At the core of C.I.’s M.O. are two intrepid observations Kimball has made about the innermost psychology of home cooks. Namely that they 1) are haunted by a fear of humiliation, and 2) will not follow a recipe to the letter, believing that slavishly following directions is an implicit admission that you cannot cook. (When Kimball laid this out for me, I shuddered with recognition.) What the magazine essentially offers its readers is a bargain: if they agree to follow the recipes as written, their cooking will succeed and they will be recognized by family and friends as competent or even expert in the kitchen. To this end, every 32-page issue of the magazine presents a handful of recipes that have been made “bulletproof,” to use a Kimballism, i.e., worried into technical infallibility after weeks of testing so exacting as to bring an average home cook to the brink of neurasthenia. The bargain further holds that the peppercorn-crusted filet of beef or butterscotch-cream pie will turn out not only in C.I.’s professional kitchen, with its All-Clad pans and DCS ranges, but also on a lowly electric four-top, using a dull knife and a $20 nonstick skillet.
The bargain’s appeal is, at root, visceral. To cook well at home is to begin to master the quotidian, to wrest a measure of control over the entropy of day-to-day living. I began reading the magazine as a fearful, ungainly cook several years ago, and I remember the inordinate pride I took in putting on the table, for the first time, a basic but creditable Thanksgiving dinner, made entirely with C.I. recipes. My experience, I have since learned, is actually fairly common. Editor after editor at C.I. recounts stories of readers, a surprising number of whom turn out be white, middle-aged men, who’ve approached them at public events to offer thanks for “teaching me how to cook,” voices froggy with emotion. Kimball views his bond with home cooks as a solemn responsibility. These days, online surveys allow the magazine’s editors to communicate with readers in minutes; no story idea gets into the running unless it surveys well, and no tested recipe is complete unless at least 80 percent of those who tried it at home — thousands of uncompensated volunteers known as Friends of Cook’s — say they would make it again.
From the start, readers latched onto Kimball’s strange magazine with crablike tenacity. Today, roughly three-quarters of subscribers renew, a rate that’s the envy of publishing. In 2007, they signed up their one millionth subscriber, and over the years Kimball has supersized his idea into a franchise that includes 12 seasons of “America’s Test Kitchen,” the most-watched cooking show on public television; a second magazine, Cook’s Country (with its attendant show); reams of special issues and books; a battery of paid Web sites; a radio program; and even an online cooking school, and he has done it without discounting subscriptions or giving anything away or taking on a single advertiser.
C.I.’s headlines, like Kimball himself, don’t truck in false modesty. Invariably the recipes are “better” or “best,” never just worthwhile variations, and their preparation tends to be “easy” or at least “easier,” and even “American classics” don’t make it into print unless they’ve been “improved.” Kimball’s bravado relies on a set of convictions that provoke much low-frequency grumbling among competitors. “Most cookbook authors don’t care what happens to their recipe when it enters your home,” Kimball insists at Le Bernardin. In bighearted moods, he describes the C.I. approach as “why bad things happen to good recipes.” The corollary is his belief that empirically rigorous testing always leads to the best preparation, just as blind tastings — another staple of Kimball’s products — will always winnow out the best brand of crunchy peanut butter or microwave popcorn. To the relativists — those Pollyannas who insist that cooking is as much an art as a science and that a recipe’s effectiveness depends mostly on what a particular cook enjoys eating — Kimball has this to offer: “Cooking isn’t creative, and it isn’t easy. It’s serious, and it’s hard to do well, just as everything worth doing is damn hard.” With this he takes off his spectacles and rubs his eyes, looking like a riled-up border-town newspaperman in a Western, a simile he would no doubt enjoy.
by Alex Halberstadt, NY Times | Read more:
Photograph by Ryan Pfluger
