Education Week: In Search of Taste

Keith Reeves

Culinary journalism is alive and kicking.

Is it education or just pleasure?

It’s expanding to include better writing and more interesting articles than ever before. There maybe a place for magazines like Cooking Light, Bon Appetit, or Food & Wine, but look out for gems that appeal to more of your senses.

Super Chef snagged a copy of the first issue of In Search of Taste. Editor-in-chief Keith Reeves has created a masterful magazine that is both stylish and visually rich, and completely engrossing.

Here is a taste of the articles in the first issue.

Gardener Jane Stevens describes “An Evening of Innards in Piemonte Italy” with great pluck and enthusiasm.

The whole meal picked away at that bit of the brain that wants to identify and catagorise shape and pattern, like a small child sorting triangles and squares. The kicking piles of frogs legs broke through that particular charm. But anyway, by that point, who needed food? (p. 55)

She and ten other Italian companions devour a Fritto Misto that includes both dolce e salato: meats (brain, testicle, sweetbreads) as well as fruit (apple, plum) and vegetables (cauliflower, borage leaf). She admits to not being quite reliable since the meal finished at 1:00 am, but that is beside the point. It is her queasiness at spinal cord (mad cow disease), her inability to find this kind of Fritto Misto in books that make the meal so memorable. It is precisely how we eat and remember.

Journalist Patricia Fieldsteel provides an essay on Boudin Noir that is an octogenarian farmer, Francis, and a mission to pick up hay and inspect his animals. One pig (with another looking on) is butchered and turned into boudin, jambon cru, roulade, pate, rillettes, and caillettes as she narrates the day’s visit. A full-page black and white photograph by Andi Sapey of the heat of a big on paper, still wearing whiskers, accompanies the story. It is the kind of day that is both remarkable, and commonplace. It is full of the beauty and matter-of-factness of raising food in France. It is hard to resist any essay on boudin noir, but this one is especially thoughtful.

There are excellent stories on Italian bread, Greek food, and terroir.

On the back page of the magazine (with no advertisement throughout the issue) is written:

In Search of Taste is a new publication written with fire, wit, imagination and depth, dedicated to examining traditions where affinity between food and wine is born.

Spend time reading, learning, and enjoying these smart articles and photo essays.

Click InSearchOfTaste.com to learn more.

In Search of Taste - logo

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