Outtakes from a conversation with Chris Kimball and RMPBS Cooks Club volunteer Lois Forman at the Rocky Mountain PBS studios, October 21. To request a transcript of the entire interview, please contact Dona Dodson, donadodson@rmpbs.org.
Lois: Have you always loved working with food or was your interest born out of a greater curiosity about the science of cooking?
Christopher Kimball: I always loved cooking, but I was frustrated because nobody could explain it to me. I also have a band I play in occasionally. Music and cooking are identical because unless someone explains to you why you do it, what the theory is, you'll never get good at it.
For years and years, I used to play guitar and take lessons. I finally met a guy who, in an hour, explained it to me. He explained the underlying concept. Once I got the concept then things got much easier.
Same with cooking. I hate just following directions, but when someone says, 'Look, this is a meat filled with a lot of collagen and fat. It's from the chuck; it needs to be cooked at a low temperature because you need to get the collagen to 200 degrees to melt it. And that's how barbeque works.'...That's why I started the magazine.
Lois: There is a trend among some cooking circles towards high tech food techniques - like foams created from thermo whips and nitrous oxide. What do you think of this movement in the cooking world, and do you see any other changes in the food world or trends on the horizon?
Kimball: For the home cook, I think it's incredibly stupid. Who cares? The problem is most people at home don't have a lot of cooking skills. Their equipment's not perfect; they're having trouble even turning out a good hamburger or good roast chicken.
So all of this high tech stuff I think is incredibly interesting and fun, and if you can make a living doing it, I think it would be great. It's like playing. It has zero relevance for the home cook, where the job is to get predictably good food on the table and enjoy cooking. So I don't think the two things are related at all.
As far as trends go, I'm really not that interested in trends. We found over the years that the recipes people want from us - because we survey everything, it changes very slowly. It's the same recipes people wanted ten years ago, twenty years ago, thirty years ago. Cooking at home has not changed that much. Restaurant cooking has changed a lot. So the world of restaurant cooking and high tech and all that stuff has nothing to do with the home.
In the home, of the top ten recipes in America, the first one is green bean casserole – out of 5000 recipes that were surveyed. That tells you something. And the other two are tomato sauces.
Our role is only to help people cook the kind of food they really cook...I'm interested in if they make mashed potatoes, I'd like them to be good. So, I think that's where the food world has missed the boat. They're not really addressing the concerns of the typical home cook whose concerns are totally different than what you're going to read about in magazines.
Lois: The illustrator Robert Papp's Cook's Illustrated covers are always a treat to see. Most food magazines are created by professional food designers and photographers. Why did you decide to go in a different direction? And also the inside of the magazine is so different with the drawings.
Kimball: In 1992, when I was working on the redesign of the magazine to re-launch it in 1993, I'd been through a decade of publishing, competing against Cuisine and Bon Appetite, Gourmet and so forth, so my goal was to design a magazine for me. Let's just do one thing. We're going to talk about cooking, which meant that I wanted the whole thing to feel totally different than anything else that was out there. Because it was different.
So I looked at designs. Color photographs of food looks [the same]. There's no way you could signal to them, to the buyer: Hey, look, you may like us or hate us, but we are different.
The old cookbooks had drawings on the cover, too, for a long time. So we decided to go back to the paintings and design a cover that I thought I liked. It was classic and also said, 'Look, we're not Food & Wine, Bon Appetite, Gourmet - we're something different, take a look at us.' And I think those paintings actually reflect the editorial voice of the magazine. It's spare, it's not commercial at all; it's straightforward, there's an elegance to it – the whole magazine. My designer is brilliant. It's simple but it's complicated, actually. The fewer things you have to work with the harder it is.
Lois: I think that the unique aspect of your magazines creates a different experience.
Kimball: That's what I like. It's also done on purpose...I think anybody that's going to be successful in the next ten years is going to have to have a unique brand. For example, public television now has been going through this exact discussion for the last ten years. Which is: What is the public television brand? The public television brand in the '60's and '70's was very clear.
Today, with all the competition out there, it's still clear. I think it's the best brand. I think it's the most interesting and most powerful brand in the world, at least in America. But you have the same problems, the same concerns, the same questions I do about my brand, which is: How do you keep that brand distinct going forward?
...You have to do the same thing I have to do, which is make sure that what you're offering is unique and it's clear to people why it's unique...You're going to have to think long and hard about why you offer something unique because the consumers are a lot smarter than they were ten years ago.
Lois: You and the others on your two television shows seem to have such a great time together. What's it like behind-the-scenes?
Kimball: Oh, we hate each other. It's exactly the same off-camera that it is on camera. It's no different.
Jack's been with me for 21 years, Bridget and Julia more than 10 years, and Adam. Adam is freelancing at this point, actually. But it's exactly the same thing. We really get along well.
Bridget is in charge of Cook's Country, Julia's in charge of the book department, Jack is my editorial director of the whole company. Everybody in the editorial section reports to Jack. So it's really the same thing.
I think the bonding experience is we've all been through leaner times when we were just getting started. We believed in the process – the process has gotten us to where we are today and we've been doing it a long, long, long time together. In the early days, we had our differences and stuff, but that's now evened out. I didn't used to look forward to my show because it was so much work. I didn't know what I was doing. I would say in the last three or four years, I really look forward to May when we're doing the show. It's fun!
And Bridget is hysterically funny. Unfortunately, we have to edit out a lot of her stuff. She's really a piece of work. And Julia's great. And, you know, it's the same cameramen who have been there for ten years, the same director. A few people change year to year, but it's basically the same crew, same make-up artists. We do the other show now, too, so they're also in Vermont and that's like summer camp. I ride motorcycles with a couple guys. It's great! It's very much a family thing.
I think the other thing is that the business is so large now, with one hundred employees, that television gets us back to the small group of people that started and so it's more intimate. We're actually spending time together...It's an opportunity to spend time with the people and also the cooks in the back kitchen. It's a more intimate time of the year. It's less about business and more about cooking. One hundred employees, $7,000,000 [in] salaries a year. It's a big business now.
Lois: And the very last question – clip-on or do you tie your own?
Kimball: I tie my own! You can't wear a bow tie that's a clip-on. Clip-on! Oy!
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