“I want to make something really fancy this year for Thanksgiving,” I told my mom on the phone.
“OK, so what are you going to give up making that you usually make so that you have time?” asked Mom practically. “Pecan pie?”
“God no, I only get that once a year.”
“Sweet potato casserole?”
“NO! I love that!”
“Yeast rolls?”
“You want to eat rolls from the store?” I asked her, aghast.
And thus we agreed that we’d both be making the same old, same old for Thanksgiving dinner. Just like Christopher Kimball knew we would. As the Cook’s Illustrated editor and America’s Test Kitchen host affirmed bluntly in an interview with Serious Eats’ Ed Levine:
How we approach Thanksgiving goes to the heart of our philosophy. Today, most people’s repertoire in the kitchen is unlimited. (Once upon a time people knew how to make 100 dishes, at most.) As a result, nobody ever gets good at anything, because they don’t do anything twice. In our magazine, we keep doing the same thing over and over again. So in our Thanksgiving issue we stay focused on the things people want to make: turkey, mashed potatoes, pie crust, biscuits.
Kimball also dissed the yearly T-giving coverage at other food magazines. Those editors, he says, “write for their friends and themselves. They feel compelled to do something different every year because they’re bored. People want mainstream American cooking, and that’s what we give them.”
OK, Mr. Kimball: Guilty as charged. And God knows I love you, even if your monthly editorials in Cook’s are so folksy they might as well be embroidered on a sampler. But really, you went off the rails at this point:
People have to get over their fixation with green vegetables. Green beans are disgusting. Our meal is all shades of white, brown, and orange.
You’ve never had a good green bean casserole, have you?
Cook’s Illustrated published an improved recipe for green bean casserole just last year! Presumably Mr. Kimball has a personal prejudice against green beans, although he does serve an even more controversial green vegetable, brussles sprouts.
I knew there was some reason I have no use for America’s Test Kitchen and Cooks Illustrated.
Seriously, I’m sick of hearing that green vegetables aren’t delicious.
OK, Cook’s Illustrated has its place, but this holier-than-thou anti-snobbery has gone a bit too far in this case…”people have got to get over their fixation with green vegetables”? Why?
Another thing that bothers me is that they are sooo obsessive-compulsive! They have taken all the spontaneity out of cooking. Did you see their latest pie-crust video, wherein you’re supposed to hold part of the flour out of the recipe while mixing butter with the rest, so as to maintain the perfect, and perfectly consistent, ratio of butter-coated flour and free flour every time? If you make pie crust all the time, and do it by hand, you will learn what the right consistency is. They tend not to trust people’s ability to form intuition in the kitchen, and that bothers me.
What crap. I’m not a big fan of the green and leafies, personally, but green beans are probably my absolute favourite veggies.
You skipped the most important part of that Q&A:
I notice there aren’t very many green vegetables on the menu.
That’s right. Our Thanksgiving meal is all about the desserts.
THEN he goes on to say that they’re leaving out green veg. Sheesh. Are you daring to say that green beans are more delicious than pie? :-)
Also, a pie crust coming out right depends on a lot of things, including the relative humidity, so I appreciate that they suggest I keep some of the flour out to add as is appropriate.
You have to appreciate Cooks Illustrated for what it is. It isn’t a place for the newest flavor trend, or to promote the spontaneity of cooking. Rather, it is an incredible resource to become better versed in the building blocks of great cooking.
I have always loved how Cooks Illustrated can help you understand the science and the “why’s” behind great food. How many times have you made dish that looked/sounded incredible in one of the more leading-edge publications, only to have it fall flat. Cooks Illustrated strives to be fool-proof, and there is no doubt that they deliver on this.
What’s interesting is that my green beans with carmelized onions and toasted almonds gets requested every year before any kind of dessert.
I find Kimball a bit stuffy as well and find ATK cumbersome to watch. Their end results are good, but I just find it a bit boring sometimes to hear how they went through 20 recipes to come up with the “right” one.
And Saveur’s Thanksgiving issue is all about the classics. It has some new ideas for dishes, but it really focuses on the old reliable stuff and has a great article on a farm that sticks to tradition.