When I asked Leslie Brenner of Cooks Without Borders, formerly food editor at the L.A. Times, the leading question of whether their cookbook reviews at the paper were profitable, she responded: “We didn’t have to worry about that.” I needed to be reminded, and I needed the audience to remember, too: There were times when work was done for the work’s sake, for the good of public knowledge. Funded by advertisers, sure, fueled by subscribers, but not determined by them. That is no longer the case.

We didn’t get into the “celebrity” of it all too much, but there is the very real issue of how the celebrity magazine profile has become much more sterile and PR-driven, so has the food media become seemingly afraid to criticize their own darlings (to the point of having cookbook authors interviewing each other…). We did get into the economics of publishing, too, not being supportive enough of cookbook authors, for whom photography and recipe testing come out of their own advance.

What did come up quite a bit is that cookbooks aren’t taken as seriously as film, or art, or music—cultural lineages that have structures of critique built into them. This is something that Nora Ephron noted all the way back in late 1960s, and I don’t think it’s gotten that much easier: It’s a small world, as was noted in the roundtable, and the economics of media these days don’t make room for rigor. This is perhaps a non-sequitur, but I’m personally deeply burnt out from over five years of nonstop work: Media that once supported cookbook reviews without concern for profits has been replaced by individualized creators who need to keep churning things out for revenue (don’t tell me I don’t have to, because I know the numbers), and it’s not sustainable and it’s not creating the right conditions for good criticism—cookbook and otherwise.

These were some quotes I pulled to introduce the panel. I started recording a touch late, after asking Charlotte to explain the origin and evolution of the Piglet Cookbook Tournament, because frankly once we all got on Zoom, the conversation started to go off beautifully and I forgot. The full video is below the paywall for members, along with a text selection.

LAURA SHAPIRO in Something From the Oven: “But it’s always difficult to know for sure how often women turned to a particular cookbook, no matter how popular it was. Many home cooks consider a cookbook one of their favorites if they use just two or three recipes from it.” 

CHARLOTTE DRUCKMAN (2016): “it was very clear. when we started [The Piglet Cookbook Tournament], it was really our way of geeking out on how much we love cookbooks, and how much we love good writing, and how much we love great criticism—and the kind of criticism that's driven by the specific point of view of its critic. we weren't looking at objectivity—that relationship between a person and her cookbook is SO TOTALLY SUBJECTIVE, because people cook differently. so having these very different people tell us about their experiences with these cookbooks and how they cook becomes a really cool way to think about how cookbooks function in the real world.”

TIM MAZUREK(2024): “I don’t think being critical of things is being mean. I think to be critical of something is to take it seriously. And I am concerned by how unseriously we seem to take cookbooks.”

LESLIE BRENNER (2024): “Is this incessant outpouring of recipes the fast fashion of the food world? Do we make these dishes once or twice and then discard them? Is it sustainable? ‘feeding some kind of insatiable recipe machine.’”