Life After Gourmet

What should you read now?

by Trey Popp

SIXTY-EIGHT YEARS after its inaugural issue, Gourmet magazine has completed its last. The November edition of America’s most influential food-culture monthly started hitting mailboxes this week. Condé Nast will then decant subscribers into the mailing list for Bon Appétit — a journey that, for some, will resemble that of a Chateau Lafite-Rothschild into a pitcher of sangria. 

Like most good magazines, Gourmet offered irritation as well as enlightenment. But for every photo spread of faux-casual picnickers gamboling in some New England meadow, there was something to inspire the mind. What other food magazine would publish David Foster Wallace’s 7,600-word, 20-footnote rumination on whether lobster brains feel pain? Who else would devote an entire issue to Latino cooking in America?

Not Bon Appétit, whose October issue featured seven recipes for turkey, six for potatoes, and a grand total of one from Central/South America, Asia and the Middle East. So for anyone who hungers for more than Gourmet’s replacement can offer, here’s a survival guide for life without it.

Epicurious.com: Dishes and drinks from Gourmet’s past will remain accessible at Condé Nast’s online recipe archive. Cost: Free.

Gastronomica: Itching for articles that plumb, say, the scientific and commercial controversies surrounding pluots and plumcots? This quarterly journal from University of California Press is for you. Culinary history, art and memoir round out this eccentric and gorgeous — but sometimes overly academic — publication. Cost: $50 for four issues.

The Atlantic: Gourmet had been doing a nice job with cocktails lately. Fortunately, The Atlantic’s Wayne Curtis is an even better travel guide to the land of mixology, and his dispatches appear almost every month. Plus: Corby Kummer on food. Cost: $24.50 for 10 issues.

Oxford American: Another non-food magazine with a great food columnist: John T. Edge, who can change they way you think about things ranging from pimento cheese to the racial dynamics of barbecue. As a bonus, you’ll get a stellar CD with the music issue, and incontrovertible proof that Southern literary culture is not even close to the skids. Cost: $20 for four issues.

Wednesday New York Times: Mark Bittman’s Minimalist column is a superb way to replace Gourmet’s Ten-Minute weeknight mains. Cost: $192.40/year (Monday-Friday).

Saveur: Hate to reward Condé Nast with a subscription, but at least this rag has a more global orientation than Bon Appétit, with recipes for Cuban pork hash, pickled shiitakes, North African lamb sausages and Indonesian chicken curry in October. Cost: $19.95 for nine issues.

So there you have it. Life after Gourmet won’t be cheap, but it can be filling. Alternatively, you could try to buy my mother’s back issues. She’s kept every one since 1971.

(t_popp@citypaper.net)