So Peter rearranged the kitchen with nifty new Metro shelving, and in the process made me acutely conscious of how many issues of Cook’s Illustrated I’ve got piled up. They seem sort of redundant now, because I bought access to the recipe database on the Cook’s website, and I can’t remember when I last sat down and browsed through them for ideas. In fact, I don’t think I’ve even read the last few issues.

Which is no way to treat what I used to call my Favorite. Food Mag. Ever. It’s the magazine that essentially taught me how to cook. Sure, it has its problems (scroll to “Cook’s Illustrated in the Flesh”), but I owe this publication a lot: my lemon pound cake is fluffy and lemony-tasting, I can whip up crepes in a jiffy, and I know which canned tomatoes are worth buying (Muir Glen, FYI).

Looking through my back issues, I realize I’ve been subscribing for ten years. That makes me more than a little nostalgic. Especially when I see my favorite issue, the one that has come in the handiest over the years and is totally warped from countertop puddles and stained on every page. It’s from April 1997.

Its secrets include key lime pie, chicken and dumplings, soda bread, braised lamb shoulder chops, electric knife sharpener reviews, canned tomato tastings. All of these things are essential to my repertoire. I made the corned beef recipe once, and it was awesome. I still haven’t made the buttermilk doughnuts, which kills me, and now I see there’s a recipe for braised celery. April 1997–it’s the gift that keeps on giving!

Indulge me while I get a little misty-eyed…

In April 1997, I was living in Bloomington, Indiana, in a giant old house with three other people. Bloomington was a creepy oasis of semi-culture in the black hole of redneck Indiana, but that house was a fantastic place to live. Each of us cooked two nights a week, so a good part of my grad school life was spent sitting around with cookbooks figuring out what was within my grasp, involved ingredients that I could get at Kroger or the Sahara Mart, and wouldn’t bankrupt the house kitty.

My roommate Jeremy was once heard to shout from behind the swinging kitchen door, “Hey, do you know where we can get whole baby goat in this town?” Jen made some casserole involving an upside-down frozen pizza, as well as an exploding-heart Valentine’s cake. James simmered huge vats of red sauce and sausage. When I wasn’t doing classics from the ol’ Cook’s, it was something Indian from Madhur Jaffrey–the only cookbook I have that’s as stained as this April 1997 issue of Cook’s.

Enough of memory lane, but Cook’s was a lot better then. The recipes were things I wanted to cook. They seem to have painted themselves into a corner these days, as they’ve burned through all the good classic dishes, and nowadays we get stories on turkey tetrazzini. Christopher Kimball himself said they’d never do a story on fresh pasta, for instance, because it was too fancy, and the new companion magazine, Cook’s Country, reveals the editors’ real–and really nasty–predilections: for marshmallows in everything, against heirloom tomatoes, for even more wasteful uses of Saran wrap. If I’d known where this enterprise was headed, I would’ve quit in April 1997.

So I’m chucking my subscription. I think I’ve graduated–and it’s satisfying to look through this giant stack of magazines and see how much I’ve learned. Frankly, I retained more information from Cook’s, especially about the magical world of egg proteins, than I ever did from any class about medieval Arabic poetry. Hell, yesterday I couldn’t even remember the name of the Abbasid poet who’s a lot like David Allan Coe, and I spent a lot of time working up that hard-hitting analysis.

Sure, I haven’t had the definitive, literal kung fu battle with my master, Christopher Kimball, that would prove I’m ready to make it on my own in the world. But I feel like I could kick his ass.