's closure has worn off, people are starting to ask "what happened?," and "what's next?"

There's been plenty of Monday-morning-quarterbacking in the past few days, most of it focusing on the Internet, and food bloggers especially (gulp!), as a primary cause of Gourmet's demise. As Amanda Hesser put it, there was "nothing wrong" with Ruth Reichl's "stewardship" of Gourmet. "What was wrong with the magazine," Hesser says, "was its medium: print." Hesser says that people want content fast, and they want it on the Web. But, more importantly, "they don't want the master talking to the servant." They want to be part of the conversation. Chris Kimball, of Cook's Illustrated, disagrees. He says that "the world needs fewer opinions and more thoughtful expertise," and they're willing to pay for it. That's why, he says, his no-advertisement, subscriber-financed business model is doing just fine, thank you very much.

There's even been a fair amount of not-so-nice "I told you so"-ing, including a cutesy piece in The Boston Globe, a "Recipe for Obsolescence." Talk about the pot calling the kettle obsolete! Only a few months ago the Globe's parent company, the New York Times, came dangerously close to shutting down the Globe for very much the same reasons that Conde Nast closed Gourmet.

But no amount of hand wringing and second-guessing will bring Gourmet back. Or will it? Venture capitalist Kylie Sachs has started a one-woman campaign via Twitter to resurrect Gourmet under a Cook's Illustrated-like business model. It seems like a long shot, but, as of today, savegourmet has 648 followers (including yours truly).

Barring a Lazarus-like resurrection, what will become of Gourmet's current subscribers? According to a notice on Gourmet's web site (which will go dark after a "transitional period"), subscribers "can look forward to receiving Bon Appetit magazine for the remainder of their subscription." I, for one, plan to say "Thanks, but no thanks!" to this offer, and in fact, I also intend to cancel my subscriptions to other Conde Nast magazines (GQ and Details).

A little birdie has told me that I can expect to recieve a subscription for Cook's Illustrated for my birthday, which is right around the corner (hint, hint). It won't be the same, but Cook's Illustrated, will fill at least part of the hole in my mailbox left by Gorumet's passing.

Laughing through the tears

They say a picture speaks a thousand words. This picture, from Gawker, says only one: gone.

Apparently, the rumors are true: almost immediately after Conde Nast's announcement on Monday that it was closing Gourmet, the offices were packed up. Now, just two days later, the offices are empty and quiet.

As sad as this is, Jon Stewart has, thankfully, given us something to laugh at through our tears. On last night's Daily Show, Stewart made the suggestion (which is no more ridiculous than killing a 68-year-old-icon) that, instead of shuttering Gourmet, Elegant Bride, Modern Bride, and Cookie, Conde Nast should have colsolidated them into a single publication: Pregnant Gourmet Bride Magazine! Here's the clip, props to Eat Me Daily.

The one bit of silver lining in Gourmet's closure, if there is one, is that it paves the way for Ruth's next book: Ruth Reichl: The Condé Nast Years, or something like that. It ought to be good reading. In the meantime, I'll be watching my mailbox for the November issue, and I'll savor every bit of it.

R.I.P. Gourmet Magazine 1941 - 2009

Today is a very sad day for the food world. It was with complete shock and dismay that I read the news this morning that Conde Nast was discontinuing four magazines, including Gourmet. The November issue will be its last.

It's no secret that newspapers and magazines in general have been having a rough go of it over the past few years, and the current recession has been particulary tough on magazines, like Gourmet, that depend heavily on advertising for revenue. In fact, Gourmet's January issue and Bon Appetit's March issue had so few ads that they were barely over the 98-page minimum necessary to even glue the magazines together. There have been rumblings during the past couple of months that there would be "frequency reductions" and severe budget cuts at several Conde Nast magazines. But no one expected today's news that the 68-year-old grand dame of epicurian journalism would be shuttered. The news surely surprised Bon Appetit's publisher, Paul Jowdy (who's keeping his job), who said back in February that the roumors that Conde Nast would close Gourmet or Bon Appetit were "ridiculous ... They would never do that." Apparently, when bean-counting management consultants are involved, you can never say never.

Conde Nast says that it "will remain committed to the brand, retaining Gourmet's book publishing and television programming, and Gourmet recipes on Epicurious.com." This is cold comfort for Gourmet's subscribers -- some of whom have been loyal readers for decades -- not to mention Gourmet's staffers, who, if you believe the stories, are being treated very, very badly by Conde Nast. The reports are that all of Gourmet's staffers, including Ruth Reichl, have been let go, and have been given only 48-hours to pack their things and leave the building. Ruth's Twitter post from today seems to confirm this. "Thank you all SO much for this outpouring of support. It means a lot. Sorry not to be posting now, but I'm packing. We're all stunned, sad."

