For me, it really depends on who wrote the cookbook. In general, I'm a visual learner and appreciate photos of both process and product. And I don't know if this really has a name, but I'm also a "work-backwards" learner who needs to understand where I'm trying to get to, in order for the process steps to fall into place. But some writers - like Melissa Clark - write great descriptions of the process that I find simple and easy to follow, while others (too many to name) will never make sense to me no matter how many photos go along with the text.
p.s. I'm so excited about your book coming out in paperback! My budget and space limitations don't allow for a lot of hardcover purchases.
Nigella Lawson once said that she reads cookbooks like novels :) I'm not quite like that, but I am a profligate user of the library for cookbooks. Your mention of Dirt Candy has reminded me that I should just buy the damned thing; I loved it so much. Though I don't really cook from them anymore, I found Mollie Katzen's books charming with their illustrations. They're probably the reason I liked Yvette von Boven's "Homemade" cookbooks so much; that, and the fact we got to eat at her tiny, gorgeous (now gone) restaurant in Amsterdam many years ago.
I would rather have well-written, easy to understand instructions and no pictures vs lots of picture and not-enough written instructions, and as many 'finished product' pics as possible so I know what I'm working toward.
Also, I love love love getting a receipt in a used book, especially if the receipt has many items and I can create a short story in my head about the person who owned the book before me!
I started teaching cooking to kids and adults to offset my cookbook habit.🙂 I recommend “bowl” by Lucas Volger the most. I get my Indian fix from Vegan Richa, mostly Vegan Richa’s Instant Pot Cookbook. I cook multiple times a week from Vegan under Pressure by Jill Nussinow and a few times a month from Miyoko Schinner’s Japanese Cooking Contemporary and Traditional. I’m also a heavy googler and NYT Cooking subscriber. We eat mostly vegan and my culinary inspiration waxes and wanes. I just discovered two podcasts “the recipe” with J.Kenji Lopez Alt and Deb Perlman, and “everything cookbooks” with multiple hosts including Andrea Nguyen.
I chose my university in Ithaca, NY because of the Moosewood cookbook.
My first cookbook was James Beard’s American cooking, the second was a Julia Child compendium.
On the pate de fruit front, we made them from a Jacques Pepin FoodTV recipe one Thanksgiving —huge hit! Now when I’m craving a special host gift I order from Yamina- yamiyami.com
I was looking through my cookbooks for a recipe and realized I had one more to mention- The Frog Comissary cookbook from a restaurant and caterer in Philadelphia in the ‘70’s and ‘80’s. No photos, cut illustrations and amazing recipes. I don’t make much from it now, when I was a kid the Chocolate Mousse Cake with Warm Grand Manier sauce or the Sachertorte or the Carrot Cake were the projects we embarked on for special occasions. In my twenties I’d make the NY cheesecake for parties.
I think Camilla Wynne's new book, Nature's Candy, (fall 24) will cover pate de fruit!
Having just scrawled 100k+ words for a book that is only partially complete (I haven't even gotten to the recipes themselves yet lol), I feel you. Pictures are no substitute for clear, concise, and complete text, and the latter is way harder to do, which is why some writers do not take the time. (It took 11 years working for a mainstream food pub to become good at writing cooking.)
I do think the *right* set of images can go a long way into filling the details, but images alone cannot carry a recipe, even (and especially) when the subject is technique-heavy. I do think having a single representative image of a finished dish is worth including if time and budget allows, because *that* can be difficult to describe precisely.
I love the Saltie cookbook from the long-gone but never forgotten sandwich shop on Metropolitan. It’s the cookbook I’ve used the most-bread-vinaigrettes-pickles-desserts-but also one of the books I would read when I missed my friends & I just craved voice & proximity. It was their shop.
In terms of pictures, when I was trying to figure out how to make puff pastry from scratch years ago-it wasn’t Jacques Pepin’s Techniques with its extensive photography that taught me. Lindsey Ramolif Shere & her recipe in Chez Panisse Desserts, with no pictures at all, her recipe made my brain understand what it needed to do.
wow yes!! i never put together the photography/lack of instruction piece. i was trying so hard to cook from a baking cookbook and have decided after five failed recipes the lack of detail in the recipes was the cause 😅 i’ve been relying heavily on the simple vegan by lauren mcneil lately because the ingredients are easier to find in my fridge already & there’s not too many bowls used haha
I'm not kidding when I say that Hannah Che has changed how I cook! This is coming from someone who worked in cookbook publishing and judged competitions. Seriously one of the best new books out there, so well researched too.
