FAREWELL TO COOK'S MAGAZINE

Dear Cook’s Magazine,

The time has come for us to part.  I know, we’ve been together a long time and I have been loyal to you.  I never subscribed to some other cooking magazines – not that there is another like you – and rarely went to the internet for recipes.  Well, a few times, but not many.  I have renewed and renewed and renewed – even when you came up with that Country Cooking spin off that might have been put out by pre-diabetic Paula Deen so much butter did each recipe contain (I counted 14 tablespoons in one.  The dairy industry must have loved it.)  Still, my loyalty did not waver.

But, over time, doubts have crept in.  These doubts began as tiny seeds (to use a kind of organic, victory garden metaphor) that grew and grew.  What are they?

Grilling.  A disproportionately large number of your recipes – at least two entire issues per year – are devoted to grilling, which is something most people do in their backyards. 

I live in a New York City apartment smaller, I’m sure, than the Cook’s test kitchens.  My outdoor space consists of a rickety fire balcony on the fourth floor where I am not going to install a Weber.  I don’t care about grilling.  Being a non-griller presented with a grilling magazine is like going on a date to a skating rink without skates.  Or being on a baseball team but sitting out the game on the bench.  I’m sure I can come up with more sports metaphors, given time.  But the fact is I wouldn’t go to a skating rink without skates, why would I want to read a magazine devoted to grilling when I don’t have a grill?

Next, equipment.  One recipe said a food mill was good for a particular job (I could be wrong, but I believe the job was making Julia Child’s leak and potato soup) but you weren’t recommending it because few people have such an esoteric and old fashioned piece of equipment as a food mill.  Something that, even though I am not 150 years old, I happen to have.  What you apparently believe all people DO have is food processors.  Also microwaves.  And, that sign of an amateur in the kitchen, a garlic press.

 Possibly most people do have food processors and microwaves and even garlic presses.  I have a garlic press although I never used it and long ago consigned it to service as a PlayDo accessory for my daughter.  Possibly, the number of people who don’t possess food processors and microwaves and let’s not forget heavy-duty mixers with dough hooks is so miniscule, we’re not worth worrying about.  Clearly, we’re not worth translating any recipe for. 

That’s fine.  I can translate recipes myself.  I know how to melt chocolate on top of a pan of simmering water rather than in the microwave I do not have, and how to chop vegetables using that quaint, old fashioned invention the knife rather than the food processor I also do not have, and I will for a dish I’m interested in making.  But that brings me to my next and biggest problem, Cooks.  I don’t want to make any of your food.

The recipes always have too many steps.  They also always include ingredients I will never use.  I don’t want to make my sauces silky by using gelatin.  I know the cooks in Cooks-landia are very proud of having figured out how gelatin mimics the whatever-it-is in slow cooked meat sauces that comes off the bones and thickens the sauce naturally, but gelatin will never make its way into my sauce.  I’m not using liquid smoke either.  And I’m never going to use cream to emulsify a pasta sauce.

This is how you emulsify pasta sauces, Cooks, the ones that just have oil and parmesan cheese, for example.  Or the lemon sauce you tried to duplicate recently.  You make the sauce quickly in a pan (quick is its signature), you add the pasta and some of the pasta cooking water, then you turn the pasta over and over in the sauce.  Over and over.  Add a little more pasta water if it’s not the right consistency.  Turn the heat up if there’s too much liquid.  Putting cream in a non-cream sauce – in a sauce whose reason for being is that it is not a cream sauce –  makes you look lame.

The truth is, in all the years I’ve been reading Cooks I’ve made maybe four  recipes.  Two of the four were awful.  The pasta primavera – the one where you toast the pasta then cook it in vegetable broth – that was just weird.  The only recipes I’ve kept were the ones for Christmas cookies, because I used to do an annual cookie bake when my daughter was young and needed cookies sturdy enough to stand up to the decorating torture she and her friends put them through.  (I didn’t eat them.  Nobody ate them.)  And the recipe for streusel topping for apple crisp.

The recipe is genius – simple, but nobody else thought of it: you pre-bake the streusel topping before you put it on the crisp.  That way the topping doesn’t get soggy.  It’s so good, I’m happy I’m the one making it so I can eat it right out of the oven before I put it on top of the crisp, like granola.  Hats off to you for that one, Cooks.  I liked that no-knead bread recipe too, though I never made it as I’m afraid of yeast.  Which is my issue, not yours.

But what you bring to the table, well, it just isn’t enough.

For years, I’ve been waiting for you to come up with food I really want to make.  I’ve been overlooking the ingredients that make me roll my eyes; the inane tips people send in and you print; the ridiculous food tastings you do where your tasters invariably like the version of the-thing-being-tested that has chemical additives the best. 

I know it’s not just you.  I have Magazine Rage.  Magazines make me angry.  Most of them are meant for entitled rich people who have a spare $4,000 to spend on a pair of shoes.  I had to wait in the doctor’s office for a long time the other day, a magazine and a half’s worth of time and I saw that same pair of $4,000 shoes in both magazines.  “Editorial content” is just advertising.  That makes me mad.

Cooks, I didn’t think you were like that.  You don’t run ads.  You’re supposedly for everyone equally, us regular people who just like to cook.  But you have a demographic even if you won’t admit it.  Backyard owning, food processor using, microwave equipped grill enthusiasts with compromised emulsification skills. 

Of whom I am not one.

So farewell Cooks.  Thanks for the memories.  Now, I have to go start dinner.