The Good: No advertisements, Nice photography?
The Bad: Utterly impractical recipes, No issue-to-issue organization.
The Bottom Line: Another magazine that offers nothing that cannot be found easily on the world wide web, Cuisine At Home is an outdated, pointless magazine!
I suspect that the magazines that suffer most under my pen these days are ones which seem most unnecessary in the changing world of the internet, where information may often be found free, are cooking magazines. After all, there are scores of reputable free websites now which offer cooking lessons, demonstrations, answer questions and provide recipes. Those websites make Cuisine At Home and magazines like it utterly obsolete. Add to that, I've never understood the market which believes they must have these new recipes now (monthly, bimonthly) instead of waiting for an annual cookbook. After perusing through several issues at my local library, Cuisine At Home strikes me as an entirely unnecessary magazine.
Published every two months, Cuisine At Home Magazine is commonly found in good supermarket check-out aisles and it is the standard magazine size, though it has holes for a three ring binder on the binding. Cuisine At Home is a glossy, full-color magazine with an average of 50 pages per issue. Cuisine At Home Magazine has no advertisements, which gives it more of a cookbook look and feel than a magazine one. However, that one positive aspect does not make the magazine look or feel any more vital.
Inside the magazine are recipes and the average issue contains about fifteen recipes and each and every recipe features a full-color picture of how the food is supposed to look when it is done, as well as pictures of the ingredients at key steps. What is nice about the magazine is most of the recipes are actually presented in a larger typeface and having so few pages makes it easy to prop up or fold over while one is actually in the kitchen cooking. As a result, most of the magazine's recipes are physically easy-to-read.
However, the recipes are clearly intended for people who know what they are doing in the kitchen. Each recipe is laid out with the traditional ingredient list, a notation of what types of mixing and cooking dishes are needed, and then the steps needed to make the ingredients into a sumptuous dish. As a result, terms like parboiling and blanching are not described in detail for some of the recipes and readers are supposed to know what they are (fortunately, growing up with a chef for a father, I do).
As well as cooks who know their way around the kitchen, Cuisine At Home Magazine is clearly intended for people who have a lower-middle class or above income. Virtually all of the recipes I read about used obscure ingredients or cooking methods and seemed more conceptually fancy than actually edible. So, for example, a recent issue had the recipe for Oxnard Strawberry Pizza On Shortbread Crust, which looked more like a novelty food than something most cooks would love to eat.
Finally, Cuisine At Home does have about six pages each month with tips from readers, hints on how to cook and questions answered from professional chefs at the magazine. However, all of these may easily be found on-line or in well-established cookbooks. Cuisine At Home seems to be trading on the status of making gourmet food at home, but it is a lot of space taken up for little content, none of which is truly unique (I, for example, found three sites with similar Strawberry Pizza recipes online). Anyone with an internet connection can save the paper and get exactly what they need without Cuisine At Home.
For other magazines reviewed by me, please check out my take on Entertainment Weekly by clicking here!
4/10
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© 2010 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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