In the beginning, there was Gourmet. The food and lifestyle magazine first appeared in January 1941. War was already raging abroad, and America would soon be attacked.

Anyone seeking escape from the dark days that followed could do no better than dive into the world of Gourmet, with its old-guard reverence for French everything and lustrous accounts of the café society immortalized in Fred Astaire movies.

Gourmet survived World War II (it suggested that readers save their issues to use when food rationing ended), but it did not survive the recession of 2009. Nor have some other shiny-sheet publications touting the high life in this time of great woe for luxury advertisers.

Condé Nast, which bought Gourmet in 1983, will also shutter the parenting magazine Cookie and two bride-oriented publications. Some industry observers have criticized the Condé Nast business model that required magazines to rely heavily on advertising revenue. Several noted that Domino, a home magazine Condé Nast closed down in January, charged a very low subscription price of $12 a year. Its loyal and heartbroken fans would probably have paid a lot more for it.

Many food magazines will continue to show the flag in Gourmet’s absence. Condé Nast’s Bon Appetit, which specializes more in recipes and less in exotic travel, is doing okay. And there are other, more ordinary-folk food magazines, such as Every Day with Rachael Ray.

Still, Gourmet’s departure marks the end of an era. Back in 1941, most Americans ate plain food. M&Ms made its debut, as did Cheerios and other early “ready-to-eat” cereals.

Gourmet was about crown roasts, canapés and champagne dinners for two on New Year’s Eve, lights twinkling in the distance along New York’s East River. The ads in the back were mostly for restaurants in Manhattan joined by an occasional visitor from Chicago, New Orleans or San Francisco.

Over the years, Gourmet carried great food writing and some wonderfully arch commentary. The feature by Lucius Beebe, “Along the Boulevards,” showed the author in a top hat. He wrote things like this about a now-long-gone Manhattan restaurant:

“Its clientele is fairly well limited to port-voiced gentlemen who command two sorts of wine at a minimum and a few professional names who know wonderful food and are important enough to be able to eat in a restaurant not frequented by the entire corps of Broadway paragraphers.”

(Mr. Beebe once tipped his top hat to the Brick Wall, a restaurant in Providence. Any readers out there remember it?)

Ah, goodbye, Lucius Beebe and all that Gourmet represented. Welcome Rachael Ray.