Throwback November 1981: No Turkey Gourmet?

For a Food Photography class with Nina Gallant, I selected the November 1981 issue of Gourmet Magazine for a throwback assignment. The goal? Write a short piece on the issue considering the era, then recreate and photograph a recipe. To update the cover story, I recreated the cover photo as a concept related to the accompanying Celery and Herb Soup recipe. It is adapted slightly for what I had on hand. Enjoy!

The cover of Gourmet’s November 1981 issue is a grey monotone, dour image of squared-off, interlocking logs. The weathered texture and deep cracks allude history and age, but nothing about this cover feels ‘gourmet’ or November.  Imagine this issue nestled on a rack between the turkey shown with a knife at mid-carve on the cover of Bon Appetit and the Thanksgiving cake decorated with pecans and set atop a delicate plate and lackey doily on the cover of Food & Wine. It is pretty bold and admirable for a food and lifestyle magazine to forgo the traditional Thanksgiving cover in November. However, while out shopping for the holidays, I am not sure I would be intrigued enough by this radical expression to pick up a copy.  Of course, looking back a few decades, outside of the holiday mindset, the cover was actually compelling enough for me to look into it.

Rather than a gloomy stack of logs, the photograph intends to portray workmanship and craft. “On the Cover” explains that the image is of the corner of a historic house in New Harmony, Indiana. New Harmony is a blip on the map. It lies on the banks of the Wabash River which runs along the Illinois-Indiana border. The house in the photo was built when the town was originally founded as Harmonie. That is better than 150 years ago and the house is impressively made without any nails. My engineering self says, “Wow that is pretty impressive.” My food studies self says, “Wow that still isn’t Gourmet, food or Thanksgiving.”

Proceeding on, the story about New Harmony tells of a town that has been twice occupied groups aspiring to settle Utopian communities á la Atlas Shrugged style. Now, I found my snarky self says “Wow, who is John Galt?” The macro-close up view of the corner of the house depicted on the front cover was built in the early 19^th century by a religious group referred to as Rappites or, in honor of the town’s namesake, the Harmonites. After the Harmonites left, the Owenites settled in New Harmony in pursuit of their own Utopian society. Apparently, even today, both Harmonites and Owenites still enjoy a following and some New Harmony residents maintain ties to their Owenite ancestry. Although the author was aiming to present the town, its history and its settlers as idyllic and harmonious, I mostly got a cult-like vibe from the whole thing.

Visiting the New Harmony website, the town boasts of its slow-paced and relaxed atmosphere complete with art, architecture, antiquing and historic tours. In 1981, I do not know if the Gourmet article did this quaint little town justice or boosted its standing as a tourist destination.  By comparison, the tone of this piece contrasted with the travel and adventure tone of other stories in this issue. It is largely a historical treatise on New Harmony. The accompanying photographs also have a grey and dour quality to them. There is the stand of trees draped in fog and the art deco Atheneum building, also draped in fog. Even the up close shot of a basil plant has a foreboding darkness in the background.

Only at the end of the article, on the continuations pages toward the back of the magazine, does the author get to the New Harmony of 1981. She spares only a few paragraphs on the New Harmony commercial district, an inn and one of its restaurants. These paragraphs are almost an afterthought, thrown in so that there is a reason to include a handful of recipes of which, only two are mentioned in the story. The recipes appear at the very end of the story. They are in the back pages of the magazine that give way to advertising. There are no pictures of the Celery and Herb Soup or the Tipsy Pork Tenderloin or even a Thanksgiving style layout of Roast Goose with Apple Sage Stuffing.

This all leaves me to wonder about the questionable choice of Gourmet’s November 1981 cover. I assume some readers skipped those publications with fall and Thanksgiving covers and grabbed Gourmet. Perhaps it was out of curiosity over the craftsmanship on the cover.  Perhaps they did so because New Harmony seemed interesting. Were they delighted by this historical treatise? Did they look past the inexplicable cover and instead soak up the beaches of Antigua? Instead, as might happen when driving through the Indiana countryside, perhaps the readers simply blinked as they went past New Harmony on their way to the Thanksgiving dinner of Braised Pheasant on page 104.

So, in honor of that Celery and Herb Soup, I recreated the recipe through pictures.