Current Issue

 
no. 84 — mailed April 23rd.

colored square  Editor's Letter (click)

colored square  The State of Pork: Pigs, Iowa, Corn, and Pasture  Edward Behr
        Great ham as a starting point for learning about great pork,
        the superior results from compassionate farming, the grim
        factory methods, the roles of pasture and grain, the importance
        of breed, the organic ideal, and the rise of the niche market.         
colored square  Recipes: Pork with Prunes and a Meatless Spring Cabbage
        Soup   Edward Behr and James Macguire

colored square  The Lost Fishery: Shad in California  Hank Shaw
       A fisherman examines shad and shad roe, including cooking,
       and considers the potential for a commercial fishery.

colored square   The Value of Wild Plants  Melissa Pasanen
        A friend of the professional foragers Nova Kim and Les Hook
        looks deep into the advantages (and disadvantages) of food
        from the woods.

colored square  In Galilee: Lunch with Erez Komarovsky  Mitchell Davis
        A writer observes the cooking of a talented chef with a
        point of view.

colored square  Why This Bottle, Really?
        Anthony Wilson on Sottobosco vino frizzante rosso (Reggio
        Emilia) from Cà de Noci.

colored square  Notes and Resources
        Lettuce, the new wine magazine Tong, saving sourdough,
        trouble in the Mosel Valley.

colored square  Restaurants
        New Orleans: Rachel Wharton on Casamento’s.
        
colored square  Books
       Harris Salat on Hiromitsu Nozaki’s Japanese Kitchen Knives.
       James MacGuire on the latest translation of the Larousse
       Gastronomique
       The Short List: Encyclopedia of Pasta, Collio, Canal House
       Cooking, and Rhubarbaria.
 

Editor's Opening Letter

Following up on my last letter, for now we’re sticking to print and not publishing in electronic form. Meanwhile, we’re on Facebook and Twitter, as almost any business now has to be, and I write some of the posts. Social media turns out to be a good sounding board for us.

    I’m not much interested in careful polling and adjusting AoE in response, although that might increase circulation and success. It makes me think of a chef driven primarily to please customers rather than to cook good food. Pleasing customers is essential, but the best results are likely to come from a balance of motives, of the desire to please and the desire to do your best work.

    With a magazine, much of the fun is trying to make it what it should be: a magazine wants to be a certain thing, I think, as a result of the collected influences of the editors and contributors, the chosen subject, the readers, the spirit of the times. We certainly want to please you, our readers — we want many more of you.

    In the interest of hearing from you but not falling under the influence of statistics, we turned to social media for reaction to our quantity of wine coverage. I’ve always meant to have about 25 percent wine content over the course of a year, and lately we’re falling short in both articles and reviews.

    We put out the word on our Facebook and Twitter (@ArtofEating) pages: “Big discussion here about doing more than one wine review per issue. Four bottles a year is not a lot. How many should we do?”

 Everyone seemed ready for more wine. One person asked, “How can you justify the best in wine coverage at 4 per year?”   Some people wanted two bottles in each issue, and some were ready for a red, a white, a sparkling, and a fortified or dessert wine. More than one person suggested that the bottles each time be related, such as from the same region.

    So, starting with the next issue, we’ll review a pair of bottles, and they’ll have at least some relationship. More wine articles are coming too.

Edward Behr, April 2010

 

To order, click here or call 1.800.495.3944 (US and Can) or 1.802.592.3144 (anywhere) or send mail to The Art of Eating, Box 242, Peacham, Vermont 05862 USA.