An Ode
Once again I am reminded of, and thus devastated about, the loss of Gourmet. We’re off to Providence for Thanksgiving. Many McPhees collecting at my cousin’s house to cook an enormous feast. (Twenty-six of us this year.) We arrive each year armed with Gourmet and the intention to cook many of the recipes, replacing the ones that interest us less with recipes from past November issues. I have had more than a few friends ask what we will do without Gourmet. I don’t know, is the answer. The year of the Persian-influenced Thanksgiving (I still make the jeweled rice regularly) we made every single recipe. We even bought the calla lilies used in the illustration to decorate the table. I can’t help feeling that S.I. Newhouse will come to his senses, that he’ll bring Gourmet back. It will come back. It will. In the meantime, we have this year. Off we go, ready to roll our sleeves up and cook: Bacon Smashed Potatoes, and Toasted Cornbread Pudding, and Kale With Panfried Walnuts, and Oyster Casserole, and Braised Turnip Greens With Turnips and Apples, and Brown Sugar Baked Sweet Potatoes And Acorn Squash, Cranberry Celery Relish, and Bourbon Pumpkin Pie, and this is just the beginning. My splendid, gracious cousin, her welcoming family, her parents, my parents (both sets divorced), our stepmothers, in-laws, a few of my many lovely sisters, all the children, even my cat—all of us in the kitchen, inspired by Gourmet: stirring, whipping, melting, rolling, stuffing, carving. Happy Thanksgiving.
MARTHA McPHEE 
Oh I feel your pain, facing what I’m afraid is indeed the permanent loss of Gourmet. The description of your family’s Gourmet-inspired Thanksgiving is beautiful and familiar. Somehow for us this year, despite the gigantic choice from stapled-together and ragged magazine recipes (sources too varied to recount), the only one we dug out from Gourmet was the Roasted Garlic Sweet Potato Disks with Fried Sage Leaves. But Martha, can I tell you – it was the best thing on the table! Reading your post, I feel I let Gourmet down by not raising it up this post-editorial Thanksgiving. I’d like to share with you the blog entry I wrote the day Gourmet’s fate was published.
http://the-new-now.blogspot.com/2009/10/indicators.html
Martha and all the McPhees, thank you for the tribute!
Thank you, Charlotte. I can’t wait to read the post. I know those Sweet Potatoes. We made them last year and they were fantastic! Oh it’s such a loss… Thanks for commenting.