Mushroom au poivre was suddenly everywhere. My husband was flipping through Bon Appétit and pointed it out to me, then sent me a New York Times Cooking post on Instagram. The message was clear: He wanted to eat mushroom au poivre. I found the Times has portobello and maitake versions on their site. All of these variations called for heavy cream, and so I pushed it to Christmas. Heavy cream is a holiday-only kind of ingredient in my life.
The mushroom au poivre of it isn’t the interesting aspect of this end-of-year happening; the everywhereness of it is. You can’t copyright a recipe, and a recipe is just an idea, really: One that changes in the hands of everyone who tries it, unless this is a well-oiled fine-dining kitchen we’re talking about. Test kitchens and recipe developers are under pressure to figure out meaty mains for vegetarians around the holidays, resulting in things like the carrot Wellington. I was fine with the mushroom Wellington, thank you very much. But now, I guess, I’m behind—now is the time for mushroom au poivre and carrot Wellington!
If recipes and cookbooks have historically been significant ways to understand people and places better, spanning geography and time, what does the digital glut and onslaught of recipes tell us about our current moment?
That overproduction of everything is the norm, and recipes—an age-old form used for the transfer of heritage and skill dating back to at least Babylonian clay tablets from 1700 BCE—have become objects unto themselves, something paid for that either becomes absorbed and taken throughout life, shared and cooked repeatedly, or is easily discarded for the next. Which recipes become the bag you carry for thirty years and which become the Target dupe of an Alaïa mesh ballet flat, discarded after one season? One can never know before one gets into the kitchen.
In this individualized “creator” landscape, it’s not just Bon App, the Times, the Post, and Food & Wine competing for the best variation on the same idea: There are many newsletter writers, bloggers, and TikTokers putting their spin on things out into the world. It’s way past time to wonder whether recipes are in their fast fashion era—indeed, my friend the food writer Charlotte Druckman sent me a piece she wrote in 2017 about this very thing (unpublished, a travesty) and Leslie Brenner of “Cooks Without Borders” just wrote about it, as well:
Maybe it’s just me, but I feel like there were a gazillion recipes published this year that weren’t published because someone was dying to have you cook them and eat them, but because they were feeding some kind of insatiable recipe machine. And I don’t even look at TikTok.
People want quality but also support the quantity that social media algorithms demand: What are the signals the audience is sending publications, creators, and publishers when we click, comment, like, and buy? Do recipe developers want to be on a hamster wheel of production? Perhaps they’d like to write in depth about a technique, but would that be supported by the marketplace as it is? It’s something Molly O’Neill already considered in 2003, in her Columbia Journalism Review piece “Food Porn” that I refer back to often:
On a balmy May evening in 1997, I was at a bookstore in Santa Barbara, California, signing copies of my third cookbook. It wasn’t my best book, and nearly every chapter of it had previously appeared in my food column in The New York Times Magazine. Nevertheless, nearly two hundred people waited to pay me homage — as well as $26.95 for the book.
The magazine was one of the most powerful platforms for food writing in the nation and, to the people in line, I was a rock star. My mother, a sensible Ohioan, was with me that night and she was appalled. She stood near as fans gushed admiration for my prose and recipes.
Finally, as if unable to contain herself another second, my mother interrupted one woman’s compliments and asked: “Do you actually cook that stuff?”
“Of course not,” replied the customer, who looked like my mother, tall, lean, with a white cap of stylishly coiffed hair. “Every week I cut them out of the magazine and promise myself I will cook them. Don’t we all?”
In her book Something From the Oven, Laura Shapiro writes (emphasis mine):
“…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 one or two recipes from it.”
And of course, when it comes to cookbooks and other forms of food media, we’re only getting further and further away from a time when there might have been real criticism, real engagement with the work that is customary and understood to be necessary to other cultural industries. When food media does find it in its heart to be critical, it’s of something like the recent really poorly considered Eater negativity about Meghan Markle’s yet-to-be-released Netflix show. It amounts to rage-bait on Instagram rather than actual critique of the food TV marketplace. So much of what passes for “critique” in food are just… complaints! (For which, of course, there is a season…!)
Tim Mazurek wrote a blog post titled “Cookbooks and Criticism” last year around the time of the Oscars, and a lot of folks were riled up. But I still think he made some great points, ones that are really important to consider as recipes proliferate at such a rate that it’s impossible to keep up with them, and we have to start asking about the food waste—recall the Times publicist bragging about the “dozens of birds” that went into developing one new Thanksgiving recipe—and costs that go into their production.
“This general lack of criticism creates a strange feeling void around cookbooks. It is disappointing to encounter a cookbook you really hate and have nothing to do with that energy. No space for commiseration or shared outrage, no green splotches. It can make me feel inappropriate for having such strong feelings about cookbooks. It’s just a cookbook is what the cultural response can feel like.”
The marketplace, at the end of the day, is made up of people, and the recipe in has indeed become an object, something worth paying for with dollars and attention, and writing as such doesn’t quite have the same shine to it. A new recipe or cookbook, like a new dress, carries with it the potential for becoming a new version of oneself. Perhaps we could stand, in this New Year, to stick with the tried and true. But I’m not going to hold my breath.
Despite this, these are some of the recipe developers, artists, chefs, bloggers, and resources that provide constant inspiration to me in their work:
Lukas Volger, Hetty Lui McKinnon, Erika Houle, Anna Jones, Chloe-Rose Crabtree, @crispyegg420 (a.k.a. Bettina Makalintal), Gun Street Eats, This Needs Hot Sauce, Heidi Ross, @nomleah, the “Everything Cookbooks” podcast, Meera Sodha at The Guardian, and always Nigel Slater’s books.
Older Pieces on the Subject
I likely contradict myself over and over, as my kitchen feelings are ever changing.
“On Recipes,” February 15, 2021“On Cookbooks,” August 16, 2021“On Cookbooks As Culinary Tourism,” March 27, 2023“On Recipe Writing,” May 8, 2023
Interviews with Recipe Developers
There are many, so scroll through the podcast archives. But a few:
Daniela Galarza of the Washington PostEric Kim of the New York Times and author of Korean AmericanKristina Cho, author of Mooncakes and Milk BreadKaron Liu of the Toronto StarBryan Ford, author of New World Sourdough and Pan y DulceMelissa Clark of the New York TimesPaola Velez, author of Bodega Bakes
News
Today at 3 p.m. EST, we have the weekly chat Salon. Join fellow subscribers to discuss what we’re reading, watching, and working on. What recipes and cookbooks are we into right now?
On Friday, the Monthly Menu, a blog on everything I’ve eaten at restaurants, cooked at home, and a monthly wine recommendation. Plenty of vegetarian inspiration and cookbook recommendations.
This month, the Desk Book Club is reading Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto. We will have the Zoom discussion on Sunday, January 26, at 1 p.m. EST. I will send the link and my reading notes on Friday, January 24. You can buy all the 2025 Desk Book Club picks at this year’s partner bookstore, D.C.’s Bold Fork Books, for 20% off with the code in the header (or email me).
Join me for the second installment of the Desk Salon Series on Sunday, February 9, featuring author Mayukh Sen discussing his book Love, Queenie: Merle Oberon, Hollywood's First South Asian Star: paid subscribers have free access with the code in the header (or email me) and anyone else can buy a ticket for $10. There will be ten of these over the course of the year.
There are plenty of workshops happening this month, and you can find them all at my website. Paid subscribers have 25% off to each, using the code in the header. (Or, once again, email me.)
Reading