I'm stunned and sad, too, Ruth.


(Thanks to Eat Me Daily, Eater, Gawker, and The NYT Media Decoder for their excellent coverage of this unfolding story.)

A new day for Gourmet ...Today

About ten years ago, Ruth Reichl and the editors of Gourmet Magazine set out to "gather the cream of the crop" of sixty-plus years of the magazine's recipes and put them together in a single cookbook with "every recipe you would ever want." The result of these efforts, as you know, was The Gourmet Cookbook.

If Ruth & Co. thought their work was done when they published their 1040-page, 1,300-recipe book, they thought wrong. It's a different world now than is was six decades ago when Gourmet magazine first appeared. And a lot has changed even in the short time since The Book's been on the market. Words like "foodie," "flexitarian," "locavore" and "mixologist" have entered our everyday vocabularies. Television shows like "Iron Chef" and "Top Chef" have raised people's standards about what they want to eat, while shows like "30 Minute Meals" have made people less willing to wait around for good food.

In light of these changing attitudes, the folks at Gourmet thought that the time was right to publish a new collection of recipes for the way that people are cooking today and will cook in the coming years. Gourmet Today doesn't replace The Gourmet Cookbook. Instead, the new book picks up where the other one left off. If The Gourmet Cookbook is about the best of food's past, Gourmet Today is about its future. It's a lot like the two-volume Gourmet Cookbook the editors published in the 1950s. Each of the two books compliments the other, but can stand on its own as a complete cookbook.

So, what's different about Gourmet Today? The most immediately noticeable difference is the color. The bright green cover nicely complements the sunny yellow cover of The Gourmet Cookbook, but stands out as something new and different. The rest of the design and layout is very similar to the older book, making it easy to use for cooks familiar with The Gourmet Cookbook. The other major change is the addition of three new chapters designed to meet the needs of today's cook: Drinks, Grilled Dishes and Vegetarian Main Courses. There's more emphasis on ethnic foods (Asian foods in particular), taking advantage of the wider variety of ingredients that are now more and more available in supermarkets. Also, in a nod to the Rachel Ray faction, more than half of the dishes in Gourmet Today can be cooked in a half-hour or less. There are also a couple of new features that really make this a very usable book for planning meals and parties: first, each chapter includes a recipe index (or a "checklist" if you're a cook-through blogger), next, the book's general index is one of the most comprehensive I've seen (it's 66 pages long!), and my favorite new "usability" feature is the addition of suggested menus composed of recipes from Gourmet Today. Often, as I'm cooking my way through The Book, I'll pick a great-looking recipe, but I'll have no idea what to serve with it. Well, in Gourmet Today, the editors have offered suggested menus for everything: seasonal quick weeknight meals, vegetarian menus, holiday meals, cocktail parties, and even weddings.

I was thrilled to get an advance copy of Gourmet Today from the nice folks at Gourmet. And the best part is that it's autographed by Ruth Reichl! The inscription says, "To Adam - From one cook to another, Ruth Reichl, August 2009." And tucked inside the book was a nice note from Ruth. "Dear Adam - Couldn't wait to share this with you. I really hope you like it!" Thanks, Ruth!

As I flipped through Gourmet Today, I was really impressed with the great variety of delicious sounding dishes. I was also pleased to see that the editors took the opportunity to fill some of the gaps in The Gourmet Cookbook. As I said, the editors of The Book aimed to provide "every recipe you would ever want." Well, that was a very tall order, and of course, there were bound to be some omissions. No baklava? No classic Christmas fruitcake? No spanakopita? Thankfully, Gourmet Today provides those missing recipes (pages 803, 735, and 61, respectively). It's hard to find anything to complain about in Gourmet Today. If pressed, I'd have to say that while my "no-red-meat-thank-you-very-much" wife and I are glad to see the addition of vegetarian main courses, it would also have been nice to have more gluten-free options. Many of the vegetarian mains involve pasta, bread, or pie crust (quiches and tarts). That's a small criticism, though, for a book that doesn't bill itself as being allergy-friendly.

Since I know you're wondering, no, I'm not going to attempt to cook through Gourmet Today. Even though I've got almost 200 recipes under my belt, I've really only just begun to cook through The Book. I'd be crazy to add another 1,000 - plus recipes to The Project. But, for the next few days, in honor of the release of Gourmet Today, (in bookstores September 22!) I'm going to do some blog posts about recipes from the new book to give you a bit of a taste. I hope you enjoy it as much as I know that I will.

