On Not Writing a Cookbook
Rejection is protection.
When my first book came out in 2023, many interviewers kindly asked me with sincere curiosity why No Meat Required wasn’t a cookbook. Before its publication, for the three years between selling it and its launch day, many people simply assumed it would be a cookbook. Vogue, I was happy, put it on its list of highly anticipated cookbooks while noting in its blurb that it wasn’t one.
Cookbooks are the form of publication that people immediately and readily think about when “food” and “book” are in the same sentence, though narrative nonfiction, memoir, and history are extremely popular types of food books. This assumption about my own book felt, often, gendered. It also often felt dismissive of my skills as a writer and researcher, despite the fact that I know how much work and creativity goes into a good cookbook. Who considers me to be, first and foremost, a recipe developer? I wondered. It gave me an identity crisis.
What interviewers, list writers, and others didn’t know was that I’d just tried to sell a cookbook the year prior. It didn’t work, and this question—which came with it the notion that it would’ve been a much easier move—was salt in a fresh wound.
After the paywall, I write about how this happened, the idea itself, and include screenshots from various sections of the proposal.