The more recipes I write , the more I need detailed instructions in the recipes I follow from cookbooks, because I'm always second guessing myself and mentally asking the author the same questions my editor would ask me if the recipe was not detailed enough!
Also, you cannot even imagine how proud I am to spot Cucina Povera among the books on heavy rotation in your kitchen. THANK YOU!
I’m glad that you asked about cookbooks because for some reason I have put a lot of thought into what makes a great cookbook (for me.)
It of course needs accurate and complete ingredients with matching quantities. Please don’t mix imperial and metric. If I need water PLEASE include that in the ingredients.
It needs to have the detailed steps and method of elaboration accompanied by photographs. It should ALWAYS include the plated dish.
I also love the story behind why we do it and the who, what, and when behind the recipe.
My favorite new cookbook is Disfrutar Vol 2 from the 3 Michelin star restaurant in Barcelona.
It was founded by three Bullianos. (ex El Bulli chefs.)
It’s in English and Spanish (Catalan?) it has beautiful photos and for some of the more challenging recipes a QR code that you can scan to watch a video of the elaboration!
I have two editions of The Joy of Cooking, from 1979 and 1997, and I've loved being able to compare them--there's so much to glean about US home cooking, what ingredients and techniques were common and which weren't, and the text is so thorough (I'm not a visual learner either). And I've hung onto a Better Homes & Garden Junior Cookbook from my mother's youth (1955!), mostly for the graphic design.
As for new(er) cookbooks, The Flavor Bible (ed Andrew Dornenburg and Karen Page) has made me a lot more confident cooking without a recipe; it's just list of flavors that go together, ingredients associated with certain cuisines, etc. SO helpful. And I just bought a second copy of Katie Workman's The Mom 100 Cookbook; I may not have kids, but I cooked out of that first copy until the pages started falling out!
So much depends upon my mood, my current project, and my daily reality. In theory, I love transportive books with language that makes me desperate to cook. (As a francophile, Auberge of the Flowering Hearth and When French Women Cook come to mind.)
But the books I use most these days are all on the pragmatic side of things. I love Perfectly Good Food by Margaret and Irene Li. Yasmin Fahr's new book Cook Simply, Live Fully, just came out today, and I've already made a couple of things and have marked several more recipes. I enjoy a lot of Melissa Clark and Hetty McKinnon.
Then I've got shelves upon shelves of books that I almost always just use for research, but I love them, too. :)
And thanks for the shout-out and link to my photography post.
And for fostering these comments. I love reading them.
i'm super dependent on following (or interacting with) a recipe when i cook, but also super addicted to my phone, so the physical cookbooks i have are mostly for inspo and browsing. i think the last cookbook that i gave significant wear was lyndsay sung's plantcakes, and it was really the right book at the right time for me... vegan companion for my cake decorating semester, with stuff that's still kind of new/gaining popularity like vegan swiss and italian buttercreams, broken down for the home baker. also love that her cake decorating styles are really broken down -- i love paint by numbers kind of stuff when learning that type of skill.
I love good textual descriptions, but I do like to see photographs of the end dish, because food is so visual that the image of it can entice us to cook it.
I am so thankful for having access to my local library that has exposed me to so many cookbooks over the years. I am able to borrow many before I ultimately decide which ones I absolutely need to own. When I first started buying cookbooks, the pictures were definitely helpful. As time went by, I realized that the instructions and extra tips were what determined how successful a recipe would turn out for me. As I have become a better cook over the years, I do not necessarily need a book with pictures. I am a visual learner and once I get the hang of something, I can take that skill and use it going forward. I do enjoy having a community of people that cook through recipes in a cookbook where you can share tips and tricks. The new-ish cookbooks on rotation for me is Pati Jinich Treasure of the Mexican Table, Hawa Hassan, In Bibi's Kitchen, Six Seasons: A New Way with Vegetables by Joshua McFadden, Falastin by Sami Tamimi & Tara Wigley, Fresh India & Made in India by Meera Sodha, To Asia with Love by Hetty McKinnon, Any of the Smitten Kitchen cookbooks. Classic which I did not know about but I have started to buy used copies are: A variety of Ina Garten older cookbooks, the Moosewood Cookbook by Mollie Katzen, Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone by Deborah Madison, Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking by Marcella Hazan and The Taste of Country Cooking by Edna Lewis. Lastly, if I need to brush up on how to make a dish from my home, I like to read through the recipes from this cookbook that was created by a high-school: The Multi-Cultural Cuisine of Trinidad & Tobago & the Caribbean.
