What great magazines do: Inspire

Lamb love: Saveur's October issue.

I’ve been a little down on Saveur lately. When I started subscribing years ago, it was the darling of “real” food people, as opposed to pop culture-oriented foodie types who spend more time watching cooking shows than actually cooking. I loved the gorgeous photos of Ethiopian cooks making injera the traditional way. Then I read one too many stories where the writer got to have an amazing, authentic food experience with people and places that most mere mortals will never have access to. That, along with one too many recipes for homey, housewifely dishes straight from mom’s or grandma’s kitchen (remember, she loved her shortening and her convenience foods), and I was over Saveur.

Because of some truly shining moments, like the Butter issue and the Breakfast issue, I still keep up my subscription and appreciate the mag’s quirky charm. But I haven’t felt that frisson of excitement when it arrives in my mailbox for a while now.

Happily, that may be changing. Yesterday, I lazily opened the October issue with the cover line, “Why Lamb Rules.” And I was inspired. Saveur has had a lot of success, winning awards and keeping their numbers up even in these economic times. As I looked at Saveur with fresh eyes, I thought the accolades are well-deserved. I found the same lush images worthy to be called food porn and the in-depth single-subject coverage the mag excels at. Along with all this, I found something that’s become rare in the food magazine space: something new.

I often feel that food mags recycle the same content over and over to an embarrassing degree, so new ways of thinking about food aren’t presented as often as they should be. Saveur’s recipe for Beet Stew with Lamb Meatballs, a traditional Iraqi-Jewish dish, made me sit up and re-imagine a lamb stew and a roasted beet and a meatball. I was also dying to cook and eat it immediately.

Along with that, the magazine offered Pasta with Spicy Tomato-Beer Sauce, an intriguing take on Puttanesca that requires reducing a bottle of bock-style beer for over an hour. A 10-page ode to cinnamon included a few snoozy recipes (baked apples, coffee cake), but I loved the approach showcasing the versatility of the spice and inspiring cooks (who must be, admittedly, less jaded and demanding than myself) to recast the role of cinnamon in their kitchens (Picadillo – cuban pork hash – with a full tablespoon plus a stick of cinnamon: yes, please!).

I’m glad Saveur can still  keeps even its most critical readers, like Magazine Know-It-All, excited to devour content that not only informs the mind and pleases the eye, but inspires us to bring the ideas on those pretty pages to life in our personal worlds.

Advertisement

Tags: magazines, Saveur