Kathryn Hill

My collection of Gourmet cookbooks

Wow, I am really bummed about the news of Gourmet Magazine shutting down.  My mother was a subscriber in the 70’s & 80’s and archived every single copy.  I spent many rainy days sitting in the den reading them as a child, along with my father’s National Geographics.  And my parents wonder how I grew up to be a foodie and a traveler.  Duh.

At some point, the magazines got tossed out.  I managed to inherit four of her Gourmet cookbooks, which I use.

Gourmet was a big influence on me in finding the path to cooking, traveling, and Francophilia. In the older versions of the magazine, the photographs were simple, used natural light, and showed off the food and locations beautifully.

I have vivid memories of flipping through photographs of wicker baskets of radishes, wooden boxes of wine grapes, live Toulouse geese, and women shopping with wicker baskets at open-air markets in France. And other simple images that just captured France beautifully – a woman walking down the street with a baguette tucked under her arm, two men sitting at a cafe table, drinking wine and laughing, and a man wearing a beret and sniffing a truffle.

When I started traveling to France in the late 80’s I happily found the France that I had read about in Gourmet. My timing was auspicious; nowadays most of those charming wood and wicker baskets have been replaced with ugly plastic bins and the wicker shopping baskets are now plastic bags.  France has changed before my eyes in the last two decades; since that initial trip in 1989, I’ve returned almost annually.  But if you know where to look, you can still see the same timeless images that Gourmet printed forty or fifty years ago.

Thanks for all the gifts you gave me, Gourmet.