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Boston Globe

A sleek, new, print food magazine without ads defies the online trend

Each issue of Homecooked centers on a particular geographic region. The first was Pioneer Valley in Massachusetts (his staff photographer Melanie Zacek lives there and it seemed like a good place to start), the second Austin, Texas, and a third, due out in June, will feature Monterey Bay, Calif. McCormick doesn't know the folks at Advertisement The Boston companies also offer classes, TV shows, cookbooks, and high-end kitchen merchandise. But the Homecooked publisher has no plans for any of that. He's committed to print. 'Print's not dead,' he tells me on the phone from his base in Eugene, Ore. 'It's just different. We put out a product that people love and if we do that, we have enough faith that people will find us and it will work out.' The 'it' that will work out is the finances. Advertisement Michael McCormick, publisher of the new print food magazine, Homecooked. handout Subscriptions cost $80 for four quarterly issues, but since the first one is free, it means they actually send you five. It's a bootstrap operation funded by the publisher. As for size, picture an issue of Vanity Fair, or a hefty 160-page magazine, dense with appealing photographs and copy, printed on matte paper, all of it a pleasure to hold and look through. The first two Homecooked magazines are ¼-inch thick, considerably larger than other advertising-free magazines, or even those with ads. Homecooked has an authentic, homespun vibe that's down to earth. We're looking at real people. It's all very honest. Something about this magazine reminds me of the early days of Saveur, launched in the 1990s by There are a dozen stories in each Homecooked, with a photo spread that might show a detail of a cooking technique, but seem more like photo essays on the cook and the region. You see them working in their setting and you see what their food looks like, and none of it looks posed (though surely must be to get the shots just right). The Pioneer Valley issue — the region straddling the Connecticut River — has a story on Gloria Pacosa of Gloriosa & Co., an event space in Ashfield. We peek inside her greenhouse, watch her making herb crackers from the fresh herbs grown there, get a recipe for the crackers, see her teacups inside a cupboard, and more. Advertisement Homecooked magazine, first issue on the Pioneer Valley It's all a little dreamy, but it's not Martha Stewart dreamy. You can make most of these things (though the crackers are for someone who really loves to roll pie dough because each large cracker is rolled individually). In the Austin issue we meet Cravey is a crossover from another of McCormick's publications, Quiltfolk, also an ad-free print magazine, this one for quilters, started eight years ago. Quiltfolk runs online workshops that are popular, says McCormick, and take a lot of work to produce. 'They're a mix of travel, culture; we talk a lot about food in those workshops.' McCormick was raised in Eugene. His first job was in pro baseball, a catcher in the Advertisement A recent addition to his publishing group is McCormick says that the most difficult part of Homecooked is actually finding cooks with stories to tell. Starting out meant a lot of cold calls and emails, digging into the region to seek them out. Sometimes getting the recipes is harder than you think because instructions have never been written down. His staff is recipe testing, having a lot of back and forth with the cooks whose dishes they're making. 'As a publisher, it's a bigger challenge than I originally anticipated.' He's up to it. Homecooked magazine, . Sheryl Julian can be reached at