Food Magazine Subscriptions

Hi,

After my thoroughly enjoyable afternoon reading Saveur on Saturday, I decided to get a new subscription. I had recently received in the mail a Saveur coupon offering a 'professional courtesy' rate. For comparison, they advised annual cover price of $45, regular subscription rate of $29.95 and my 'courtesy' rate of $19.95 (new subscription for me and renewal subscription for a friend).

I flipped over to my favorite shopping area for the 'wants' in my life: e-Bay. I used the keyword 'Saveur,' where I found a number of back copies as well as subscriptions. I purchased two 4-year subscriptions to Saveur for $15.95 each or roughly $4 per year.

Unfortunately, Cook's Illustrated does not use subscription brokers or I would advise this as a cheap source. However, my other favorite magazine 'Old House Journal' (not to confused with This Old House -- very, very different approachs to restoring older homes) is re-upped via e-Bay, also.

The last couple of times I've made purchases I've made from restaurant.com have offered free subscriptions to Saveur and a relatively new music magazine called Tracks. I think both purchases were made with a promotional code, so that may explain the free mags. And I'm happy to have a free Saveur subscription. (Tracks, on the other hand, greatly annoys me.)

I just received the charter issue of Cook's Country magazine. This is Cook's Illustrated new publication. It's comfort food recipes, like pot roast, cheesy mashed potatoes, sea foam candy, chocolate pudding. Also there's a recipe contest, readers send in funny stories about things that have gone wrong in the kitchen, and they also test products . The one big thing that is different from cook's illustrated is color photos and recipe cards . I think this is a keeper. Another subscription!

Aaron Deacon wrote:The last couple of times I've made purchases I've made from restaurant.com have offered free subscriptions to Saveur and a relatively new music magazine called Tracks. I think both purchases were made with a promotional code, so that may explain the free mags. And I'm happy to have a free Saveur subscription. (Tracks, on the other hand, greatly annoys me.)

Aaron,

Ah, that explains it. I was informed a few months ago that I would be receiving Saveur for free. I thanked the gods of grub and thought no more about it. I'm guessing my name was mined off restaurant.com.

Hammond

David Hammond wrote:Aaron,

Ah, that explains it. I was informed a few months ago that I would be receiving Saveur for free. I thanked the gods of grub and thought no more about it. I'm guessing my name was mined off restaurant.com.

Hammond

My parents are receiving saveur for almost certainly the same reason.

-ed

Hi,

I did order my 4-year subscription to Saveur for a mere $16. It has already begun starting with a few back copies from this summer. I am covered to 2008. I am tempted just to buy another subscription to bump up to 2012.

Free is better, though $4 a year for 9 copies is a steal.

Hi,

Penelope Bingham spoke on American Food at Saturday's Chicago Foodways Roundtable meeting. She asked the group what food magazines did they read: Cook's Illustrated, Saveur, Gourmet, Bon Appetit were amongst those mentioned. She asked if anybody subscribed to 'Taste of Home.' She elaborated further her audiences in rural Illinois would almost certainly get 'Taste of Home' and 'Southern Living.' Almost none got the magazines we had identified. The most surprising statistic was 'Taste of Home' has a subscription base larger than Cook's Illustrated, Saveur, Gourmet, Bon Appetit combined.

This information suddenly put the puzzle together why 'Cook's Illustrated' had their new venture 'Cook's Country' to tap into the 'Taste of Home' market. 'Taste of Home' has recipes in a perforated format for easy clipping and dropping into an index card holder as does 'Cook's Country.' When 'Taste of Home' does a kitchen remodel feature, it is usually at a farm house with a country theme with homemade craft accents. I recall one example where it looked like a 'before' picture when it was clear they were proudly showing the 'after.'

I'm going to look at my back issues of 'Taste of Home' with a new appreciation because it is how the other half lives.

Regards,

As someone with an editorial background (albiet in trade publishing, not consumer) I was interested in your post about "Taste of Home," Cathy2. I've never even heard of "Taste of Home," but I'll definitely have to look for it next time I'm at the bookstore or library. But in a lot of ways its no different than the "shelter" (i.e., home decorating) magazines...the person who subscribes to "Metropolitan Home" isn't reading "Michigan Cottage Living" (unless it's for ideas on how to decorate their second or third home!).

