You, Sir, Are No Cook's Illustrated!

On Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal ran an article about the new glut of food magazines hitting newsstands, despite a difficult ad market. I wasn't surprised to see the article because on the prior Saturday and on the Monday before, a free copy of a food magazine, Cuisine at Home, arrived in our mailbox. The first copy was addressed to the husband, and the second came in my name.

"Two copies of the same magazine. What's so big about that?" you ask, Gentle Reader?

Well, lemme 'splain a few things, and then I'll answer your question.

The issue was so awkwardly put together and amateurish that we assumed it was a new title, thus my lack of surprise when I saw the article in the WSJ. Imagine my surprise when I bopped over to CaH's Web site and discovered it's been published for four years now! A thousand monkeys working at a thousand computers all loaded with Adobe InDesign could have readily produced something more appealing, more professional than this thing. Then again, since the magazine doesn't include advertising, perhaps the publishers are relying on monkeys to slap the thing together.

Furthermore, the copies the husband and I received aren't even identical. You'd expect that, wouldn't you, Gentle Reader, considering they arrived so close together. But no, my copy has a slightly different content layout: for example, a few recipes are excluded, and a few articles are placed later in the magazine. The visual design of the table of contents pages is even different: One copy has large page numbers to the right of each article or recipe's title, while the other has the page number of each piece of content to the right in a point size that gets lost.

The differences aren't just puzzling, but they beg the question: Who the frig's in charge, is that person aware of these screw-ups and, if so, does that person have to account for the money wasted on running two (at least two) versions of practically the same content?

If the visual appearance of the magazine weren't enough to put me off even considering subscribing, I found something even more disturbing about the publication. Read on, Gentle Reader!

Copycat! Copycat!
Cuisine at Home announces boldly on its front cover, "Absolutely no ads! 100% Cooking!" Hmmm...where have I heard that before?

Oh yeah, that's where--in Cook's Illustrated, a far superior magazine. I base my opinion on several factors:

1. CI gives readers some background about the recipes it tests, the testing the recipe underwent, the successes and failures the testers had--information that puts the reader in the test kitchens right there alongside the fine folks in America's Test Kitchen. CaH introduces its recipes with some rather generic text. Here's the lead-in paragraph for the issue's dinner roll recipe:
   

   If you're apprehensive about exploring the wide world of bread baking, don't worry. It's not as scary as you think, and these rolls prove it--they're so easy and good, it's hard to stop making them!

   Okay, fine--but why should I trust the voice of the magazine? Anyone could write those generic plaudits about any recipe, including one for shit on a shingle. "It's so easy, it's hard to stop making it!" With CI, I get evidence for why I should trust the recipe, why this particular recipe is the one to make over others.
   
2. CI shares tips and tricks from readers. So does CaH--except that many of them I've already read in CI. If I need some quick cash, I can copy down some tips from the issues of CI lying around the house or from the magazine's Web site or from the various books that collect the tips and tricks published over the years, send them to CaH and make $25 a pop. Cha-ching!
   
3. CI and CaH both answer readers' questions. The Q&A page(s) of CI often have questions about obscure ingredients, antique cooking tools and cooking technique dilemmas that, if not immediately useful, are kind of fascinating for the faudies and foodies alike.
   CaH, on the other hand, must have morons for readers. In the issue we received copies of, the questions were basic and, well, obvious: "What are anchovies?"; "A lot of recipes call for parchment paper. What is it?"; and "Why does Swiss cheese have holes?" These are the kinds of questions you'd expect from grade school chefs-in-training, not adults you're trusting with personal kitchen torches.
4. The recipes that appear in CI seem to meet some need of the readers', some desire they have. Perhaps it's a reader's desire to make dishes he or she remembers a grandmother or mother making that were lost to time; to recreate favorite dishes from favorite restaurants but without a lot of fuss; to make the kitchen a center of activity for all members of the family and to perhaps reclaim the connection that can be made by sharing food that's prepared well and--do I dare say it?--with care for the people eating it. The recipes in CaH, on the other hand, are just, well, there. There's nothing terribly special about them, nothing haute or novel or, well, anything. They don't seem to have any kind of logic behind their inclusion in the issue. They're not simplified versions of hard-labor "oldies but goodies," nor are they "healthier" or "lightened up" takes on dishes we know are "sinful."
   
5. While I do give CaH some props (not mad ones) for including the nutritional info for each recipe (CI, I've found, only include this info in the issue focusing on "lightened" recipes), the nutritional info for some of the recipes made me almost lose my eyeballs they goggled so much. Call me a food crank, but I think it's a bit irresponsible in this day and age to promote a recipe, for example, that contains 45 grams of fat, 1.407 mg of sodium and 843 calories (the "Caprese" panini--the Southwestern chicken panini with cilantro pesto and chipotle mayo listed beside it comes in at 55 grams of fat, 899 calories and 1,248 mg of sodium).

I could go on, but I won't bore you, Gentle Reader. While I did find a few recipes from the copies we received, I don't intend to hold onto them (Half-Price Books, here they come!). I sure as hell don't intend to subscribe. I sure as hell wouldn't recommend the magazine to anyone either. If you want an advertising-free cooking magazine, save your pennies and get either a subscription to CooksIllustrated.com or a subscription to CI. Your brain and sense of culinary rectitude will thank you.