I have several ATK cookbooks. My mother-in-law likes to give them. They're like the Consumer Reports of cooking: they will evaluate each and every little thing on nine different parameters and then come up with an aggregate score. This is great if you agree with their parameters and if you think they should all be equally weighted.

ATK recipes tend to be overdetermined. They are full of asides about how you must do this and you can't do that but it's often things like "be sure to set aside a third of the butter to incorporate in two minutes." They're also unremarkable: if you would like to make the unweighted average of eight different Philly cheese steak sandwiches they will give you step-by-step instructions. However if you follow them more or less you generally get a decent meal out of them.

Gourmet had a different approach. They'd try 50 different variations and then say "do this one it's the best" rather than refining. You could certainly fail: I had to buy ingredients for a creme soup three times because my girlfriend at the time kept curdling it. If you pulled it off, though, you either liked it because it was delicious or hated it because it wasn't your taste. There was no law of averages.

Nowadays it seems like most recipes are "here's a bunch of ingredients our sponsors paid for next to a picture of something made completely different that photographs well." I long for an era where Pinterest Fails isn't a genre of entertainment.