I am an admitted recipe-holic -- 9 years of Bon Appetit, many random issues of other food magazines (Food and Wine, Saveur, and so on), stacks of clipped recipes from the Trib... You get the idea. My mother is (was? I've lost track) a subscriber to Taste of Home. She would also get their annual hardback recipe compilation. Despite the fact that Taste of Home had pretty atrocious photography and used far too much jello, I have found a few winners over the years. Taste of Home definitely targets a more general population.

-The GP

You can currently get Saveur magazine for $3.60 per year--or 40 cents per issue. Not quite as good a deal as when I got it free with my Salon subscription, but still well worth doing. You can use the special for up to three years, so I indeed subscribed for three years for the grand total of $10.80.

Use this link and at check-out enter the savings code "food."

Courtesy of the Hot Deal News at Fatwallet.com.

Thanks Ann! Just processed my order.

I just ordered as well....thanks for the great tip!!

Thank you very much for the heads-up Ann. I'm in for three years.

Help,
I tried this and was not able to get the price indicated. Perhaps the offer has expired or, I amy be doing something wrong.
Any suggestions would be appreciated.
Thanks.
Jyoti

I got the three year offer; the discounted rate didn't show up 'til the final checkout.

The box for the discount will be called "coupon" or "gift promotion". It will appear on the bankcard info page. After entering the codeword "food", and clicking on the payment button at the bottom of the page, the msg "Remove food" will appear. Don't panic! The next page will show a discount of $49 from your $60 bill.

Quite a deal, tnx so much for the heads-up!

Geo

This is a bit of a drift off topic, but it reminds me of a question I've been wanting to ask for some time. I did a search but didn't find an existing thread on this. How do you save and organize all the recipes you save? I have recipes clipped out of magazines in piles and folders and baskets all over the house, because I haven't yet figured out how I want to organize them.

Magazine pages are so flimsy that just three-hole punching them and putting them in a binder doesn't seem like a good idea. Cut and paste them onto sturdier stock? Rather than rewriting them all, I lean towards scanning because I want to save the photo, if there is one, with the recipe. Which makes me think maybe I should just keep them on the computer.

Then there's how to organize them. I could just save them by the usual cookbook headings, but I also think I'd like some kind of seasonal divisions.

What works for you?

Katie wrote:What works for you?

I take the time to transcribe recipes into Mastercook on my computer. By the time I decide I want to save a particular recipe, I've probably cooked it a couple of times and have made my own modifications to the original, so retyping it into Mastercook with my customizations is not such a big deal. Once it's in Mastercook, you can search and sort by pretty much any criteria you can think of. If it's a recipe you find on the web, it's even easier because you can use the import assistant to bring the recipe in without retyping at all. You can also store a picture along with the recipe.

I just scan them to searchable PDF with this then save them in a folder. With the searchable PDF, even if you don't remember the exact name of the recipe, you can search your recipes folder for any dish that contains 'chicken' for example, and the search will return any recipe you have in that folder that has the word 'chicken' in it. Of course, if you have a color scanner (like the one above), the PDF file will look exactly like the original clipping (preserving any pictures or diagrams, etc).

MKHesq wrote:I just scan them to searchable PDF with this then save them in a folder. With the searchable PDF, even if you don't remember the exact name of the recipe, you can search your recipes folder for any dish that contains 'chicken' for example, and the search will return any recipe you have in that folder that has the word 'chicken' in it. Of course, if you have a color scanner (like the one above), the PDF file will look exactly like the original clipping (preserving any pictures or diagrams, etc).

Cool. I see a new toy in my future!

Thank you with the ordering assistance. However, despite following directions meticulously, it did not work.

The good news is that I emailed the company and they promptly responded and let me know that they would honor the promotional price and adjust my billing accordingly.

Jyoti

I also took advantage of the fatwallet.com (deal prior to this post) for both myself and a friend... definitely a great deal at $.30 an issue for 3 years!

Katie wrote:I should just keep them on the computer....What works for you?

Although I, um, read food magazines for the articles, (cough) I usually don't bother saving the recipes, as my favorites are all under Epicurious.com, which has a "recipe box" feature so you can look up and store all your own personal favorites from Gourmet, Bon Appetit, and several other food magazines (including, of all things, Cooking Light) Most food mags have the recipe box feature, and if you wanted to you could go right from there to copying them into the computer.