The Book before The Book

A few weeks ago, I was flipping through The Book looking for something to make for Father's Day. I absent-mindedly stopped at the Preface. Now, I'm sure that I read Ruth Reichl's introductory essay before I started The Project, but the first few lines apparently didn't register with me until now.

"The book that taught me to cook was a big brown leather-covered tome with The Gourmet Cookbook stamped in gold on the front. I called it 'the Book,' but to a little girl in the fifties, it was more than that."

What? But I thought that I was reading The Gourmet Cookbook? The Book was published in 2004, not the 1950s. It's yellow, not brown. Was Ruth mistaken? I needed to get to the bottom of this, so I put The Book aside and pulled up Google. I typed "Gourmet Cookbook 1950s" in the search window. After a few minutes, I had learned that, in 1950, as Gourmet Magazine was approaching its tenth anniversary, the magazine's editors decided to publish a cookbook "based on the cream of the recipes that had appeared in the magazine during the first decade of its existence." A few years later, in 1957, the editors published a second volume of The Gourmet Cookbook, meant to be a companion to the 1950 book, but at the same time "a complete and independent cookbook in itself." Whereas Volume I is a broad-based general cookbook, Volume II delves deeper into "pastry making a la francaise, outdoor cookery, and the accouterments of the grand buffet." After a number of printings, the editors undertook a complete revision, and in 1965, they published a second edition of the two volumes. (The early 1960s also saw the publication of a couple of other Gourmet books: The Gourmet Menu Cookbook and The Gourmet Basic French Cookbook.)

I had to get my hands on these books. My local library was no help. But e-bay came through. I found a set of the 1965 second edition available in an auction set to end in a couple of days. My first instinct was to lunge and make a "buy it now" offer, but I decided to play it cool. There were no bids yet, and the minimum bid was $9.99. I stalked the auction, checking it almost hourly as the end-date approached. A few hours before the auction ended, there were still no bids. I could smell victory. With only minutes left in the auction, I typed my bid into the dialogue box. After a few tense moments, and for the bargain price of $9.99 plus shipping, I was the proud owner of The Book's mama and papa.

A few days later, a great big brown-paper package (not tied up with string, but that's OK) was waiting for me when I got home from work. I tore the package open, and there they were. The pages were slightly yellowed and had that faint, mildewy high-school library scent. They are both big, heavy, and more than 700 pages each.

If The Gourmet Cookbook is the food Bible, the 1965 edition is the Old Testament. The pages are crammed with recipes written with an economy of words. The recipe for French Onion Soup, for example is only six sentences long. Notably absent, however, is the list of ingredients that precedes recipes in modern cookbooks. The recipes in Volume I and II are written in paragraph form, in the style of the classical cookbooks like Escoffier's. Apparently, ingredient lists, like those printed in the margins of Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking (1961), were still innovative in the 1950s and 60s. The books are also liberally illustrated with red ink line drawings, and lush, if somewhat corny, technicolor photographs. For instance, the photo of Caneton a la Orange au la Bigarade (Duck with Orange) includes a creepy prop ceramic duck sitting uncomfortably beside its cooked cousin. And the photo of Chocolate Bavarian Cream is decorated with a statute of Napoleon and a model of the Arc de Triomphe.

As I sat on the sofa flipping through Volume I, my wife asked me, "So, are you going to cook through that book, too?" Just then, I happened to stop flipping at page 473. I looked down at the page, and without hesitating for a moment, I answered, "No, I am not going to cook through this book." The recipe I had stopped at was for Ours Grand Veneur, or "Bear Huntsman Fashion." That's right, a recipe for roast bear loin. Apparently, "bear flesh is rich, sweet, and delicious." I don't think that they carry it at Stop & Shop, though. But if you don't like your bear "huntsman fashion," perhaps one of the three other bear recipes will appeal to you. What's that, bear's not your thing? That's OK. There are six pages of recipes for venison, two recipes for woodchuck, and six for frog's legs.

So, while I won't be making Brunswick Stew any time soon ("Cut 2 plump young squirrels into serving pieces..."), I know that I'm going to enjoy flipping through the pages of these books for ideas and inspiration.

