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chris kimball ’73
columbia college today
Majoring in primitive art, Kimball recalls having excellent art
history professors and cites Professor Albert Goldman’s classes as
being particularly memorable, but he acknowledges that he probably
learned as much outside the classroom as inside. During his
undergraduate years, Kimball drove a cab on weekends and remembers
sitting on the roof of the student center during a protest,
talking a fellow protester out of throwing a Molotov cocktail.
After a couple of jobs in publishing and marketing, Kimball,
who had always had an interest in cooking, began taking cooking
classes. Frustrated with the lack of answers about why some recipes
worked and others failed, Kimball decided to start his own
cooking magazine in 1980 and raised $100,000 from friends and
family to get it going.
“The other food magazines weren’t really about food,” he says.
“They were about restaurants and lifestyle.” This first magazine, titled
Cook’s, already bore Kimball’s soon-to-be signature emphasis on cooking.
Eventually, the magazine was sold and operated by different media
companies before being closed down by Condé Nast in 1990.
In 1993, Kimball decided to try again, and this time, after buying
back the name Cook’s, he ditched the advertisers as well as
any lifestyle and travel articles requested by said advertisers. The
result was Cook’s Illustrated, an advertising-free publication that is
a cross between Consumer Reports and a high-end neighborhood
recipe pamphlet. The magazine only has color on the cover; inside,
unfussy black-and-white photos are augmented with precise
line drawings.
In 2000, Kimball started America’s Test Kitchen, now airing its 10th
season on PBS. “It’s no secret that in the food world, you need to be
on TV,” says Kimball. “If you’re not, it’s very difficult.” Unlike traditional
cooking shows, which are built around the personality of the
chef-host (think Julia Child), America’s Test Kitchen is much closer to
a classroom. Kimball rarely, if ever, cooks on the show, leaving that
to the test kitchen staff. He acts in his host role as a stand-in for the
viewer, asking the reasoning behind each ingredient and technique.
His friend and fellow PBS cooking show host, Lidia Bastianich,
host of Lidia’s Italy, is respectful of Kimball and his team’s zeal for
details. “I think they are very practical, and they take the maybes out
of the recipes. It’s a clean, intelligent approach,” she says. Bastianich
says that her show emphasizes “the freedom of cooking” and a belief
that “cooking is not a science,” taking a more relaxed approach
that is the opposite of Kimball’s philosophy; for him, cooking is a
science. Nonetheless, Bastianich suggests that perhaps her show has
gently changed Kimball’s approach to television, saying, “We have
influenced each other. He hasn’t admitted to my influence, but perhaps
now he brings a little more passion to the show.”
The recipes for Kimball’s magazines and the television shows all
go through a rigorous testing process. First, readers are surveyed
about which recipes they want to see. Next, the test kitchen tries out
multiple versions of each recipe, with a working recipe being tested
as many as 50 or 100 times. Then the recipe is sent to a few thousand
volunteer testers, with a few hundred of them trying it within a week
and answering a questionnaire. “Unless 80 percent of the people say
that they will make it again, we go back and fix it,” Kimball says.
“We have to go back and make it simpler, make it tastier.”
The featured recipes are rarely fancy; the emphasis is always
on simple, easy-to-find ingredients transformed into tasty, approachable
food. Kimball believes that everyone can agree on the
best version of a dish. “This whole idea of taste being relative
— when it comes to basic American cooking — is just not true. I
mean, there are good mashed potatoes and bad mashed potatoes,
and it’s not that hard to tell the difference,” he says.
The resulting recipes are impressive. Cook’s Illustrated’s recipe
for pie dough, which uses vodka to create a flaky crust, is hailed
by Kimball as one of the magazine’s best discoveries and immediately
became a classic among bakers.
Of course, with access to so many test kitchens and sample
recipes, the question becomes whether Kimball cooks at home.
The short answer, at least during the week, is no. That task falls to
his wife, whom Kimball met when she was working at a summer
job at a marketing seminar company, where Kimball also worked.
Adrienne laughs when recalling how Kimball, who used to have
to walk by her cubicle when leaving, would never say goodbye
until one evening when she yelled out “Good night, Chris!” Adrienne,
who has been married to Kimball since 1987, worked on the
business side of Cook’s before leaving to take care of the family’s
farm in Vermont, their children and their daily lives in Boston.
Adrienne, as the person in charge of Kimball family
meals, did have a wandering eye, recipe-wise,
for a while. “For years, Adrienne cooked out of
Bon Appétit, and I used to get really mad,” says
Kimball. “She used to just ignore me, and then I
shut up for about three years, and slowly I realized
she finally had migrated to our stuff, because, I hope, she
found our stuff more reliable.” Adrienne, who now cooks exclusively
from her husband’s magazines and books, agrees, saying,
“The bottom is line is that the Cook’s Illustrated recipes work. The
other ones, while they may have looked good on paper, were not
consistently working. Ours just ended up being better.”
Compared to the other cooking magazines, which are supported
by advertising, a subscription to Cook’s Illustrated is expensive,
$24.95 for six issues. After Kimball placed a notice in The New
York Times announcing Cook’s Illustrated’s return, 1,500 subscribers,
many of them former Cook’s readers, immediately signed up,
and today, almost two decades later, the magazine has a million
subscribers, a number on par with glossies such as Bon Appétit
and significantly higher than competitor Saveur, which has about
270,000 paid subscribers. Cooksillustrated.com is unusual in that
none of its content is free, even with a subscription to the magazine.
A year’s subscription to the website costs $34.95.
In a media world that is rapidly changing and during a recession
where many publications’ advertising revenue has shrunk dramatically,
Kimball also stands out because his magazines and website all
are free of advertising, supported only by subscription fees. “Considering
what a traditional niche Chris is in, he’s been a real innovator,
and his models have implications that go beyond his amazing
franchise,” says David Carr, media critic for The New York Times.
Kimball is adamant about the need for consumers to pay for
content and to pay for the expertise of well-trained editors and
test cooks who develop recipes for the show and magazine. “In
terms of recipe selection, having a lot of recipes is not helpful;
having recipes that work is,” he says. “You want someone to
stand in between the raw data and the consumer and give the
consumer something that’s helpful.”
And with his gimlet eye, finicky palate and multimedia reach,
Kimball wants his recipes to be the ultimate stand-in between the
ingredients and the home cook. America’s Test Kitchen may be a
democracy of recipe testers, but one very determined ruler stands
above it all.
To watch highlights of Chris Kimball ’73 on America’s Test Kitchen,
go to www.college.columbia.edu/cct.
Claire Lui ’00 is a freelance writer and editor. Her articles have appeared
in Print, American Heritage and other magazines and websites.
july/august 2010
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