I have put a few recipes up on RecipeZaar. I am a much less committed cook than many here, but it seems like a pretty cool site to me. When you enter recipes, it scans the details so that it can compute nutrition information, or help you build a unified shopping list from a complete menu you've assembled (including letting you mark off what you already have at home).

You can use most of it for free; I am not really sure what the paid membership gets you, because I don't have it. And I really only use RecipeZaar a couple of times a year...

I'm not shilling, even though I think I have posted something like this around here on a previous thread.

Ann Fisher wrote:You can currently get Saveur magazine for $3.60 per year--or 40 cents per issue. Not quite as good a deal as when I got it free with my Salon subscription, but still well worth doing. You can use the special for up to three years, so I indeed subscribed for three years for the grand total of $10.80.

Use this link and at check-out enter the savings code "food."

Courtesy of the Hot Deal News at Fatwallet.com.

I put in my order on May 2, but have not yet received any issues. It was for a new subscription, not a renewal. Has anyone who used this deal received their first issue yet?

Thanks!
-gtgirl

Huh, me either. No magazines.

I did not re-up my subscription to Cook's Illustrated. This was an unhappy decision for me to make as I think the content is quite good.

During this past year I have been spammed repeatedly by CI asking me to buy their cookbooks. Spam is easy to ignore, so this alone would not have swayed me, but, still, an annoyance, something the other numerous cooking/food magazines I subscribe to DON'T do.

The final straw, though, was their repeated telemarketing attempts! It is difficult for me to understand why organizations, Cook's Illustrated being only part of the larger whole, do not take me at my word that I will discontinue my support for them if they do not stop calling me.

It's a big disincentive for me to support many a philanthropic organization. Since I am on the various "no-call" lists, they, intially, cannot call me at home. However, once you become a customer, donate, whatever, they are free to nag you at their will at home. WBEZ, WTTW and others have lost my support as a result. Simply put: do not call me at home unless you know me. I don't give three strikes - only two. After the first call, the representative is warned, then the second call results in my discontinuing of whatever support I provide whether it be a subscription or donation.

I realize I might be overly sensitive to this AND that it must work as a number of organizations pursue it. I guess my point is that I wish it wasn't so, and, it's my money in the end.

That being said, none of the Conde Nast publications do this, Gourmet, Bon Appetit and others. Saveur has never felt the need to call me at home, nor Cooking Light. If these magazines can survive without these supremely annoying marketing ploys, why can't Cook's Illustrated, whose editorial content I will sorely miss (and I mean that quite sincerely), flourish without calling their loyal customers at home to sell a cookbook that's already advertised within the pages of the magazine? I simply will not accept being called at home to be hyper-aggressively marketed whatever they're shilling.

If you've made it this far, thanks for listening to my rant and my run-on sentences. Ahem.

Down with telemarketing!

I sympathize with your being bothered. You shouldn't have to tell an organization more than once that you're not interested.

With that being said...

dfawley wrote:That being said, none of the Conde Nast publications do this, Gourmet, Bon Appetit and others. Saveur has never felt the need to call me at home, nor Cooking Light. If these magazines can survive without these supremely annoying marketing ploys, why can't Cook's Illustrated,

Of the magazines you mention, I would guess that 60% of them are devoted to advertising of some kind. Cook's Illustrated, on the other hand, accepts no advertising. This ostensibly keeps them from bowing to corporate interests and sharpens their editorial teeth (which you justifiably praise them for).

What to do when you lack a revenue stream (advertising)? Sell more product.

But, as I said, they don't get anywhere with unwelcome solicitations to current customers. I don't mind as much as you do, but they should respect your wishes.

gastro gnome wrote:What to do when you lack a revenue stream (advertising)? Sell more product.

They also charge a quite hefty subscription price ($36/year for 6 issues, if I recall correctly). I go through the same thought process whenever my renewal comes up: this is too expensive for what I'm getting...but they don't accept advertising, and I like that...it's still only $36...

They've never called me, and I'm not sure why my experience is different from others. But I completely agree with the idea of canceling if an organization doesn't respect your wishes regarding being contacted.

Wow, how did I never know you could get magazine subscriptions on eBay before?? This is great, thanks for sharing, Cathy!