Of course, there was plenty written about food in various media before then. Lucius Beebe, A. J. Liebling, M. F. K. Fisher, and Joseph Wechsberg were among the writers who more than occasionally focused their attention on matters gastronomic in the first half of the twentieth century. Gourmet magazine debuted in 1941 and set a new standard for the seriousness with which food and food writing was to be taken. But most of this writing was tailored to a small audience with the financial means and social wherewithal to benefit from advice about which were the best French restaurants in Manhattan and what regional treats to look for while traveling abroad. The alternative was the type of food writing aimed at housewives—publications such as Good Housekeeping, Ladies’ Home Journal, and the food pages of most newspapers, for example—which offered recipes and other advice for women burdened with the daily chore of putting dinner on the table.
