Current Issue

 
no. 83 — mailed December 31st.

colored square  Editor's Letter (click)

colored square  The Fair of the Fattened Ox in Carrù  John Irving
        The classic beef from the Piemontese Breed in northern Italy,
        the annual fair at which the cattle are bought and sold, what
        makes the beef so good, and an introduction to the cooking.

colored square  Classic Piedmont Beef Recipes   John Irving
        Three essential dishes: Bollito misto (mixed “boiled” meats) as
        prepared at Ristorante Moderno in Carrù (with four classic
        sauces), Brasato al Barolo (beef braised in Barolo) as prepared
        at Osteria La Torre in Cherasco, and Carne cruda al coltello
        (hand-chopped raw beef) as prepared at Osteria La Torre.

colored square  Pain au Levain: The Best Flavor, Acidity, and Texture and
     Where They Come From, with a Recipe   James MacGuire
        The definitive description of the bread, including visits to Poilâne
        and Pain Virgule, the flour and the ideal meeting of sourness
        and flavor, with a recipe that shows how to achieve the control
        that produces the best taste.

colored square  How to Buy Pain au Levain   Edward Behr

colored square  Duck Hunt: In Search of California’s Perfect Wild Waterfowl
     Hank Shaw
        A hunter seeks the best-tasting species and the best places for
        flavor.

colored square  Lingonberries   Lee Reich
        The great wild Scandanavian berry, with advice on growing it
        where it can’t be found in the wild.

colored square  Lost and Found in the Woods: Funghi Porcini
     Nancy Harmon Jenkins
        A Tuscan perspective on hunting for boletes and on their use,
        with a recipe for porcini ragù.

colored square  Why This Bottle, Really?
        Mannie Berk on the virtues of Wylie-Fenaughty Syrah (Sonoma
        County) from Edmunds St. John.

colored square  Notes and Resources
        A modestly priced source for round French bannetons, the
        linen- lined baskets in which country loaves, including
        pains au levain, rise.

colored square  Restaurants
       Dublin: John McKenna on Chapter One.
       San Francisco Bay Area: Scott Hocker on Regional Mexican
         Places.

colored square  Books
       John Irving on Maria Pignatelli Ferrante’s Puglia: A Culinary
         Memoir (the new translation of La Cucina della Sicilia orientale).
       Anya Fernald on Giuseppe Coria’s Sicily: Culinary Crossroads
         (the new translation of La Cucina delle Murge).
       Edward Behr on Michael Steinberger’s Au Revoir to All That:
         Food, Wine, and the End of France.
 

Opening Letter from Edward Behr

As the age of ink on paper slides relentlessly into the electronic one, I think more and more about the nature of a magazine, what sets it apart from any other form of publishing. For me, a magazine is especially about turning pages, about the variety, not knowing what the next two pages will bring; in certain magazines it's about the interplay between editorial content and expensively produced ads (the latter often visually much more clever than the former). In a magazine without ads, the challenge is to capture the same excitement.

     The nature of a magazine was especially on my mind after the sudden death in October of Gourmet, with its circulation of 980,000, more than 100 times that of AoE. Maybe it tried to be too many things to too many people. A magazine with a more narrowly defined audience is supposed to be in a better position. And happily, because we have no ads, a drastic decline in ad pages can't do us in. But what, everyone wonders, will pay for high-quality information in the media of the future?

     Each issue of a magazine should be a performance, complete, not changing but fixed, a quality automatically supplied by ink on paper. We had been planning to offer digital subscriptions, essentially the print magazine in PDF form, and we may do that. But at the same time that life has been growing more digital, Brooklyn hipsters wear full beards and flannel shirts; a few people in Brooklyn, as in, for instance, Paris, keep bees (illegally in the first case), and in a number of US cities they raise chickens. And there is a burgeoning back-to-the-land movement of a new sort, represented by groups such as the Greenhorns. Across the river from Brooklyn in Manhattan, ardent food craftsmen (including some well-tattooed Brooklynites) appear at the marvelous, periodic New Amsterdam Market. We at AoE start to think that maybe the smartest thing we can do is to forget digital, embrace print, and remain solely a well-crafted object.

     In this issue, as ever, we struggled with limited time and resources to make a balanced whole. Perfectly balanced content is always the goal, and I don't know whether we will ever achieve it.

     But there's one fine element of balance in this issue. While we don't do a lot of how-to, James MacGuire provides both appreciation for sourdough, or pain au levain, as he prefers to call it, and he tells you how to make it. His recipe, despite both our efforts at simplification, risks putting off the casual cook. His aim, as it was in his recipe for a baguette-inspired loaf, is to go well beyond the usual and show you how to control flavor and texture and produce the best possible bread.

Edward Behr, November 2009

 

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.