The American dream of the moment united an idealized old-style domestic tranquillity with two-car garages and luxury kitchens. It was also (though no one knew it) the last moment in history when anybody could assume that the happiness of American women centered on the roles of wife, mother, and, not least, hostess. In short, it was an auspicious era for publications offering inspiration and advice on the most fulfilling uses of discretionary income and leisure time. The only difficulty was keeping up with the pace of new pleasures.
The most conspicuous pleasure offered in the GOURMET of the 1950s was a boundless zeal for the romance of food. Every conceivable subject (and some pretty inconceivable) was turned into a narrative, populated when possible with colorful historical or made-up characters. A 1952 article on cranberries begins with Charles II roaring "Zounds, my sweet," while a 1954 piece on Lebanese cooking is couched as the story of Najla, a marriageable maiden setting her cap at a husband.
Even factual articles about particular foods or dishes became fanciful, circuitous reads full of jaunty metaphors and a wealth of literary allusions, from Virgil to Wodehouse. Readers went to such stories expecting a leisurely stroll through imaginative byways, not a fast track to hard information.
The recipes, meanwhile, had expanded in range. Polenta and vitello tonnato were introduced in the first half of the decade, along with squid, morels, and matzo balls. By 1960, the magazine would present recipes for Mogul-style chicken biryani, baklava, Chinese sweet-and-sour carp, Yucatán chicken pibil, and Moroccan b'stilla. The ever-lively Sugar and Spice columns provide perhaps the best reflection of the times and of the magazine's part in them. Many readers belonged to military or diplomatic households stationed abroad, and often they had more firsthand experience of some particular cuisine than GOURMET itself did. Sugar and Spice correspondents were always eager to fill each other in on the unknown. (There is one priceless 1954 exchange in which an army wife based in Japan wrote to ask about two strange items called bagels and lox, and an old Asia hand informed her that lox was to be had "at Lehmeyer's Delicatessen, midway between Tokyo and Kawasaki.") And they weren't shy about setting the record straight when they thought gourmet didn't know beans about sea urchin, say.
From time to time, though, readers began to object to the trouble and expense of some dishes. Their complaints were not unjustified. Despite the presence of recipes from around the world—and despite modern conveniences that made TV dinners and frozen vegetables the norm for everyday cooking in many households—in its second decade, gourmet came to stand for superelaborate French dishes requiring endless supplies of stock (several kinds), chaud-froid, hard-to-find items like c&eagrave;pes, and/or labor-intensive restaurant-style garnishes. Haute cuisine of professional complexity did not absolutely drive out simple recipes, but to cook from the magazine was a project.
A more intangible, but supremely important, element of the magazine's identity was an intense fixation on the past as the standard of meaning. Every year—it seemed nearly every issue—brought more memoirs of vanished worlds. For example, when GOURMET decided to publish its first major series on Chinese food—a real breakthrough that ushered in an increased attention to unfamiliar cuisines—the vehicle was Z.L. Loo's four-part account of an unimaginably privileged boyhood existence that had disappeared some 40 years earlier.
The magazine's other great innovation during the '50s was a shift toward the service, or tourist, aspects of travel coverage, which would eventually make information on lodgings, routes, conveniences, and so forth as crucial as a writer's sense of place. Yet during this adjustment to postwar realities, the travel features remained very close to the passion for nostalgia so generally apparent in the magazine. What American visitors—and not just food lovers hoping for transcendent meals—hungered for in France, England, or Italy was a kind of time travel through physical travel. The miraculous paradox of the age was that an expanding coterie of 20th-century observers could now glimpse some storied older civilization through the marvel of affordable modern transportation—affordable either for themselves or for the burgeoning ranks of professional travel writers and photographers whose business it was to capture the experience. The influence and power of the United States was spreading around the globe, and the world of GOURMET, once rarefied and aristocratic, was becoming more available to more and more of its readers.
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