You Don’t Know a Real Cooking Tip Until You’ve Read These

Cook’s Illustrated’s Quick Tips is, to my mind, the best front-of-book magazine column in existence. Readers write in not with recipes to recommend, or even ingredients to use, but with small, sometimes minuscule tweaks they’ve made to the ways they cook and use their kitchen equipment. I cannot get enough of these weird little bits of news you can literally use: Dan Lundberg from North Miami has figured out that it’s better to turn the container than the lid; Anne Kampes of Parkton, Maryland, thought to hold a splatter screen over the top of the pan as she turns her cake out, and wonders if maybe you might want to try it.

The tipsters write under male and female names, and I have no idea of their ages, but the voice of the column, as it appears in my head, is 60 or 70 years old—the voice, in fact, of a particular high school friend’s dad, who knew just where everything in his kitchen should be and would tell you. The information imparted might be on the level of a kitchen-hack TikTok, but instead of feeling questionable, a Quick Tip’s vibe is that it’s coming from a cook who’s been doing this forever. In the May/June column this year, David Sanchez of Chicago recommended saving the mesh sleeves that liquor stores slip over your bottles and using them to separate pans in drawers so that your nonsticks won’t scratch. (Did you know that you are supposed to throw away your nonstick pans when they get scratched? Better listen to David Sanchez! I did!) Back in 2001—and yes, I did go read old Quick Tips to write this article—Bobbie Love of Hawaii told readers to use the lid of a pan to hold the browned beef as you’re building a stew to avoid dirtying an extra plate. I’ve done that ever since I read it.

“Back in 1992, when the magazine launched, the section was a way to signal to readers that the magazine was about home cooking, not chefs and restaurants,” said Brian Franklin, a spokesperson for Cook’s Illustrated, about the column’s genesis. The format does a lot more than that: It makes a forceful argument that cooking can be satisfying not just in the eating, or even in the pleasing of other people, but in the doing.

I’m not the only one who likes Quick Tips. Dan Souza, the current editor in chief of the magazine, told me that Quick Tips, along with the Kitchen Notes and Ingredient Notes columns, are always the highest-performing parts of each issue, as measured by responses to reader surveys. The column receives a ton of letters, and Annie Petito, the compiling editor, tests them herself before the magazine commissions an illustrator, John Burgoyne, to make the distinctive drawings of people’s disembodied hands using chopsticks to clean out waffle irons, or immersion blenders to scramble eggs.

The Quick Tip has a lineage. People who write about American home cooking—its history, its politics—will often note that an honest accounting of what has actually gone on in our kitchens over the years can be difficult to formulate. That’s because the record is often about what professionals did and what they advised amateurs to do—not about what those amateurs actually did. We have restaurant menus, reviews, and memoirs of restaurateurs. We have business histories of industries like canning, meatpacking, and frozen foods. We have cookbooks, recipes, and magazines aimed at home cooks. But the internet’s recent explosion of amateur food advice is actually an anomaly in this archive.

Food media seems to have perfected the “tip” unit for magazine use in the early 20^th century. As people moved away from their families to urban settings around that time, young women who would have been basically apprenticing at their mothers’ or neighbors’ kitchens lost out on that hands-on transfer of knowledge. At the same time, the industrialization of American food systems was providing more and more intriguing possibilities to cooks: canned and processed food was on the upswing, refrigeration was getting easier and easier, and electrification was just touching the edges of the home kitchen. People needed “hacks” and tips.

Into this landscape stepped the column Discoveries, which ran in Good Housekeeping magazine in the 1910s and 1920s. Readers could write in with a tip they had landed upon while doing their housework or cooking. “Discoveries wanted!” ran the advertisement.

To browse in Discoveries is to see that the home cooks of the time, who were recipients of some strict moralizing from home economists about the kinds of “correct” cooking they should be doing, sometimes actually really liked being in the kitchen. You can see incredible moments of innovation, as when HDN, from Oregon, describes the kludged-together device she created to stand in for the electric motor she wanted to buy for the kitchen but couldn’t afford yet. (The people who wrote in to Discoveries were identified only with initials; I’ll assume here they were female, given Good Housekeeping’s typical audience.)

“I had the blades unscrewed from my electric fan, and a rod, having three strong wire loops at the end, inserted,” HDN wrote. “Then the converted fan-motor was screwed to the kitchen-wall at a convenient height above a broad shelf.” This device then became her electric mixer. “I can make mayonnaise, beat eggs, whip cream, mix batters, and do a dozen things that used to mean arm-ache; and much time expended. Until you have tried it, you don’t know what fun it is, while you are mixing the cake, to have a little motor purring away and beating the whites of the eggs,” she enthused. As a KitchenAid owner, I do know how fun it is, and I’m impressed.

Souza told me that you could track some interesting trends in the 21^st century kitchen in the submissions to Quick Tips. For years, tipsters have been suggesting ways to conserve materials like aluminum foil and plastic wrap, and storage solutions for kitchens with too much equipment and too few cabinets—in other words, the kinds of tips that are relevant for an affluent American kitchen culture where there’s too much of everything and waste is always a temptation. But there are also less socially determined patterns. “For a while, a few years ago, there was a trend where people suggested ways to use power tools in the kitchen,” he added—a fascinating moment of crossover between separate DIY realms, like Food Network meets Property Brothers.

The Discoveries tipsters would recognize that impulse. ODB, who wrote in to Discoveries from Iowa, described using an ax to open a Hubbard squash and “generally winding up with at least one disabled member.” She had a better idea, suggesting that people wash their squashes after breakfast and put them into the “range oven” or a wood-fired stove. By dinnertime, you could open the squash with “any common knife,” then add a “little cream and seasoning.” This way, she wrote, “all its sweet juices have been retained and so has my temper!”

One thing Discoveries gives you that Quick Tips—which are confined within the physical world of the piece of equipment and the food—doesn’t is a sense of the social worlds that evolve around food. Mrs. FCM, from New York, described an arrangement she made with a neighboring homemaker. Farmers help one another in busy times; just as their husbands did, she and this wife arranged to help one another by trading vacuuming, doing canning together, taking turns baking and ironing during the summer. “We get a great deal of enjoyment from our cooperation, and I advise any neighbors who are really neighborly to try it,” Mrs. FCM concluded. There are dozens such examples in between the practical advice.

But that practical advice is king. “Pouring melted butter, warm oil, sauce, or almost any liquid from a pan often creates a drip down the outside of the pan,” reads a Quick Tip from Cook’s Illustrated, May/June 2002. This is a common problem: It happened to me recently making graham cracker pie crust. But I am saved: “Kimiko Bush of Turbotville, Pa., has figured out how to prevent the drip with a simple flick of her wrist. Instead of immediately turning the pan right side up after pouring out the contents, she continues to turn the pan in the direction of the pour, through one full rotation, until it eventually ends right-side up. This forces the liquid to run back into the pan instead of down its side.” (Kimiko Bush, you could totally make that into a TikTok.)

I suppose, looked at from one angle, it’s sad to get this kind of knowledge from strangers and not family. This pan flip is the kind of thing you should learn from sitting in a kitchen with a person, watching them do the same thing over and over again. And I did learn some things that way, from my mother and father, just as my daughter has learned from me how to stabilize a carrot for peeling by jamming your non-peeling hand’s thumbnail into it. (Keep your thumbnails long, people.) But reading Discoveries and Quick Tips, I feel oddly optimistic about the home-kitchen world we’ve created, even if it’s sometimes less intimate than it once was.
People’s brains are out there working on the world, and we’re all better for it.