In the mags Feb 28: food magazines

It's summer, allegedly, a time to be thinking about food and wine. Mark Broatch checks out what we're being told to cook and crack open in the foodie mags.

A change is as good as a rest, some fool said. So, since all magazines claim integrity at some level, this week we look at serious magazines of a different stripe: those about food and wine.

I chose four that are readily available in stationers, Cuisine, Taste, Dish and Delicious.

Cuisine has long been top of the gastroporn puriri. It comes out every two months and has a useful website, cuisine.co.nz. Its readership last year, says Nielsen, was 377,000.

Taste comes out monthly and has a useful website, taste.co.nz. Its readership was 112,000.

Dish comes out quarterly and has a basic contacts website. Its readership was 76,000.

Delicious, produced in association with the ABC, comes out monthly, and links through to the useful site taste.com.au. The company told me it didn't have NZ readership figures (413,000 in Oz).

So to the post-Wither Hills Cuisine (March), which seems to function quite well without an editor, Simon Wilson having been edged aside for a "team" of senior staff and consultants. Time will tell if this strategy pays off.

The cartoony cover of mice at leisure around "Cheese Matters" is cute and appealing. (Mice prefer chocolate in their traps, actual and figurative, I am assured, but no matter.) But it doesn't make me immediately salivate about Fromager des Clarines or a round of raclette.

The food photos inside do, though. Letters, industry news, and reviews of restaurants and books welcome us in. Cuisine's critiques are helpful rather than biting, its writing informing rather than entertaining (the reviewing legend, $$$$ for $32+ etc, should be on the opening page, too). The reader-friendly At Your Request, which finds recipes, and Ray McVinnie's mix and match are valuable. Cuisine offers quality and quantity for serious wine drinkers. Who knew we had so many chardonnays in this country? Dozens. Enough to get me seriously thirsty. Some of the standfirsts and headlines could be smarter: I'm not sure a renaissance can owe its lifeline to anything. But the mag does provide a sense of the gastronomic breadth of the country. Recipes and credits at end. For dyed-in-the-walnut foodies.

Taste (Feb) looks more straightforward, less flashy, less high-end. First Tastes offers tips and diary dates, and Ask our Expert answers readers questions.

The layout is clean and clear, the recipes simple, in design and ingredient. The photography and styling are less alluring (hopefully cheaper) and with the choice of fonts the whole effect is to give something of that wide-eyed advertorial sheen (it's not). A Budget Special and friendly snacky features reinforce the idea that this mag is for people with one eye to their supermarket bill. Wine editor Bob Campbell stays on message by filling three pages with under-$20 picks. A glossary and recipe index pull up the drawbridge.

Good stuff, offering a clear point of difference with its competitors, if a little less aspirational. Perhaps Cuisine is acknowledging relative newcomer Taste's success, as Simon Wilson suggested elsewhere, by including such heretical ingredients as ready-made pastry.

Dish (Feb), with a fresh-off-the-presses tang, promises to be bi-monthly from June - bring on the competition! The chocolate sauce logo on the cover is a winner, but I have to say the dead leaf attached to the tomato does nothing for me. And the coverlines, especially in an "Italian issue", don't sufficiently entice or explain.

The events diary offers a bit more detail than those of its rivals, which is followed by the news bits and bobs, and quite short book reviews - but then who reads long and detailed critiques of cookery books? The food features on olives, heirloom-variety tomatoes and Italian wines are appealing and useful, though some pics of the bottles would have drawn me in more. Dish has lots of white space, the recipes are not full of impossible-to-buy ingredients, and even though the styling is less high gloss than Cuisine, the meals look genuinely tasty. The Italian meal looks delicious. Matching drink with food (including beer) is a great idea.

The writing is again useful rather than flash, but the thin, san serif body font and gaps after the paragraphs are unfortunately reminiscent of advertorial-heavy mags. The proximity of ads and editorial on the same subject and the front-footing of the mag and its editor in promotions don't help. The credits could be run vertically up the gutter. Recipe index and useful conversions are on the inside back. This magazine is clearly in touch with local producers but needs more interaction with its readers.

Delicious (Feb) immediately seems to have piles of money, what with UK chefs Gordon Ramsay, Rick Stein and Jamie Oliver, and Bill Granger (among other hot Aussie cooks) as contributors.

It leads with event pics, letters and pages of news and views, a signal to the reader that it really values the interaction. The food photos are professional and expensive, the recipes appealing and not too complicated. The focus is on recipes, heaps of them.

Wine writer Ben Canaider tackles viognier. It's too flowery a wine style for me personally, and is not Canaiders' first choice. He's a refreshingly honest and stylish writer. Typical quote: "This style of wine is obvious and easy to taste, and you would have to undergo a tongue-ectomy to miss its call; but it's not easy to drink. And that's what I like to do, daily and thoroughly."

This mag comfortably straddles the middle of the market, but its commerciality put me off. Too many ads at the front of the book crowd out leisurely reading, and their proximity to editorial subjects is not a good look. Do advertisers really think it helps? Delicious even has a "beauty bar" of cosmetics - "latest products from our advertisers". And it has absolutely zero local content, but globe-trotting gastronomes probably couldn't care less when their mag can call on such good chefs.

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