BTW, since the original thread was about cookbooks, I decided to go to Ebay and buy some old Gourmet magazines from the 60s and 70s. As my usual bedtime reading, these turned out to be superlative! So much more intellectual and stimulating than the dumbed-down picture-oriented zines of today. While there is a kind of fun pomposity to some of the writing, it reminded me that the old Gourmet was much more a travel magazine than a food magazine. And a history magazine. It had a long piece on Colonial foods and cooking that was interesting and a sad and ironic piece on the glories of Haiti: filled with French aristocrats and ambassadors swanning around the mountains and hanging with Papa Doc! How wonderfully politically-incorrect was the old America.
I think ‘Gourmet’ was the magazine that used to have a feature where people would write in and ask the editors to ferret-out the recipe for something wonderful they’d had in a restaurant. I found the recipe for one of my favorite ‘mall eatery’ dishes that way, and saved a lot of others from that feature as well.
-JT