This month’s Food & Wine magazine suggests three “chef-upgrade” Thanksgiving pies — cranberry lime curd, fudge-drizzled “chess,” and sweet potato with chocolate crust. It’s a dismaying sign of a publication that has lost sight of the core mission to provide recipes for dishes its readers might actually want to cook and eat.
Pie is one of America’s most glorious traditions, and one of the few dishes that’s oddly un-translatable to other cultures, as any American who has watched early pie episodes of The Great British Bake-off knows. Every culture has pies, but American pies are a specific thing, requiring a sweet, deep-dish filling usually of fresh fruit, angled sides, and a flaky pastry crust (crumbs or crushed cookies are a distant second). Pies can have some variety: they can be open-faced, or have a lid or a lattice or a pile of whipped cream on top. And their crusts and garnishes offer endless opportunities for decorative flourish. Still, there are rules: if you aren’t making it in an American pie dish, it’s a tart.
My aunt, now in her 80s, still makes six pies every year for our family Thanksgiving: pumpkin, apple (two of them), pecan, chocolate and banana-cream. Her fillings are simple; her Crisco crusts are perfectly fluted; and we need nothing more.
This is not to say that all innovation is bad. I’ve gone early-American, with a vinegar pie topped with whipped cream and sugared cranberries, inspired by the spread of pies at the country fair in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Farmer Boy (recipe found in The Little House Cookbook). And I’ve gone bougie-American, making a cranberry pie with pecan-crumble topping, from the website Smitten Kitchen. These offerings suit my palate for acid and unusual flavors. My relatives have been … polite.
But if you’re going to innovate, your innovation should be beautiful, well-executed, and have a good flavor profile. The Food & Wine pies, in this regard, are suspect.
But does anyone really want a cranberry-lime-curd pie, with a crumb crust made from rye flour, complicated by a topping of blackberries, pomegranate arils and large strips of lime zest? That is too much going on, and cranberries and eggs together sound yuck.
The peanut-butter chess pie drizzled with chocolate sauce gives the impression of appealing Americana, but only on first glance. Like so many early desserts, the chess pie was a response to scarcity, and is basically just a bland, sweetened custard that went out of style for a reason. Peanut butter might punch it up, or it might not — usually, these pies get a flavor spike from acid, either lemon or vinegar. And peanut butter and chocolate together are fine, but no one is going to be excited about the combination as pie.
Lastly, there’s the sweet potato pie with cocoa crust and a flambéed meringue piping. My aunt skips this classic Thanksgiving offering for the sensible reason that sweet potato pie just isn’t a crowd-pleaser. The chef-upgraded magazine version might look a little better, but sweet potato and chocolate aren’t a natural pairing (unlike pumpkin and chocolate); Food & Wine’s piped meringue layer and blowtorching are 1950s-retro in execution; and the topping is a lot of work just in order to add one extremely sweet, low-flavor element (meringue) atop another (sweet potato). The Food & Wine pie also has a random scattering of pecans on top, and requires chocolate-pearl topping that many people will have to mail-order.
These are pies that only an editor could love. They sound original, they fit a story-concept, and it doesn’t matter what the cooking or eating is like. And it’s not just Food & Wine. Bon Appétit’s recommended Thanksgiving desserts are scarcely better. The magazine suggests cake instead of pie: marbled chocolate-pumpkin, pecan, and white-chocolate cranberry. Again, these desserts sound original, look nice in photos, and fit a story-premise, but they’re just not likely to find a wide audience on a Thanksgiving table. Here kids, have a slice of pecan cake. No? How about the chocolate-pumpkin bundt?
It wasn’t always like this. The early aughts saw an explosion of cool food culture — Anthony Bourdain published Kitchen Confidential in the year 2000; the website Eater launched as a New York City restaurant guide in 2005. The formerly stodgy, high-end food publications transformed around the same time. Editor Dana Cowin took over at Food & Wine in 1995. Adam Rapoport remade Bon Appétit for bros and young people in 2011. This was an era in which both titles had great ideas and great aesthetics. Their recipes were often aspirational, but in the best sense: these were dishes ambitious home cooks would want to try, and would enjoy serving to friends once they’d done so.
