Who's easy now?
Here's the quote that caused the trouble, from a recent story I wrote about preserved lemons: "Preserved lemons can take a month - certainly not less than two weeks. By that time, I've put aside my North African…
Shelf Life With Susie
Local and localer
In the days before I had my own vegetable garden, I could hardly wait for the farmstands to fill up with local color and variety each year. What's better than a fresh carrot? A purple carrot grown five miles away.…
The mainstreaming of the global pantry
When I was first learning to cook, the 80's had just swept past, leaving in their big-haired, big-shouldered wake a trove of newly-popularized ingredients that had once been exotic: raspberry and balsamic vinegars,…
All About Branding
Let's talk for a moment about "branding," a term one hears a great deal of in cookbook publishing these days. Everybody does it: The TV chef who sells a line of cookware, the market gardener who starts a blog, the…
Teeny-weeny tiny print!
As I might have mentioned a while back, I'm in the middle of developing this cookbook-rating app, which means that I've been going through the backlist and re-examining cookbooks from about the last 12 years (as well as…
"Table" vs. "Kitchen"
A funny thing is going on at Marketing Department, c/o Cookbook Publisher, Industry St., Anytown USA. I was just perusing the titles of cookbooks published in the last 30 days, and it seemed to me (I stress the…
Database cookbooks
Correction: Since this post was published, ATK has contacted me to clarify that some cookbooks (like Slow Cooker Revolution) consist of brand-new content, and others (like Cooking for Two) use database recipes as only a…
Buying a cookbook, asking the right questions...
So this weekend, I was making a quick visit to Manhattan with my son, and we needed a place to rest our sidewalk-weary feet. We ended up taking refuge in the Union Sq. Barnes & Noble, as I have done so many times…
Winging it
I was leafing through the new Nigella Lawson book the other day, when I came across this recipe: Prosciutto-wrapped grissini. Grissini, as you probably know, are breadsticks. The recipe listed two ingredients - I will…
Street food vs. home cooking
If you've picked up an ethnic cookbook lately, chances are you've seen one of two phrases either in the title, subtitle,or "teaser copy": home cooking or street food. As in Hugo Ortega's Street Food of Mexico or Every…
More than just the recipes.
I'm just back from the Cookbook Conference in New York, where EYB's Jane Kelly and I sat on panels and hobnobbed with cookbook authors, publishers, marketers, and others involved in food. It was a good time, and a…
The cookbook index in the age of EYB
I don't know about you, but Eat Your Books has radically changed my relationship with the cookbook index. You remember the old days. Say you needed a recipe for quail. You'd go to your bookshelf and try to guess which…