I've been annoyed with what I also consider too much photography in cookbooks (and online recipe sites) for a while because so often they are overly-food-styled seductive shots that don't even give you a great picture of what you're aiming for. For aesthetic purposes they might contain additional garnishes or some other overly-styled flourish. This has gotten a bit better since the early 2010's but the glamour shot persists.
I hadn't really put it together before your recipe that even with good food photography and styling some of this minimalism in text is likely due to the reliance on pictures of the dish. Personally, I prefer a thorough description to a reliance on precision in amounts and timings (though I'm not much of baker). Ideally a recipe will have clear and concise measurements and directions, but also text that describes, for example, the doneness/texture desired to move on to the next step and a good description of the finished dish. The ideal recipe can lead an inexpert cook to produce a decent version of a dish that they are not necessarily familiar with beforehand.
Of course I've my preference is not everyone's. Most of my friends are busy moms who never really had the cooking bug and many of them find a recipe with a lot of text intimidating, a sign it will be too difficult.
For me, it really depends on who wrote the cookbook. In general, I'm a visual learner and appreciate photos of both process and product. And I don't know if this really has a name, but I'm also a "work-backwards" learner who needs to understand where I'm trying to get to, in order for the process steps to fall into place. But some writers - like Melissa Clark - write great descriptions of the process that I find simple and easy to follow, while others (too many to name) will never make sense to me no matter how many photos go along with the text.
p.s. I'm so excited about your book coming out in paperback! My budget and space limitations don't allow for a lot of hardcover purchases.
Nigella Lawson once said that she reads cookbooks like novels :) I'm not quite like that, but I am a profligate user of the library for cookbooks. Your mention of Dirt Candy has reminded me that I should just buy the damned thing; I loved it so much. Though I don't really cook from them anymore, I found Mollie Katzen's books charming with their illustrations. They're probably the reason I liked Yvette von Boven's "Homemade" cookbooks so much; that, and the fact we got to eat at her tiny, gorgeous (now gone) restaurant in Amsterdam many years ago.
I would rather have well-written, easy to understand instructions and no pictures vs lots of picture and not-enough written instructions, and as many 'finished product' pics as possible so I know what I'm working toward.
Also, I love love love getting a receipt in a used book, especially if the receipt has many items and I can create a short story in my head about the person who owned the book before me!
I started teaching cooking to kids and adults to offset my cookbook habit.🙂 I recommend “bowl” by Lucas Volger the most. I get my Indian fix from Vegan Richa, mostly Vegan Richa’s Instant Pot Cookbook. I cook multiple times a week from Vegan under Pressure by Jill Nussinow and a few times a month from Miyoko Schinner’s Japanese Cooking Contemporary and Traditional. I’m also a heavy googler and NYT Cooking subscriber. We eat mostly vegan and my culinary inspiration waxes and wanes. I just discovered two podcasts “the recipe” with J.Kenji Lopez Alt and Deb Perlman, and “everything cookbooks” with multiple hosts including Andrea Nguyen.
I chose my university in Ithaca, NY because of the Moosewood cookbook.
My first cookbook was James Beard’s American cooking, the second was a Julia Child compendium.
On the pate de fruit front, we made them from a Jacques Pepin FoodTV recipe one Thanksgiving —huge hit! Now when I’m craving a special host gift I order from Yamina- yamiyami.com
I was looking through my cookbooks for a recipe and realized I had one more to mention- The Frog Comissary cookbook from a restaurant and caterer in Philadelphia in the ‘70’s and ‘80’s. No photos, cut illustrations and amazing recipes. I don’t make much from it now, when I was a kid the Chocolate Mousse Cake with Warm Grand Manier sauce or the Sachertorte or the Carrot Cake were the projects we embarked on for special occasions. In my twenties I’d make the NY cheesecake for parties.
I think Camilla Wynne's new book, Nature's Candy, (fall 24) will cover pate de fruit!
Having just scrawled 100k+ words for a book that is only partially complete (I haven't even gotten to the recipes themselves yet lol), I feel you. Pictures are no substitute for clear, concise, and complete text, and the latter is way harder to do, which is why some writers do not take the time. (It took 11 years working for a mainstream food pub to become good at writing cooking.)
I do think the *right* set of images can go a long way into filling the details, but images alone cannot carry a recipe, even (and especially) when the subject is technique-heavy. I do think having a single representative image of a finished dish is worth including if time and budget allows, because *that* can be difficult to describe precisely.
