A few of our favorite cookbooks, old and new, with the Cooks Without Borders kitchen wall of cookbooks in the background
[EDITOR’S NOTE: A slightly different version of this story was originally published at The Brenner Report.]
Six months ago, if you had asked me to assess how important cookbooks are in our culture, I would have slotted them somewhere between skee-ball and beetle fighting. I had been lamenting the fact that millennials and gen-Zers are more likely to click on a Food Wishes video in order to learn chicken-roasting skills or hummus technique than they are to reach for Judy Rodgers or Sami Tamimi. Cookbooks just seemed hopelessly old fart, boringly low-tech, increasingly irrelevant — never mind that many of the best recipes and techniques have always lived in them, and continue to be expressed in their pages.
Complicating things was the fact that what with all those free recipes on the internet and all, publishers were under pressure more than ever before to publish titles they felt sure would take off — and that wasn’t always great for quality. About five years ago I was told by my agent (of twenty years) that all the cookbook deals were going to cute young bloggers with powerful Instagram followings, so the odds of my publishing anything new were slim (even though I had six published books under my belt). I bought a few of the popular bloggy books and tried to cook from them. Generally speaking, the recipes didn’t work and the food sucked. Also young people tend to gravitate toward chefs, and chef recipes are often ridiculous in terms of what they demand of the cook. No wonder young people didn’t take cookbooks seriously.
A noodle salad from Andrea Nguyen’s excellent Vietnamese Food Any Day. Its publisher, Ten Speed Press, consistently publishes worthwhile books from the best authors.
Still, there continued to be a few excellent editors publishing great titles filled with cookable, inspired recipes — by authors like Toni Tipton-Martin and Samin Nosrat and Andrea Nguyen and Yotam Ottolenghi (and many more). In the best cases, the authors take recipe testing seriously and their recipes work. Or at least the dishes are exciting and recipe errors are fixable.
Shining a light on those exceptional cookbooks (and fixing those booboos for our cooking readers) is something we spend a lot of time doing at Cooks Without Borders. But because it is so hard to get young people interested in cookbooks (again, for reasons that are easy to understand), it has felt like a somewhat weird and probably futile pursuit, and one worried about the future of cookbooks.
COVID-19 has changed all that. Now, all of a sudden and out of nowhere, it feels like cookbooks are everything, and everywhere. After a drawn-out, near-death experience, they are suddenly the coolest, most relevant things in the universe.
Of course it is because we all now have to cook; restaurant culture has been sucked out of our lives with the force that an airline meal gets pulled off the tray table and disappears into the wild blue when a there’s a puncture in the plane. Now, after decades of gleefully forgetting how to scramble an egg, cooking is the thing that saves us from hunger. But as those of us who have been practicing the craft for any length of time know, it can do so much more. And it is that so much more that cookbooks invite us to enjoy. Which is why the cookbook — or more properly cookbook appreciation — is enjoying a renaissance.
Two weeks ago Vittles — a cool and forward-looking cooperative food newsletter out of England via Substack — published a beautiful essay, “The live-changing magic of cookbooks,” by Gemma Croffie. In her debut as a food writer, the “writer, mum and foodie based in Kent” ties together the terror of living as a Black person during the time of Covid with losing herself — and finding herself — through cooking and cookbooks.
One of the books Croffie admires immensely is Jubilee: Recipes from Two Centuries of African American Cooking by Toni Tipton-Martin (which we reviewed in June 2020):
I am in awe of Ms Tipton-Martin’s scholarship; I learn something new on almost every page. Recipes shouting my name range from gingerbread waffles and cream to salmon croquettes to curried meat pies. There is such promise in cookbooks yet to be used, a palpable excitement to see if they live up to expectation.
Wrapping things up, Croffie answering the question of why she loves cookbooks so much.
Anti-blackness is all too real in this time and fighting racism is life-draining. Very little sparks joy in my life, but some cookbooks ignite such a big spark that they practically light a bonfire. Black joy is fleeting; I’ll take mine where I can.
Toni Tipton-Martin’s Jubilee, discussed in Gemma Croffie’s essay, was reviewed on Cooks Without Borders in June 2020.
At the opposite end of the nuance spectrum, cookbook worship is splashed across the pages of “People” magazine. “I am a cookbook fanatic and collector!” proclaimed Drew Barrymore yesterday. “Chefs are my heroes. I must read 3 cookbooks a week...cover to cover!"
There’s a Substack newsletter, Stained Page News, devoted to cookbooks. Its author, Paula Forbes — a cookbook critic who has reviewed for Eater, Food 52 and Epicurious and Lucky Peach — is turning out missives on warp speed at the moment, as we are heading into the fall cookbook publishing season. To paying subscribers she has been sending every weekday (it’ll last two weeks) covering every upcoming books genre by genre. (Forbes offers a free weekly version as well.)
What enticing titles do publishers have in store for us this autumn — besides four witch-related cookbooks, five books with “flavor” in the title (Flavorbomb, The Flavor Equation, Chasing Flavor, Flavor for All, and — of course — Ottolenghi Flavor) and eight pie books?
Mely Martinez’s The Mexican Home Kitchen is one of the fall season’s highly anticipated new titles.
It’s actually an exciting crop. I’m keen to cook from, eat from and read (among others):
• Marcus Samuelsson’s The Rise: Black Cooks and the Soul of American Food
• Alex Guarnaschelli’s Cook With Me: 150 Recipes for the Home Cook
• Maneet Chauhan and Jody Eddy’s Chaat: Recipes from the Kitchens, Markets and Railways of India
• Mely Martinez’s The Mexican Home Kitchen (I love Martinez’ blog, Mexico in My Kitchen. Her recipes reflect the way people cook at home in Mexico.)
• Nuit Regular’s Kiin: Recipes and Stories from Northern Thailand
• Jason Wang’s Xi’an Famous Foods: The Cuisine of Western China, from New York’s Favorite Noodle Shop
• Nancy Silverton’s Chi Spacca: A New Approach to American Cooking
• Donna Lennard’s Il Bucco: Stories and Recipes
• Wilson Tang’s The Nom Wah Cookbook: Recipes from 100 Years at New York City’s Iconic Dim Sum Restaurant (because dumplings!)
• Hawa Hassan’s In Bibi’s Kitchen: The Recipes and Stories of Grandmothers from the Eight African Countries that Touch the Indian Ocean
• Jonathan Waxman’s The Barbuto Cookbook: California-Italian Cooking from the Beloved West Village Restaurant
We’ll be reviewing as many of them as we can manage here at Cooks Without Borders — where by the way, and not unrelated, we just launched a new column of mini-reviews: “Cookbooks We Love.” (Here are the first three installments.)
Find our collected cookbook reviews here.
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