The Odd Couple

Chris Kimball and John Thorne are two of the best food writers working in America today. But it’s hard to imagine a pair more opposite, both in format and temperament. Kimball has rebuilt Cook’s Illustrated from the ashes of the fallen Cook’s Magazine, turning it into a formidable publishing concern. Thorne is probably the food world’s best-known penny press--his self-published Simple Cooking newsletter may only have a circulation of a couple of thousand, but it is read by almost everyone in cooking who counts.

The differences in business approach pale beside the differences in style. And the two of them just about define the two extremes of technical food writing today. This is seen clearly in their new books.

Kimball’s “The Dessert Bible” (Little, Brown, $29.95) is representative of the Consumer Reports school of food writing. To teach you how to bake a cake, he starts with a couple of hundred words on the best oven-rack position (“I had always assumed that the middle position was best for baking a cake . . . “). Then comes greasing the cake pan, telling when the cake is done, baking a level cake, cooling the cake and removing the cake from the pan (having already covered everything from how to calibrate an oven to “a revolutionary way of folding flour into batters”earlier). And then you get to the recipes.

This is fascinating, but not just a little frightening. About halfway through this obsessive feast, you begin to feel a bit like Shelly Duvall discovering Jack Nicholson’s manuscript in “The Shining”--”All work and no play . . .”

Thorne, whose new book is “Pot on the Fire: Further Adventures of a Renegade Cook” (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, $25), is just as cranky, but in a more Jungian way. While Kimball will tell you about testing five different recipes on 15 different mixers to find the right machine, Thorne takes the animist approach. To find out which tool is best, he just listens; they talk to him. Of his first knife, he says, “Neither in shape, size, nor hauteur would it ever be confused with a chef’s knife; it makes no statement whatsoever about the taste or expertise of the person who uses it. It is simply a tool, and all it says is ‘I cut.’ ” Of an early pot he remembers “[It] and I had such rapport . . .”

This is not to belittle either approach. Anyone who has spent time in the kitchen almost certainly recognizes both. A cook who has yet to favor a knife because it “just feels right” hasn’t yet come across the right knife. At the same time, who hasn’t tried altering a technique--doing something a little different, just to see what happens?

Which book you choose will depend on which school you fall into. Frustrated engineers will doubtless prefer Kimball’s nuts-and-bolts analytical approach, while Thorne will appeal more to the English and art history majors in the crowd.