Interviewed nearly three weeks after she got the news that Gourmet, the venerated culinary magazine she ushered into the 21st century, was shutting down after a 68-year run, food-world royalty Ruth Reichl was still at a loss as to what she might do next.

Would she consider returning to the punishing work of reviewing restaurants? As a critic for The New York Times and before that The Los Angeles Times, she sometimes ate at a place nine times before doling out stars — or relieving a stalwart of stars it no longer deserved.

"Unlikely," said Reichl. "I was a critic for 20-something years. I don't have anything to learn from that anymore."

For Reichl, editor of Gourmet for 10 years, Condé Nast's unexpected announcement a month ago that it was pulling the plug on the magazine came at an especially awkward time. She had just hit the road to promote "Gourmet Today" (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $40), an epic cookbook she edited, and was 10 days away from the premiere of "Gourmet's Adventures with Ruth," a public television series in which she runs around the globe with foodie and actor friends, getting hands dirty at far-flung cooking schools.

"The TV show is going forward," Reichl, 61, said from her home in New York. "We have a couple of other books which will go forward. I probably will be involved. At the moment I'm still with the company, but I'm kind of figuring out what I'm going to do next. I'm still in shock."

She wasn't the only one taken aback by the news.

"It's the center of gravity, a major planet that's just disappearing," chef-author Anthony Bourdain told the Associated Press. "There's been a lot of speculation about this happening, but I'm still stunned."

"It's absolutely horrible," said Diane Friedberg of Miami Beach, Fla., a retired hotel executive. "I started my subscription in 1965, when I first got married. And I have cooked one or two recipes from every issue since. Every time I have gone abroad I have checked out the places they have recommended and they have been right on every time. It's as if The New Yorker stopped publishing."

Reichl said that though Gourmet's circulation was at an all-time high with more than a million subscribers, advertising revenue had fallen off considerably in the recession.

"But I was totally surprised. I felt that things would come back and that the company would stick it out."

Reichl made her name in the book world with four best-selling memoirs that explore her relationship with the culinary world, with love and with the mother she didn't want to become. Her focus on a recent book tour is "Gourmet Today," a 1,000-page tome that brims with fresh, often down-to-earth recipes and enlightening tips: when to use fresh pasta and when to use dried, the differences between antibiotic-free, certified organic and free-range chicken, why wooden skewers are better than metal ones.

The cookbook's more than 1,000 recipes use a global palette of ingredients. Paying attention to the times, it offers lighter, quicker-to-prepare, more sustainability-conscious dishes.

"None of it duplicates the old Gourmet cookbook," Reichl said. "And we went out of our way to put in everything that we knew and thought would be helpful to people. How to buy vegetables. How to store them. How to quick-soak beans.

"When you're doing a magazine, you're always saying to yourself, 'I wish I had the space to do THIS.' But you never have the space. This book is every fantasy about what we thought people would want to know."

The recipes are a result of research and testing by a dozen Gourmet staffers working in the magazine's eight test kitchens, but much of the inspiration came from Reichl's son, Nick, a picky eater as a child who has since done mom proud.

"He and his friends cook dinner every night at college," Reichl said. "Everyone used to think cooking was woman's work. But there has been such a huge change. Last night he called me and said he was cooking risotto and went out and bought some saffron, but did I think he should also put wild mushrooms in it. I said he was gilding the lily and to use one or the other."

The book covers drinks, hors d'oeuvres, soups, salads, pasta, noodles, dump-lings, grains, beans, vegetarian main courses, fish, shellfish, poultry, beef, veal, pork, lamb and a wide range of desserts.

"What a cornucopia of international ingredients we have available to us in the supermarkets now," Reichl said. "Latino ingredients, Asian ingredients. Americans have become very open-minded about what we eat. Italians eat pasta at every meal. There is nothing we eat at every meal."

And while some have suggested Gourmet magazine was too upscale for the downscaling culture, the book's focus is not on luxury ingredients. Every recipe tells the harried cook how long the cooking will be, and there are plenty of dishes that can be completed in under 30 minutes.

"The impression we never managed to overcome was that Gourmet was just about fancy food," Reichl said.

As heartbroken as she is about the demise of her magazine, she believes the tough economic times do have a silver lining.

"Having more people cooking at home I think is very healthy. There's a sense of security, of being cared for, when someone is at home cooking for you," Reichl said. "And when you invite guests over for dinner, the relationship is changed. There's a safety net to meeting people in a restaurant. You're not showing who you really are."