Review of "Gourmet" Magazine

This is the second of four reviews of cooking magazines. Review number one is already up and available. Reviews three and four are coming soon.

Next up under the microscope is "Gourmet" magazine, to which I purchased a subscription early this year for the bargain price of $12 annually. Now, to be fair, "Gourmet" isn't really a cooking magazine. Instead, it bills itself as "the magazine of good living". Fair enough, but the word "gourmet" carries undeniable connotations of eating fine food, and my experience has been that when there is fine food around, there's someone somewhere (likely in the kitchen) cooking it.

Even if we grant them their redefinition of the term "gourmet", however, and include other aspects of "good living" as being part of their purview, the editors of "Gourmet" seem to have lost their way. Rather than being the magazine of fine living, I'd characterize "Gourmet" as the magazine of socially-concious fine living for people who really wish they were living in New York, San Francisco or Hollywood. "Gourmet" does make references to cities and locations in middle America, but somehow they all feel as though they're written from the viewpoint of a tourist, who is visiting but would never want to actually live there. Articles about Manhattan, however? Now, that's home!

The editors apparently take their social responsibilities very seriously. My guess is that they've fallen prey to social guilt--after all, they work for a magazine called "Gourmet", and that's got to eat away at them inside. The word "gourmet" is usually associated with the Rich, and every right-thinking person knows the Rich are the root of all evil. Whole countries and governments do their (uniformly nefarious) bidding! The only acceptable sort of Rich person is one who uses their wealth and influence to better the lot of the downtrodden, the less fortunate, and lately, the environment. The editors of "Gourmet" wish to make it very clear that this last is the type of Rich person they cater to.

To accomplish this, they make certain to always include at least one or two articles that burnish their socially-concious credentials. In this year's October issue, there's a photo feature about artisan farmers who were brought to the "Citymeals on Wheels" benefit by famous chefs (the event, naturally, took place in New York). In the July issue there's a story on soil erosion and how eco-friendly researchers are trying to stop it, plus multiple stories that espouse the benefits of establishments growing their own food. In August's issue we see a story about farms in France that are all-organic or biodynamic. And the September issue is a special Latin-American issue focused on the pleasures of south-of-the-border cuisine and the industry of the immigrants who offer it. Everything from Dominican cuisine in New York City to taco trucks that serve up food right alongside the road across the south and west are covered. I'm afraid I find the timing highly suspect considering the ongoing controversy on illegal immigration and the uniformly complimentary tone of the pieces in the magazine. Am I being hyper-sensitive here? Maybe...and maybe not.

Considered solely as a cooking resource, "Gourmet" actually offers a fair number of recipes in each issue. The quibble I have with them is that most (not all) are complex, requiring more time to cook than a man with a family and a day job can realistically allocate. In addition, many of the ingredients fall into the difficult-to-find-at-the-local-Food-Lion category. For instance, the "Grilled Pork Loin with Quince Sauce" calls for quinces, naturally, plus juniper berries and veal stock. Now, I know I could trek on over to Whole Foods and find some of these (though I've looked unsuccessfully for juniper berries before), or make the longer haul to Balducci's and probably find all of these items, but it's just not convenient. There is a "Quick Kitchen" section that presents recipes that can be quickly prepared (generally in 30 minutes or less), but even there you're likely to run into ingredients like annato oil (never heard of it) or Sriracha sauce (okay, I have some of this in my cupboard, but I bet that's not true of most folks).

The best bet for using "Gourmet" as a realistic cooking resource is probably to save it for special occasions when you don't mind searching out hard-to-find ingredients and spending lots of time in the kitchen. Occasionally you'll find a recipe that is simple enough to cook on a week night, and when I've prepared some of these, they've turned out to be edible, though nothing special. If you happen across a recipe you like, though, it's a really good idea to copy it down somewhere, because that brings us to the other issue with "Gourmet"--the amount of advertising versus actual copy.

Most magazines suffer from this problem these days, I know. However, with "Gourmet", it's bad enough that I was actually surprised when I did the research for this review to find how many recipes each issue contains. They seem to get lost in all the ads. If you don't mark the recipe or copy it, it's liable to disappear among the pictures of beautiful (though no doubt eco-friendly) people smiling at each other, surrounded by advertising copy.

Despite what I said above, I confess--I do actually read "Gourmet" cover to cover. I keep issues in the bathroom off the kitchen, and find that it works well to occupy my mind when spending time in there. Idly flipping through pages, scanning ads and glancing over the odd recipe is just the thing for those quiet moments. Not exactly what the editors hand in mind, I'm sure, but even so, the publication obviously isn't totally without merit.

Okay, I think it's time to summarize. Gourmet is just the magazine for you if all your friends are tenured professors at NYU, you have a housekeeper who cooks most of your meals, and you host occasional dinner parties where guests drink Stags Leap Cabernet and discuss the merits of organic food and the horrors of chemical fertilization. If that doesn't describe you, you'll likely be less enthused. I think I'll stick with the same rating system I used last review...

Gourmet: The Magazine of Good Living

Recipes: 4
Cooking Instruction: 2
Product Evaluation: N/A
Advertising: 8
Socially and Enviromentally Conscious Viewpoint: 8

Comments from probably-not-repeat-subscriber Jake: This definitely isn't the best cooking magazine around. I'm on the fence as to whether to recommend it, though. The price is right, and it makes good bathroom reading material. Plus, it will impress guests if you display it prominently in the restroom. "Imagine what they must read when they're not in here," they'll think!

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."