Gourmets vanishing but not on ice yet.(Chicago Tribune)

It was somewhere between the imam bayaldi and my second helping of lulla kabob, covered liberally in a colleague's scrumptious homemade tabbouleh, that I remembered that the era of the home gourmet was supposed to be dead.

I didn't mention it at the time, because it may have shocked both hostess and guests at the dinner party I was attending.

The table on my colleague's porch was so laden, any sudden move seemed likely to overturn the plate holding the remaining canapes of portabello mushrooms sauteed in Chinese wine and served atop bleu cheese.

Yet, lingering like the taste of garlic was the memory of a conversation the week before with Doris Banchet, a retired member of Les Dames d'Escoffier and wife of Jean Banchet, the chef and former owner of Le Francais. She was talking about the home cooking revolution of the late 1970s, when dinner parties could be so fancy they seemed like examination time at the Cordon Bleu.

"I fear that time is gone forever," Banchet had said. "That was the era when food and good cooking and real gourmet came up in the United States. Nowadays, the young people don't cook anymore."

My wife and I _ young people still _ both enjoy cooking. But I stifled a protest, because at the time I was interviewing Banchet for an obituary about Elaine Sherman, the homemaker-turned-Chicago-cooking-guru who opened the door to a generation of ambitious home chefs here in the 1970s.

But the next day, I began to see Banchet's point.