A Bitten Word Round-Up of 175 Recipes from 10 Leading Food Magazines
As we said yesterday, we've got tons of great Thanksgiving dishes to share with you. But before we get to our Thanksgiving parade of recipes, we wanted to post our annual round-up of all the T-Day recipes from all the food magazines we receive.
Last year, we said that if we were to assign a trend to the 2009 Thanksgiving issues, it would be about simplicity.
This year, that trend seems even more extreme. This year's food mags are all trumpeting "simple," "easy," "foolproof," "no-time," "Thanksgiving 101" recipes.
Still, we did find a handful of really innovative dishes -- notably, in Food & Wine's "East by Northeast" Thanksgiving spread, which features an Asian-American meal that incorporates Eastern flavors and traditional Thanksgiving dishes. We also lusted after Martha Stewart Living's "Land of Plenty" feature, which showcased a farm-to-table Thanksgiving dinner at Blue Hill at Stone Barns. It's the Thanksgiving we most wanted to attend (maybe because it started off with Hudson Baby Bourbon Whiskey?).
We noticed a few micro-trends this year, too. Despite the beautiful slices of pie that adorn the cover of Martha Stewart Living, it's cakes that seem really popular this year. And especially pumpkin layer cakes -- three different magazines feature one this year.
Other ingredients that are big this year? Pomegranates are everywhere. As is fennel. Both of those are nice ways to add a new flavor into standard Thanksgiving dishes.
What's out? Corn, believe it or not. Other than cornbread stuffings and a couple of soups from Saveur, there's only one dish in all these food magazines that includes corn (Food & Wine's Creamed Haricot Vert and Corn Casserole).
Which ingredients stood out the most this year? Using Wordle.net, we created a couple of interesting word clouds that display the different ingredients in all these recipes according to how often they appear.
Here's a word cloud showing every prominent ingredient:
And here's one where we omitted all the usual suspects (turkey, stuffing, etc.):
Anyway, onto the master index!