Wringing of hands, gnashing of teeth, even a tear or two: Gourmet, our beloved bible, has gone to the glossy Recycling Center in the sky; Saint Ruth will no longer guide our whisks; woe unto us all.
Every blog worth its salt has posted a nostalgic obit lamenting Condé Nasty's decision to kill its golden goose. So let's let Cornichon be contrarian and spread the blame around.
Who killed Gourmet? We could start with Julia Child, whose TV show three decades ago gave birth to Food Network, whose cookbook gave birth to Julie Powell's massively boring blog and movie deal. Rachael Ray and her chatty ilk, too, for building an audience of culinary voyeurs.
We could add Diane Werner (right, at a Costco book-signing in Seattle), the doe-eyed, earnest and hardworking food director of Readers Digest publications like the 738-page, loose-leaf Taste of Home Cookbook cookbook; Taste of Home magazine, (the number one cooking magazine in the country), and TasteofHome.com website with hundreds more recipes, all submitted by home cooks from the heartland. And its online cousin, Seattle-based AllRecipes.com.
We could add Barnaby Dorfman (quoted at length in Time this week) and Sherri Wetherell of Seattle-based Foodista.com while we're at it, building a collaborative online audience to compete with top-down diktats delivered monthly by the Postal Service.
If we wanted to be snarky, we could even blame Saint Ruth herself, whose best-selling family memoirs were filled with lust and regret, but nothing revelatory about food or wine. Or Food & Wine, or Bon Appetit or thousands of narrowly targeted food mags, from Cooking Light to Cooks Illustrated, from Saveur to Edible Seatte (to which Cornichon is a contributor).
Websites without end, as well, from Epicurious.com to eGullet to ChowHound, to thousands of individual food blogs (some with amazing photos, great recipes, and a distinctive voices).
Gourmet-dot-com, the website Gourmet belatedly rolled out to create an online presence, was over-produced to the point of stasis, even though Barry Estabrook's Politics of the Plate was both thorough and thoughtful. But who wants to subscribe to a monthly hunk of paper when there's Hogwash to be had for free?
Gourmet's ultimate sin, in this everybody's-an-expert age, was to be boring. Advertisers, not known for supporting long-term causes, want eyeballs, and eyeballs want shiny new websites, not expensive paper. While Gourmet costs millions to produce, a blog costs mere electrons, and advertisers trip all over themselves to spend online ad dollars via Google and dozens of specialized networks to reach foodies in their underwear a scant 20 inches from their monitors.
So while Gourmet's perfect-bound express rumbled through the night, bound for glory, its death by a thousand paper cuts was ultimately delivered by all the usual suspects. (Cue Ingrid Bergman's Oscar-winning tears.) Best we can say is that it had a good run and didn't overstay its welcome.
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