LIT Cooks

[Madame Manga]

PS - Madame Manga, got to agree on Cook's Illustrated. The other one I subscribe to and which is a bit broader in scope is Fine Cooking. The great thing about these two mags is that they are dedicated solely to cooking. Nothing on restaurants, resorts or chef biographies/shameless promotions.

There are few things I despise more in a cooking magazine than lots of flossy photos of people I don't know and places I will never visit. When I read about a fancy meal served on antique china in a million-dollar house in some fashionable district and picked at by social X-rays in designer wear perching their etiolated asses on the Louis XV furniture, I just can't identify. It is unlikely that I will ever try to make Tiny Stone-Ground White Cornmeal Crust Individual Appetizer Pizzas with Black Truffle Oil, Wild Ramps and Pâté de Fois Gras. And I don't need to in order to "cook well".

It seems that fewer and fewer people learn to cook these days, and I can't help but wonder if magazines like this have raised the bar so high that prospective cooks get entirely the wrong idea. I read a monumentally stupid article in the Wall Street Journal last year in which the young female reporter "compared" the price of eating out with the price of cooking at home. Not only did she attempt to exactly duplicate restaurant dishes--pecan-crusted halibut, IIRC--but when she was obliged to buy a $20 bottle of extra-virgin olive oil for the salad dressing, she figured in the cost of the *entire* bottle when adding up the price of her home-cooked meal.

Of course, when she also factored in the added trouble and time involved in doing fancy-schmancy dishes (she couldn't just broil her halibut and serve it with a quick fresh salsa?) she came to the inevitable and wholly erroneous conclusion that it's cheaper to eat out all the time! In common with a lot of people (such as her editor) apparently this person does not even know the *definition* of the term "home cooking".

MM

 

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