A Diy Editor Who Did It Himself

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, Nov 1, 2003

Byline: Ken Gordon

Most food magazines, says Chris Kimball - editor, publisher, and bow-tie enthusiast - are not about food. Most are really about lifestyle. That was apparent almost from the time of his 1980 launch of Cook's Magazine, a bastion of high-quality Epicurean journalism. "Food magazines don't have much food advertising; they have lifestyle advertisers," he says. "So, you can't really talk about cooking very much because your advertisers don't want you to, because they don't feel that's synergistic with their product."

For more than a decade, Kimball functioned as editorial director of Cook's ("I didn't feel confident enough as a cook to be editor," he explains), but was never satisfied with the product. His idea? To take a serious, investigative approach to food and "pull back the curtain on the process of why a recipe works and why it doesn't." Kimball wanted his pub to hunt for - and locate - the perfect mushroom risotto, the foolproof lemon meringue pie.

By 1992, Kimball's frustration had, figuratively speaking, boiled over, and he decided to rethink his publishing recipe. He cut out all the advertising and the lifestyle elements that went along with them, focused exclusively on culinary experimentation, and named the resulting concoction Cook's Illustrated. He also made an important staffing decision: "I decided I was going to be editor and do it my way. And it might fail, but at least I thought that was interesting."

Kimball wasn't the only one who thought it was interesting. Cook's, which is published bimonthly out of Brookline, Massachusetts, and has a cover price of $5.95, is an extremely well-targeted niche magazine. Kimball reports that he has about 600,000 readers, including 85,000 newsstand customers.

Kimball gets a little testy when others try to appropriate his formula. He calls August Home Publishing Company's Cuisine at Home "a direct rip-off of what we're doing: 32 pages, no advertising" and says that Taunton Press's Fine Cooking "launched after they saw what we did with Cook's.

But Kimball professes to be unworried about the competition - whose circulation is slightly more than a third of his. And the Cook's audience is very loyal, which Kimball attributes to the magazine's tone: skeptical of conventional culinary wisdom and empathic to home cooks. Says Kimball: "Instead of the expert saying, 'Here is the perfect recipe,' we say, 'You know, we tried a bunch of recipes - they all really sucked. And we're pissed off.'" Readers also trust Cook's because of its thorough investigations of recipes and cooking products (without advertisers, the magazine is free to praise and pan cooking products as it chooses). In addition, there are Kimball's folksy front-of-the-book editorials, which do for Vermont what E. B. White once did for Maine.

Cooks aren't the only ones who dig Cook's. Magazine people eat it up as well. Says Samir Husni, professor of magazine journalism at the University of Mississippi: "I love that little magazine and the whole concept Chris has used to create a niche for himself in this very, very competitive market." And Colman Andrews, editor-in-chief of Saveur and Kimball's pal, says, "the fact that he has managed to have a commercially viable magazine with no advertising is a very attractive idea. I don't think it's easy to do. I think he figured out how to do it because he already had a following."

There is more to the formula, however, than providing that missing je ne sais quoi for the ambitious amateur. In January 2001, Kimball took Cook's to the small screen, launching - and hosting - a PBS show called America's Test Kitchen. Today roughly 2.2 million people watch each episode. (Note: Kimball doesn't earn any money directly from ATK. The only cash involved here flows directly from the underwriters to the show's production company, A La Carte Communications, and this just covers filming and distribution costs.) Then there are his Web sites, which began with slightly more than 9,500 registered members in 2001 and today boast in excess of 35,000. Boston Common Press, Kimball's book-publishing division, has put out more than 40 cookbooks. The magazine, the Web sites, and books all feed into one another. But Cook's is the flagship, accounting for about half of the revenue.

But the real question about Kimball isn't how he created such a successful food-publishing empire but how he manages to stay so skinny. The answer is simple: He avoids the test kitchen. "If I walk in, you know, five people will say, 'Could you just taste this?'" he says. "I can't taste a little bit; some people are very good, they can taste just a taste, I gotta keep going back. I taste, I taste, I taste. I end up eating 1,000 calories of stuff. It makes you sick after a while."