Review of "Cooking Pleasures"

I'm new to this blogging thing, and I'm still trying to figure out exactly how to fit the time committment and effort associated with it into my daily life. It's also a little difficult to judge in advance how much I want to say about a topic. I say all this as a preface to letting you know that after two days of working on tackling the reviews of cooking publications topic, I've succeeded in completing a single review. This has led me to conclude that it would be far wiser to post my reviews as a series of four installments, rather than one gi-normous post.

Therefore, without further ado, here is the first of four reviews of cooking publications I subscribe (or have been given gift subscriptions) to. Read on, and in the meantime, I'll be working on review number two. Reviews three and four will follow shortly thereafter.

There's a clear heirarchy, in my opinion, to the food-related magazines I receive. Let's start at the bottom and work our way up, shall we? That means I'm going to begin with "Cooking Pleasures", a bi-monthly publication put out by Cooking Club of America.

The Cooking Club of America is, in my opinion, the culinary equivalent of an infomercial. "Cooking Pleasures" is the primary benefit you get if you join the Cooking Club of America (hereafter referred to as CCA), with secondary benefits including things like "opportunities" to try (and then buy, unless you return them) products, the "opportunity" to obtain a CCA-sponsored credit card, discount "opportunities" (there's that word again), and a couple other things that amount to more ways for the CCA to sell things to you. There are a fair number of recipes included in each issue, and I have to confess that the few recipes I've actually made have turned out okay. There are also some articles on how to cook, and though they are definitely the "lite" version of cooking techniques I've seen better described elsewhere, nonetheless, they're better than nothing. My issue with the publication is that the entire enterprise seems geared towards selling products and advertising, and recipes (along with contests in which merchandise is given away) are simply the lure they use to attract potential customers. It's probably a pretty smart business model--my guess is that they sell memberships to CCA (from year-long to "life" memberships, which basically amount to subscribing to Cooking Pleasures for life), influence members to purchase products advertised in their magazines, and then charge advertisers for ads and product endorsements.

Now, you could argue that almost every magazine is geared towards selling products--that's how they attract advertising revenue. But again, consider the metaphor I used above. An infomercial is essentially a filmed sales pitch--it's targeted directly at getting you to buy the product it depicts. A "regular" television show is about something else--not a product that it's trying to sell. And the commercials that are interspersed throughout the show are basically along for the ride, getting seen incidentally by viewers who are waiting for the program to begin again. "Cooking Pleasures" certainly has the standard magazine ads--a boatload of them. But in addition, there's a subtle feeling that some of the "articles" are a sales pitch as well.

To get a good sense for what "Cooking Pleasures" is like, consider their version of the product evaluation. Suppose there's a manufacturer out there that makes a coffee maker. "Cooking Pleasures" will ship these coffee makers off to an undisclosed number of their members that volunteer to test them (remember that try before you buy "benefit" I mentioned above?), who then send in ratings that will be tabulated and printed in the magazine. When I first received my gift membership a year or two ago, the results would be published like this:

Mr. Drippy Coffee Maker

Member Ratings
- Convenience: 8.4
- Ease of Use: 7.6
- Ability to Avoid Getting Grounds in the Finished Coffee: 8.1

Member Edna Snortly says: "That Mr. Drippy Coffee Maker heated up in a jiffy, made me a Grande Caramel Latte, and spurted whip cream out the top until I whacked the stop button!"

Okay, let's think about this evaluation. Note that "Cooking Pleasures" gives no sample sizes, so you can't tell if the results are based on one or one hundred responses. They give no context to the scale--is a 7.6 good for ease of use? Or do other coffee makers rate an 8.5? And there's no objective criteria on how to rate a product. What does the product need to to do score a convenience of 10? How about a convenience of 1? And naturally there's no consideration on whether their sample of members contained any sort of bias, such as lack of experience using coffee makers, or a general feeling that positive quotes would be more likely to be published in the magazine. If you'd like a comparison as to the right way to do product evaluations, see my comments on Cook's Illustrated (coming soon in a future post).

Apparently, however, this standard was too exacting for some of the manufacturers that sponsor this activity, as lately "Cooking Pleasures" has changed the format for the product evaluations. Now they appear like this:

Handy John's Indoor Charcoal Grill and Smoker

Top ratings:
- Appearance
- Ease of Use
- Sets Off Smoke Alarms

Comments from Life Member Ralph "One Banana" Beauchamp: "It wasn't as big of a fire hazard as I thought. Didn't even have to dial 911."

Note that now we don't even have an idea of where the ratings fall on a scale of 1-10. For all we know, the Handy John's appearance was a 3, but all the other ratings were worse!

So, based on approximately a two-year sample, and evaluated subjectively by a single reviewer (me), here are the overall ratings for "Cooking Pleasures", employing their own rating display methodology:


Cooking Pleasures

Recipes: 6
Cooking Instruction: 5
Product Evaluations: 1
Sales Pitch: 10

Comments from Soon-to-be-ex member Jake: "Unless you tune into the Informercial channel on a regular basis, or somehow find yourself stranded on a desert island with nothing else to help you prepare meals over the campfire, I'd recommend choosing another magazine for your culinary reading."