“If I want authentic Asian or Latin recipes, I won’t get them from ‘Food & Wine.’”
Such content has mostly moved online now, onto platforms such as YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. And in some respects, the decline of the food magazines is just part of the greater death of the legacy print media. Yet food is also one of the few remaining semi-success stories in print. While so many titles have folded, reduced publication schedules, or gone online-only, both Bon Appétit and Food & Wine are still with us as monthlies. The creature-comfort of flipping through a tangible artifact displaying photos of food is not easily digitized. Nor is it a small thing to cook from a computer — which requires clean, dry hands and no splatters. I still prefer a piece of paper torn from a magazine when I have a choice.
Food magazines should have an advantage, then, so why aren’t they better?
It’s not just Thanksgiving; I often flip through my monthly subscriptions and find not a single dish I’d want to cook. One answer is ideological. Like most other spheres of culture conferring status on coastal elites, food went super-woke during peak woke, and is only slowly recovering. Rapoport, the visionary Bon Appétit editor, was cancelled and forced to resign in 2020. Parent company Condé Nast replaced him with a black editor with no experience in the food space. (She lasted a year, and was succeeded by Jamila Robison.) Time Inc., the owner of Food & Wine in 2017, replaced the legendary Cowin with Hunter Lewis, a white man presumably intended to compete with Rapoport. Lewis has been carefully virtue-signaling ever since.
The need for a display of the correct ideology in these magazines’ pages has resulted in many specific sins and one overarching one — a lack of focus on what used to be the core mission: promoting beautiful food the reader is drooling to cook.
The de-rigueur level of “diverse” content isn’t really a problem in itself — Americans these days have diverse palates — but it becomes homogenized and unappetizing in context. On one page of November Food & Wine, we have “Hong Kong”-style French toast; on the next, cemitas, a “Pueblan-style” sandwich.
I like both French toast and sandwiches, but Hong Kong for breakfast and Latin for lunch seems a little much. And really, if I want authentic Asian or Latin recipes, I won’t get them from Food & Wine. Also, aren’t these cultures and foodways supposed to be meaningfully different? The magazine’s Thanksgiving package offers stuffed butternut squash with curry-coconut rice, tandoori roast turkey, sweet p otatoes with maple chili crisp, and porchetta with “cheesy chard-and-leek” stuffing. If Asian, Indian, Southern-American and Italian can all sit on the same table, how diverse can they really be?
There’s also the other kind of ideology, which holds that fresh, local, seasonal, organic food is better for our health and for the planet. The Food & Wine “chef-upgrade” story on Thanksgiving pie offers adaptations of recipes by chef Camille Cogswell, of Walnut Family Bakery in North Carolina. Cogswell “constantly pulls ingredients from the farmers and artisans around her.” She’s most likely legitimately making a small-scale, artisanal product.
But can the magazine’s readers do the same? Fresh, seasonal, farmer’s-market ingredients are great, and Food & Wine is for the type of reader who can afford them. But such ingredients are also, by definition, hard to scale. The recipe suggests chocolate pearls from Michaels to garnish the sweet-potato pie, and tops the cranberry-lime one with blackberries, which are out of season. These are dishes muddled in flavor and concept, of a piece with the braindead diversity mission.
Cogswell’s pie is seen above on the left; the Food & Wine slice is on the right. The bakery version isn’t necessarily practical for the home cook to execute. It has cute stamping on the crust; the chef has done something loose and updated with her meringue piping; and someone hand-made those chocolate pearls. The other slice looks (and probably tastes) conservative in comparison.
Conservative — mainstream, though the high-end version — is what food magazines have always done well. They should get back to it, and give the readers what they really want, too: an apple pie for Thanksgiving.