139. Matzo Brei (p. 630)

A few months ago, I read Ruth Reichl's book Garlic and Sapphires. It's the story of Ruth's time as the restaurant critic at The New York Times. Like a lot of people, I've fantasized about being a food critic, but as Ruth's book shows, it's not as glamorous as it seems. Sure, you get to eat out at fancy restaurants like Le Cirque and Daniel (and somebody else pays for it!), but eating out almost every night means that you miss a lot of meals with your kids. And as a new father who usually gets home after my son is asleep, I understand how difficult that can be. There's a touching scene in the book when Ruth gets home after a lousy meal at a highfaluten restaurant, and for some reason, her son is still up. She whips up a batch of Matzo Brei and has, what I think she might agree was the best meal that she wrote about in the book.

Ever since I read that book, I've been looking forward to making this recipe. I had some matzos leftover from the Haroseth that I made, so, last Saturday, I decided to make this for breakfast. First, I broke up a matzo into a sieve. (The Book calls for four, but I was only making half of the recipe, and my matzos were huge, about 7 inches square, so I couldn't see using two of them for one person.) I ran some cold water over the pieces to moisten them just a bit. Then I put the pieces in a bowl and added a couple of eggs and some salt and mixed it up with a fork. I heated a generous amount of butter in a pan and then added the egg and matzo mixture and cooked for a few minutes.

Now, as you can see from the picture above, this is not the prettiest thing that I've cooked so far in The Project, and I wasn't too impressed after the first bite. But, as I kept eating, I liked it more and more. The eggs were tender and buttery and the matzo gave it some substance and a nice crispiness.

Speaking of Ruth Reichl, her new book, Not Becoming My Mother: and Other Things She Taught Me Along the Way, was published last week. The description on Amazon calls it "a clear-eyed, openhearted investigation of her mother’s life" drawing from her mother’s letters and diaries. Ruth sometimes talks about her mother, and her cooking, in her letters from the editor in Gourmet, so I feel like I already have a little bit of a sense of what Ruth's mother was like. I'm looking forward to reading the book and getting to know her better. Ruth's going on a book tour to promote the book, and it'll be bringing her to a few cities in my neck of the woods. I'm hoping to make it to one of the events, and who knows, maybe I can even convince her to sign my copy of The Gourmet Cookbook.

Date Cooked: April 18, 2009
Degree of Difficulty: Easy
Rating: B+

48. Ruth's Pancakes (p. 645)

To be honest, I was a little intimidated by this recipe.* After all, it comes from Ruth Reichl, the Editor-in-Chief of Gourmet, and my tour guide on this crazy quest of mine. What if I messed them up? Or worse, what if I didn't like them? How could I go on with The Project? How could I face Ms. Reichl if I ever get the chance to meet her? Well, thankfully, the crisis was averted. The pancakes came out great, and they were amazing.

In the interest of full disclosure, this recipe calls for a whole stick of butter (pause here while my wife winces), resulting in some very rich pancakes. But in the recipe's defense, The Book says that these pancakes are to be reserved for those times when "you need to pull out all the stops for an Extremely Special Breakfast." (The emphasis in this quote is The Book's, not mine. I'm not sure what an "Extremely Special Breakfast" is, but for me cooking breakfast for Ruth Reichl might be an example.)

One thing that was unexpected, and a little cool, about this recipe was that the greater-than-usual amount of baking powder called for (four teaspoons), caused the batter to start to rise while it was still in the mixing bowl, even before it got to the skillet. The result is a pancake that, while rich, was still light and airy.

I also appreciated The Book's suggestion of putting the pancakes into a 200-degree oven as they come off the skillet to keep them warm until they're all done and everyone's ready to eat. This is one of those brilliantly simple ideas that make you say, "Why didn't I think of that?" Now, my wife and I can both eat hot pancakes at the same time.

These pancakes were excellent. They were buttery (how could they not be!), crispy, fluffy, and they didn't need anything more than a little pure Vermont maple syrup to finish them off. Curiously, unlike other recipes in The Book, which say that the recipe "Serves 4 to 6," this recipe says that it "Makes about 8 pancakes." Could the reason for this be that if two people just happen to eat all eight pancakes between them (and I'm not saying that that's what my wife and I did), they won't feel like pigs for eating an entire recipe that "Serves 12"?

I think that for a typical, no-frills Sunday-morning breakfast, I'll stick to my stand-by, Joy of Cooking pancake recipe. But the next time I have an "Extremely Special Breakfast," (stop by any time, Ms. Reichl, you're always welcome!), this will be the recipe I'll use.

Date Cooked: August 31, 2008
Degree of Difficulty: Easy
Rating: B+

*This recipe isn't on epicurious.com.