This Thanksgiving, Moving Beyond Gourmet (Magazine)

Here’s a dilemma: How do you have your Thanksgiving and eat it too? For me, the answer is to celebrate early, then head for warmer climes over the holiday itself. Imagine it: all your friends clamoring to join you at a family-style banquet without family-style irritations. There’s no getting stuck at the kids’ table. No Cool Whip. And most definitely no football. It’s Thanksgiving for the Thanksgiving-lover–in a word, bliss.

But that bliss, officially known as Gobble Gobble Night, never would have been achieved without Gourmet magazine. When I started fact-checking there five years ago, I was just another girl who loved to cook and thought she was pretty darn good at it–when she thought about it at all. During my first week, between making phone calls to price-check hotels in Rome and sending e-mails to establish the precise differences in aging techniques between tawny, ruby, and non-Vintage Ports, I wandered the magazine’s mazelike hallways feeling like the youngest ensign assigned to the Starship Enterprise. “Yes, but do you really braise it?” I’d hear a senior food editor ask with the sort of concern I’d always associated with questions along the lines of, “Okay, but was it benign?” I had thought I loved food–thought I knew it–but clearly I didn’t. Not at all.

To say that working at the magazine fed my culinary knowledge is like saying that going to elementary school endows you with a love of literature. In an ideal world, yes; but first you need to learn to read. There are disadvantages to being surrounded by professors when you’re a fumbling fourth grader, but the advantages–like that particular brand of ferocious generosity one only encounters in chefs–more than compensate. And you never know where that generosity might lead you. Back in the fall of 2006, during a discussion of the best turkey roasting methods with my colleague Lillian, I told her about my vision for a best-of-all-possible-worlds Thanksgiving. “Come with me,” she said promptly. “I have something for you.” It turned out there was an extra Bell & Evans bird down in the test kitchen. Did I want it? I did. But that was only the beginning. “You need aromatics,” Lillian announced firmly, passing me several freezer bags packed with vegetable parings. “Wait, where are you going? Don’t forget the turkey stock.” One grocery bag was filled, then another. What ensign wouldn’t seize the helm?

That first Gobble night was too much of everything: food, labor, stress. Everything, that is, except space–my modest dining room couldn’t accommodate fifteen guests. “Could. Not. Eat,” says my brother, Alex, when he remembers that evening, gritting his teeth like a superhero whose powers are being taxed beyond measure. “No. Room. On. Table. For. Plate.”  But the food, oh, the food! People still reminisce over the butternut squash and creamed-spinach gratin. It should have taken me 1¼ hours to prepare–and as the person who fact-checked that recipe, you might say I had a moral obligation to clock in at under 75 minutes–but just slicing the squash into ribbons took me almost twice that long. Then again, what was two hours? Planning the menu, scouring a dozen Brooklyn markets for ingredients, set up, clean up, not to mention the cooking itself–a good week of my life went into that first dinner. Like any Herculean endeavor, it didn’t seem worth it. But then, after the final guest departed and the final dish was put away, came the afterglow.

By the following year, I was proficient enough in the language of the recipes not simply to follow the instructions, but to anticipate them: which vegetable would enter the pot next, when a hot liquid needed to cool off slightly before being incorporated into the remaining ingredients. That increased facility, combined with a Greek chorus of admonishments from the food editors–”Trust me, you don’t need five vegetable sides.” “Don’t bother flavoring the whipped cream.” “Outsource!”–made the second dinner far less demanding than its predecessor. (Although I realized I might have taken the outsourcing thing too far when my friend Daniel and his pals from Stockholm heroically carted six chairs and two enormous pots of caramelized-garlic mashed potatoes all the way from the West Village.) But these tactical advances–including turning my bedroom, the largest room in the apartment, into a makeshift dining room–didn’t preclude new errors. Reasoning that I’d have more prep time if I held the dinner on a Sunday night, it never occurred to me that at 4 am Monday morning I’d still be in the kitchen, grimly rinsing pans.

Last year the guest list reached 25 people, but by that point the ritual was so familiar that it didn’t occur to me to panic. And, in fact, there was only one tiny snag. Picking up my pre-ordered foie gras from a local shop the morning of the dinner, I realized I’d procured exactly that: a naked lobe of foie gras requiring hours of deveining, prepping, and seasoning. (If any of my friends noticed that their toasts with Sauternes gelée were in fact topped with chicken-liver mousse, they were kind enough not to mention it. Of course, some of them might have been relieved.) In the eternal dinner party battle between the immovable object of logistics and the irresistible force of pleasure, pleasure had triumphed. As I looked at my friends, their faces limned in gold by the flickering candlelight, something settled inside me. I had this night. I had them. And the unspoken corollary–the thing I didn’t bother thinking about, because by now it was as natural as breathing–was that I had Gourmet.

This September, when it came time to fact-check the Thanksgiving menus for the November issue, it took me just minutes to pick my favorites: roast turkey with cream gravy, bacon smashed potatoes, pumpkin gingerbread trifle. Perfect. What I didn’t realize–what I still haven’t quite realized–is that I was working on the last issue of Gourmet ever. Next Thanksgiving, as cooks across the country don their aprons, for the first time since before America entered World War II, the magazine won’t be around to help.

How does one mourn the loss of a cultural institution? It is a death, to be sure, but the grief is more amorphous, less straightforward, than what you feel for a person. It’s like passing by your childhood home, now in a strange family’s hands; like finding out that the library where you whiled away your adolescence has been torn down. Something you loved dearly is gone forever, and it is beyond your power to get it back. Yesterday, you were part of 69 years of collective wisdom; today, you are meeting with HR; tomorrow, you are once again just another unemployed thirtysomething with a passion for food. Ensign, where’s your ship?

The only possible answer to that question lies in action. You’ve lost Gourmet. What do you do? You cook, of course. You start small, with the dishes you’ve made so often you know them almost as well as their creators: Gina’s seven-layer salmon bites, Paul’s egg salad with fennel and lemon, Maggie’s chocolate babka. Then, when you’re ready, you slowly leaf through all your old issues, recalling not just the dishes you made but–more important–all the ones you had once planned to make. All the phantom culinary visions that, unlike Gobble Gobble Night, were never realized. Remember that snowy Sunday in February when you were too sleepy to bother with the coffee-glazed doughnuts? Or how you gave up on preparing the Danish menu from the March 2007 issue because you couldn’t find five dinner guests who, like you, were part Danish? You didn’t do it then, but dammit, you’re doing it now. You’re tackling all the things that frustrate you, the things you’re still terrible at, like pastry dough and anything involving a mandoline. Because while it’s true that, having lived with Gourmet, you’re now in a better position to live without it, there’s a more enduring truth. You just don’t want to.

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