magazines: The Art Of Eating     magazines:     The Art Of Eating   The Art Of Eating Art of Eating average customer review:based on 1 review view larger image  for more information click here In-depth essays on gastronomic subjects. Wallow in your foodieness A friend gave us a gift subscription to The Art of Eating, last year, and I'm about to renew the subscription for myself. This is only a quarterly publication, and it isn't very big (48 pages or so, with no ads) -- but it's always an enjoyable read. Part of what makes this newsletter successful is that the articles are long, involved, personal essays. These aren't short-and-sweet little 1,500-word articles that tell you the least you need to know about cheese, and slap in a minimalist recipe. Instead, the current issue has 16 pages about Greyère de Comtè, which covers everything from a travelogue of the region of France, to interviews with the farmers who raise the cows who generate the milk that becomes the cheese. You get the history of cheesemaking in the region, the reasons the cheese is so distinctive, a 1927 recipe for fondue, photos of the cheese aging in the caves. In other words, you get to wallow in cheesemaking from the comfort of your easy chair -- which is heaven for most of us foodies. (Our less enthusiastic relatives, the ones who cook Hamburger Helper on a regular basis, would be bored to tears. But they wouldn't be reading this review, would they?) What ELSE is here? Amazon doesn't say, so I'll give you an idea based on the rest of the Winter 2005 issue. In addition to the cheese feature, there's "Achingly Ripe: Tropical Fruit in Homestead, Florida;" "A Higher Authority? Science and the Pursuit of a Perfect Hard-Cooked Egg;" "Italy's Local Markets;" "Notes and Resources: Dried Corn;" and book reviews of recent cookbooks. You don't have to be an avid cook to enjoy these articles (or The Art of Eating in general); you'd probably like the newsletter even if you're "merely" a fan of great restaurants and the sort of traveler who plans vacations based on the food you're likely to consume on the trip. The photography is always excellent, though most of it is in black-and-white. The writing is uniformly engaging and lyrical, which makes you WANT to read 16 pages about a single topic. That is, unless you are disinterested in that particular subject; in those cases, half the issue is rather wasted. That did occur to me once, this year, so I won't say the entire publication is perfect. It is, however, a tradeoff I'm willing to make for the completeness of the coverage. When the newsletter arrives, I drop the rest of the mail on the table, unopened, so that I can whip the covers open on the Art of Eating. You'll probably do the same.  for more information click here products you might be interested in   search for magazines art of eating, art, eating      toavi.com    web randomly chosen book: Paper-Thin Alibi: A Craft Corner Mystery