Gourmet RIP II

[lsanderson]

Gourmet to All That
By CHRISTOPHER KIMBALL
Published: October 7, 2009

THE precursor to Gourmet, and the first truly successful American food publication, was founded in the 1890s and titled The Boston Cooking School Magazine of Culinary Science and Domestic Economics. It eventually changed its name to American Cookery and then died in 1947, forced under, in part, by the founding of Gourmet in 1941 by Earle MacAusland, who had patterned his new brainchild on the catalog-magazine of a famed Boston food purveyor, S. S. Pierce. It was the end of domestic science and food economy and the beginning of the era of the gourmet, “the honest seeker of the summum bonum of living” as set forth in the charter issue. MacAusland’s recipes made few accommodations to reality; he even suggested that subscribers save the issues and use the recipes once rationing had ended. More