Media

This month’s top comfort food magazines

Mother Nature is taking her time deciding whether or not we’ll have spring this year. In the meantime, we can draw comfort from food. Here’s a look at what some magazines are suggesting.

As much as we want to root for the David to Food Network’s Goliath, the cable foodie network’s magazine is irresistible. We know they are pandering to us with their “bacon” theme on the cover, which features the latest in supposedly shocking recipes, such as (oh my!) bacon desserts and bacon cocktails. Yet Food Network Magazine manages to draw in even the most cynical reader with clean but colorful pages filled with pictures of oversize food, mouth-watering recipes and adorable tidbits. Did you know, for example, that Idaho police are cracking down on bacon-infused cocktails? It’s illegal there to tamper with bottled booze before it’s served — even if only to make it porkalicious!

Bon Appétit’s March issue is heaven for spice addicts. Just about every other recipe has at least a little burn, which is the perfect segue to the mag’s centerpiece on restaurateur Bobby Flay. The owner of Bar Americain on 52nd is a good showman with ever-tantalizing ideas about how to add kick to his meals. And Bon Appétit does a good job keeping the reader focused on the food rather than the chef, including large photos of the items and foods Flay talks about. Bon Appétit floats Flay’s advice around photos in a colorful and interesting way, allowing the reader to more leisurely learn about his penchant for Calabrian chiles or dry-rubbed spicy carrots with Harissa yogurt. Yum!

Like a chef overdoing it on the salt, Saveur Editor-in-Chief James Oseland has added too many words to the latest issue. Foodie mags are essentially porn, which means photos are key. Saveur’s are crisp and elegantly presented, but there just aren’t enough of them to satisfy. And, no, we don’t need to see head-shots of Marseille’s new chefs to know they are good. We just need to see their recipes. That said, David Mas Masumoto’s article and corresponding pics of his life on a California peach farm are heartwarming and perfectly tuned to a magazine intended to spark your desire for food, wine and family.

The story by Cooking Light’s senior editor Tim Cebula about his month-long attempt at veganism is the star of this otherwise dull magazine. We enjoyed reading about the recipes Cebula took from Richard Landau and wife Kate Jacoby, owners of Vedge restaurant in Philly, who have a roasted carrots with Harissa and black lentils recipe that could compete with any meat dish (OK, except short ribs. Or pork dumplings). Regardless, the story was thought-provoking and edgy. The rest of the mag was anything but. It read like a Good Housekeeping no-butter edition. Eating healthy shouldn’t be a chore requiring a freezer full of chicken parts. It should be — as Richard and Kate have learned — fun and surprising. Cooking Light Editor-in-Chief Scott Mowbray should have Cebula try more experiments.

The New Yorker’s Jon Lee Anderson alerts us to a rather large and yet rather quiet project going on down in Nicaragua, in which a Chinese billionaire (fronting for the Chinese government, of course), is looking to build a $60 billion canal connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans to rival the one in Panama. It’s a great story, especially considering that the whole project appears to be a shameless boondoggle for Nicaragua President Daniel Ortega. Still, we have to ask, is there any reporter at the New Yorker who uses the word “I” more than Anderson? “I stopped to offer a lift to an elderly woman…” “One day, I went to Brito…” “In Panama, I found opinion sharply divided…” One suspects ego plays a role in compensation. In Egypt, Peter Hessler visits the zany courtroom scene where former President Mohamed Morsi is being tried on criminal charges. Morsi and other accused men are kept in soundproof cages during the court proceedings, and the trial has an “improvised” feel to it that gives “a strong impression of frontier justice,” he writes. Good to know some things never change in Egypt.

Last year Time scored with Steve Brill’s “Bitter Pill” cover story on US hospital pricing, and now Brill is back with a breakdown on how healthcare.gov got fixed. What’s touched upon (but not harped upon) is the gross incompetence of White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, who essentially paid zero attention to any of the technical aspects of rolling out the website. Ditto for his boss President Obama. “They had turned only to … marketing whiz kids instead of the technologists who enabled them,” Brill writes. Fortunately, the contractors who screwed everything up were too “embarrassed” to get in the way of the brainiacs from Google and whatnot who were flown in to clean up the mess. Elsewhere, there’s a profile of Richard Berman, the p.r. guru in charge of the campaign against raising the minimum wage at restaurants. We like the fact that he’s pictured seated alone in a restaurant with nothing but a cup of coffee in front of him. He was too smart, we gather, to order anything from the kitchen, and he probably didn’t take a sip of the coffee, either.