Ok, I get no cooking magazines at home. I have at one time or another been a subcriber to Gourmet, Cooking Light, and Saveur and when I was a kid my mom got Bon App. These days I sometimes buy Cook’s Ill on the newstand. I recently bought the Rachael Ray mag and an issue of Chow, because I was curious about these new additions to the world of cooking magazines. They’re cool given what they are.

The glossies that are all about lifestyle and fantasy don’t appeal to me. Cook’s is nice because of the illustrations and the lack of ads, but I’m annoyed by the notion that there’s a right way to make something and that they reliably discover it through their quasi-scientific process of recipe development. For one thing, every cook and every kitchen is different and I could follow their instructions to a T and still come out with something less than perfect. A cook should be encouraged to vary and compensate as needed when making a dish to adapt to taste and contingency, not slavishly follow every little tweak the writers come up with. And for another, there are lots of different ways of making any given dish and I’m against the notion that one is the right way. I don’t care for Chris Kimball’s folksy essays at the front of the mag and I really don’t care for their readers’ clever little solutions to non-problems in the kitchen, like muffling a coffee grinder with an oven mitt. For that you need a magazine? One more thing: why is it not a monthly? Can’t they get it out once a month? (This reminds me of the old Jewish joke: “the food there is terrible…and such small portions!”)

Thanks for asking this question. I’ve been saving these thougths for a good occasion to air them.

I do get some of the vegetarian mags now and again (Veggie Life, Vegetarian Times, Vegetarian Journal), although I am not a vegetarian. I usually take a browse through Cook’s Illustrated.

But what do I reliably buy? BBC Good Food and delicious. Must be my Anglophile tendencies (although delicious. is Australian, not British).

It’s pretty much all just food porn to me, though — I read about cooking way more often than I actually use the techniques or recipes I’ve read. I generally just enjoy learning about different ideas and different flavors, and I don’t get too picky about tone or style, as long as it delivers on the food.

Kirk–you identified a great lack in the food magazine world–reliable coverage of Asian cuisines and culinary arts. There is “Flavor and Fortune,” a quarterly magazine that covers Chinese food and culture, but it isn’t what one would think of as a typical food magazine. Other than that–and a magazine I remember seeing once, years ago–that was English language, but from Hong Kong–I can think of no magazines specifically covering Asian cookery.

And, of the more generalized food magazines–very few cover Asian cookery well.

Some of them, like Cook’s Illustrated, do a hideous job and present thier bastardized versions of Chinese or Thai restaurant dishes as “the best recipe.” They are always substituting genuine ingredients with weird American things and seem to think that Americans are afraid to go to Asian markets. (Actually, they seem to bugger up Mexican dishes too–perhaps they should leave the ethnic dishes alone and do what they do best–bland American classics.)

Fitfool–I do appreciate Cook’s Illustrated’s attention to detail, and I think that Cooking Light does a really good job of presenting healthy but flavorful food, which is a great thing to do in the US these days.

MZN–Chris Kimball’s folksy essays work my very last nerve, and I am a country girl. Every now and then I read one and I just want him to get trampled by a cow. That is an uncharitable thought, and I usually regret it, but geez–could he possibly slather on the “salt of the earthiness” in his prose any heavier? (If you cannot tell, I have a love/hate relationship with Cook’s Illustrated Magazine.)

Laura–I only subscribe to one magazine–Fine Cooking. All the others, I peruse at the newsstand, where in recent months I have noticed a plethora of new titles–or at least, new to me titles. I am fond of being able to see the new Aussie and UK magazines and I think that it is interesting to be able to read what cooks elsewhere than the US are up to.

The “lifestyle” part of the “Food & Lifestyle” magazines has always been irksome and boring to me; none of the values presented therein really attract me. A lot of what is presented is what gives the terms “foodie” and “gourmet” the pejorative “snob” connotation that those words have accrued over the years.