If honing your culinary skills—or at least reading how to– are among your New Year’s resolutions, we have two suggestions: 1) continue reading DCist’s “Eating In” and 2) buy this month’s Gourmet magazine.

Why are we leading you to the high brow if you’re still working on your chiffonade? No, it’s not because editor Ruth Reichl is cooking up her own version of Sex and the City based on Garlic and Sapphires. It’s because we’re fascinated by January’s 65th anniversary edition. From hundreds of choices each month, editors have selected a favorite recipe to mark each year since the magazine’s inception in 1941.

The collection looks less like a cookbook and more like the tracing of American food history and tastes since World War II. Rather than citing aspic and Salisbury steak dinners of yore, the pages are chock full of accessible recipes that sound delicious – or at the very least, entertaining.