Cook's Country Magazine

Even though I have not been cooking as much lately, I still maintain my subscription to Cook's Illustrated, a charming if anachronistic bi-monthly dedicated to bringing gourmet cooking to the everyman's kitchen. All illustrations and photos in that magazine are in black-and-white, but the magazine is completely free of advertisements and has a high standard of quality control with respect to recipe content, instruction, and product evaluation (both food and equipment.)

Cook's Country is a new magazine from the same publisher. Ostensibly the magazine is dedicated to "country-style" cooking, and the trial issue I received certainly bears that out. The July 2006 issue (not the one in the picture) features recipes for burgers, ribs, potato salad, pies, and fried fish, just to name a few. Actually, in terms of content, I found little difference between Cook's Country and it's sister magazine. The basic format is for the test cooks at the magazine to take some recipe, familiar or exotic, and try several approaches to duplicating it. They select their favorite on the basis of the ease of production and quality of the results. Often it's a compromise and they say as much. In addition to the recipe, they provide details about how the recipe can go wrong, why, and how to fix it, making their articles more useful than some of the other cooking magazines you could choose. There are also short product reviews and cooking tips (some from professional chefs and others from readers.)

The first difference you notice about Cook's Country is that, unlike Cook's Illustrated, the whole thing is in color. It's a much glossier publication, but is still ad-free. I had learned not to miss the color in CI, but everything here is so vibrant I just want to rush over and start cooking immediately. The magazine also features a punch out, quick cooking "centerfold" where key recipes are printed on cards that can be stored separately in a recipe file. These recipes are not written with the same level of detail as the feature articles, but they represent simple, fast dishes that should be fairly foolproof. (This fool hasn't tried any of them yet, though.) Also, the magazine seems to rely more on reader input than CI. One very nice feature is a letters column, where readers can write in with descriptions of dishes and ask for recipes.

According to the web, Cook's Country will be getting a companion TV show on PBS, similar to the relationship between Cook's Illustrated and "America's Test Kitchen." I hope that our PBS affiliate will pick it up, because I greatly enjoyed "ATK" for the short time it was carried locally. I like the new magazine, and I think it makes a lot of improvements to the old, traditional format of Cook's Illustrated. However, I haven't decided to subscribe or not. I am worried about overlap between the two titles. If they can maintain good quality control, and keep the two magazines distinct, I would gladly look forward to adding a new quality cooking magazine on the alternating months when I don't have a new Cook's Illustrated to read.