ROOKLINE, Mass., June 4 — Four cameras home in on Christopher Kimball, the editor and publisher of Cook's Illustrated magazine and the host of "America's Test Kitchen," a cooking show on public television. Bridget Lancaster, his co-host, has taken a bite of the cherry cobbler they just baked and pronounced it "perfect." As the cameras roll, Mr. Kimball's Adam's apple bobs up and down over his signature bow tie, working on both the cobbler and the word "perfect."

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"Can we say `perfect'?" he asks, his eyes narrowing beneath his spectacles. "I hate that word." Finally, the cobbler goes down and a verdict comes forth. "Very, very good."

With a deep disdain for hyperbole and a profound conviction that people should know how to cook, Mr. Kimball has come up with a very good business indeed. Started with a $500,000 investment nine years ago, his company, the Boston Common Press, will have more than $20 million in revenue this year and profits of more than $4 million. It is also debt free.

Its no-frills magazine has grown from 25,000 paying readers in 1993 to 520,000, with 150,000 of those joining in just the last two years. The company, based in Brookline, Mass., has independently published five successful cookbooks. It runs a Web site with 21,000 subscribers who pay at least $19.95 a year apiece, and it produces a public television show that broadcasts in 78 percent of American markets. It has plans for two new magazines, including one that will rate food and kitchen equipment.

What the company most defiantly does not have is advertisers.

"We are entering a phase where nonadvertising-supported editorial has a real resonance with consumers," Mr. Kimball said. "My bet was that people would be willing to pay for the right mix of content."

Subscriber-driven magazines have gained luster as the advertising market has lost steam. The Reader's Digest Association recently spent $760 million to buy the folksy and advertising-free Reiman Publications, which publishes 12 magazine titles every other month, including Taste of Home, the nation's top-selling food magazine.

By tapping into the inherent magnetism of certain topics and the passions they inspire, relatively small entities like Cook's Illustrated can find audiences and compete against the brute marketing forces of today's media conglomerates.

"They have taken their weakness, which is a difficulty getting ads, and turned it into a strength," said John Fox Sullivan, president of The Atlantic Monthly. "There is an intense relationship between the reader and the publication, a purity of relationship, that they have done a good job of building on."

Subscribers to Cook's Illustrated are intensely loyal, paying an average of $24 a year for six issues, with a renewal rate of 82 percent. An earlier ad-supported version of the publication called Cook's Magazine lurched through several owners before being absorbed by Gourmet, mostly because creating the kind of editorial material that brought in ads made it difficult to distinguish the magazine from larger publications. In its latest incarnation, the magazine functions as a profit-making, food-oriented version of Consumer Reports. Recipes are tested, tweaked and tasted until the ultimate, foolproof, "you, too, can do this at home" version emerges.

The company breaks the rules of the publishing industry with alacrity and uncommon success. Though other Web sites are free, Cook's Illustrated continues to charge for most of its content, choosing to have a small, profitable site rather than a large unprofitable one.

The magazine itself, which always has 36 pages, is a delicious retro artifact, with a heavy paper stock that connotes solidity and absorbs punishment in the kitchen, which is where Mr. Kimball believes a food magazine belongs.

Mr. Kimball's ideas of sexy cover headlines have included "Chicken Taste-Off" or "Rating Large Sauce Pans." The back cover of the magazine — prime advertising space in other publications — always features appetizing illustrations of vegetables or fruits. The magazine sells a respectable average of 80,000 copies of each issue on the newsstand.

Subjects that do not interest advertisers — building the better pot roast, for instance — get multipage treatment in Cook's Illustrated. And when the magazine recently tested coffee grinders, the version without the bells and whistles — or the high price tag — came out on top.

Every issue contains tips from readers as well as the 35-person staff at Cook's Illustrated and its affiliated businesses. One recent issue included a tip on how to make a croque-monsieur using a griddle and a weighted tea kettle.

The text reflects Mr. Kimball's allergy to adjectives, and the graphics — solemn pencil-drawn how-to's — have nothing in common with the food-as-glamour shots that typically shows up in magazines like Gourmet and Bon Appétit.

"Most food magazines are about anything but cooking," he said, his voice rising but leavened with the Yankee gentility that probably serves him well when he occasionally serves as a lay minister at the Sandgate Methodist Church in Sandgate, Vt. Mr. Kimball goes nearly every weekend to a hobby farm there, a place that serves as a muse for his artful practicality.

"It's like air guitar," Mr. Kimball said. "Everybody wants to be able to play an instrument without learning anything about music.

"We are serving the silent majority of people who really cook at home. New York media thinks cooking is dead because most of the people there don't cook," he explained, having just finished slurping down pasta with garlic as part of the taping of the third season of "America's Test Kitchen." (The show's distributor, American Public Television, called it that because it did not want a show named after the magazine.)

With a deep side-part and teeth that are not perfectly ready for prime time, Mr. Kimball is an anomaly in an age of prancing television chefs who all have signature clichés to go along with their signature dishes. "It's kind of goofy and kind of nerdy on purpose," he said of the show.

Last week, the television show took over Cook's Illustrated offices in an old brick building served by crooked stairs. The entry to the second floor was stuffed with an armada of grills; the hallways draped in something that smelled like Mom's cooking, only better; and up on the set, which during the rest of the year serves as a working kitchen, Mr. Kimball was trying to sneak an early bite of not-quite-cooled lasagna. His co-host all but swatted his hand with a wooden spoon.

Geoffrey Drummond, who served as a producer for Julia Child's various shows through much of the 1990's, worked from the control room, reminding the laconic Mr. Kimball to "keep the energy up and help the viewers taste the food."

"Chris is a good teacher," Mr. Drummond said. "You know that he knows his stuff, but he is more than happy to stop and have the cook explain what they are doing."

Some of that information lands in improbable places. Julia Turshen, for instance, is a 16-year-old high school student in suburban New York who has been reading Cook's Illustrated for three years.

"You trust what they tell you," Ms. Turshen said. "You can tell that they want every person to be able to make food that is simple and uncomplicated perfection."

Hearing a 16-year-old talk about "uncomplicated perfection" brings to mind a cult, which is not that far off from the core of the appeal of Cook's Illustrated.

"It's all a little precious, but I accept that as a function of the sincerity of the whole endeavor," said Robert D. Macpherson, an architect from Toronto who subscribes to the magazine. "They have the Platonic concept of a mutually shared common ideal. It is a universe that seems to orbit around Kimball's hobby farm. It has a weird appeal that can't be fully explained."