Need Ideas for Dinner? Try Old Food Magazines!

We came across this treasure trove of Fine Cooking and Saveur back issues at a yard sale the other day. It made us smile to flip through pages of old recipes, out-dated equipment reviews, and food fads gone by. Then we got hungry. Do you ever go back to old food magazines for inspiration?

We're also in the camp of people who can't bear to throw away old food magazines and end up hanging on to them for years. When we're in a cooking rut, we pull out an issue at random and see what catches our eye. We often re-discover recipes that we'd flagged to make, but then forgot about. Or recipes that we passed over initially suddenly sound very appealing!

Which cooking magazines do you hang on to and revisit later?

(Image: Emma Christensen for the Kitchn)

Comments (12)

I love food magazines, but lack the space to keep them, so I started tearing out interesting recipes and taping them into a spiral-bound notebook to keep, instead. It saves me a TON of space, and it's one-stop-inspiration when I don't know what to make for dinner. The drawback is that things aren't organized by season, or even type, but that can be part of the fun.

boring, self-evident post

We've definitely been inspired by old food magazines over at our blog, Big Girls, Small Kitchen. There's an issue of Bon Appetit from 2000 I always come back to, and an current favorite—seared scallops—got a nice new rendition after a weekend spent in a friend's food magazine archives: http://www.biggirlssmallkitchen.com/2009/07/big-girls-test-kitchen-summer-scallops.html

I keep a small handful of food magazines that are of the special issue variety: a few exclusively on Italian foods and a couple of Thanksgiving issues. I have gone back to these issues time and time again-that is why I keep them.

Ugh, I have PILES. Love looking through them, and do occasionally try a new recipe. And of course I have certain ones I use again and again. My goal- which currently has no deadline and may never happen- is to go through them all and rip out everything I want to save and put them in a book/folder and throw out the rest...

@BrooklynBaker, I have a similar stash (ripped out of mags, printed from blogs). I would hate to be injured or ill but I wonder if I'll ever go through it all and organize if I'm not bedridden. I think it would take a month of Sundays.

@vhsdr: if it's boring and self-evident, why read it? why comment on it?

really now.

Here, here kaitlin. I almost wanted to respond to the same poster but didn't want to acknowledge his/her comments.

I tend to keep all my Bon Appetits and other random cooking magazines (although I am admittedly running out of room!). They are on the shelf by month, so when I am having a summer party, say, I can easily grab all the July and August issues to flip through.

Probably self-evident, but it works for me.

I love looking through my old magazines. They're in a high-up cupboard in my kitchen, arranged by date. Once in a while, I'll go through them all and recycle those that I know haven't used in ages, but I still refer to some for ideas/inspiration.

There are some absolute classics in olds magazines -- e.g., Nick Malgieri's Swiss Christmas Cookies (not included in any of his books), an Austrian goulash soup supper (still make it today)... both from old 1980s Gourmet magazine issues...

I tend to tear out articles, because old magazines can take over your home...

I'm a food magazine hoarder, but I've also found a net alternative,

www.taste.com.au

They are all in Australian measurements but this site takes recipes from the recipe magazines you can buy at supermarkets/newsagents and puts them online. Its great fr when I can remember reading a recipe but don't know which magazine its in- I just find the recipe online.
However they don't have all the recipes from the magazines, so I have to keep them too :)