I love the Saltie cookbook from the long-gone but never forgotten sandwich shop on Metropolitan. It’s the cookbook I’ve used the most-bread-vinaigrettes-pickles-desserts-but also one of the books I would read when I missed my friends & I just craved voice & proximity. It was their shop.
In terms of pictures, when I was trying to figure out how to make puff pastry from scratch years ago-it wasn’t Jacques Pepin’s Techniques with its extensive photography that taught me. Lindsey Ramolif Shere & her recipe in Chez Panisse Desserts, with no pictures at all, her recipe made my brain understand what it needed to do.
wow yes!! i never put together the photography/lack of instruction piece. i was trying so hard to cook from a baking cookbook and have decided after five failed recipes the lack of detail in the recipes was the cause 😅 i’ve been relying heavily on the simple vegan by lauren mcneil lately because the ingredients are easier to find in my fridge already & there’s not too many bowls used haha
I'm not kidding when I say that Hannah Che has changed how I cook! This is coming from someone who worked in cookbook publishing and judged competitions. Seriously one of the best new books out there, so well researched too.
The more recipes I write , the more I need detailed instructions in the recipes I follow from cookbooks, because I'm always second guessing myself and mentally asking the author the same questions my editor would ask me if the recipe was not detailed enough!
Also, you cannot even imagine how proud I am to spot Cucina Povera among the books on heavy rotation in your kitchen. THANK YOU!
I’m glad that you asked about cookbooks because for some reason I have put a lot of thought into what makes a great cookbook (for me.)
It of course needs accurate and complete ingredients with matching quantities. Please don’t mix imperial and metric. If I need water PLEASE include that in the ingredients.
It needs to have the detailed steps and method of elaboration accompanied by photographs. It should ALWAYS include the plated dish.
I also love the story behind why we do it and the who, what, and when behind the recipe.
My favorite new cookbook is Disfrutar Vol 2 from the 3 Michelin star restaurant in Barcelona.
It was founded by three Bullianos. (ex El Bulli chefs.)
It’s in English and Spanish (Catalan?) it has beautiful photos and for some of the more challenging recipes a QR code that you can scan to watch a video of the elaboration!
I have two editions of The Joy of Cooking, from 1979 and 1997, and I've loved being able to compare them--there's so much to glean about US home cooking, what ingredients and techniques were common and which weren't, and the text is so thorough (I'm not a visual learner either). And I've hung onto a Better Homes & Garden Junior Cookbook from my mother's youth (1955!), mostly for the graphic design.
As for new(er) cookbooks, The Flavor Bible (ed Andrew Dornenburg and Karen Page) has made me a lot more confident cooking without a recipe; it's just list of flavors that go together, ingredients associated with certain cuisines, etc. SO helpful. And I just bought a second copy of Katie Workman's The Mom 100 Cookbook; I may not have kids, but I cooked out of that first copy until the pages started falling out!
So much depends upon my mood, my current project, and my daily reality. In theory, I love transportive books with language that makes me desperate to cook. (As a francophile, Auberge of the Flowering Hearth and When French Women Cook come to mind.)
But the books I use most these days are all on the pragmatic side of things. I love Perfectly Good Food by Margaret and Irene Li. Yasmin Fahr's new book Cook Simply, Live Fully, just came out today, and I've already made a couple of things and have marked several more recipes. I enjoy a lot of Melissa Clark and Hetty McKinnon.
Then I've got shelves upon shelves of books that I almost always just use for research, but I love them, too. :)
And thanks for the shout-out and link to my photography post.
And for fostering these comments. I love reading them.
i'm super dependent on following (or interacting with) a recipe when i cook, but also super addicted to my phone, so the physical cookbooks i have are mostly for inspo and browsing. i think the last cookbook that i gave significant wear was lyndsay sung's plantcakes, and it was really the right book at the right time for me... vegan companion for my cake decorating semester, with stuff that's still kind of new/gaining popularity like vegan swiss and italian buttercreams, broken down for the home baker. also love that her cake decorating styles are really broken down -- i love paint by numbers kind of stuff when learning that type of skill.
I love good textual descriptions, but I do like to see photographs of the end dish, because food is so visual that the image of it can entice us to cook it.
I am so thankful for having access to my local library that has exposed me to so many cookbooks over the years. I am able to borrow many before I ultimately decide which ones I absolutely need to own. When I first started buying cookbooks, the pictures were definitely helpful. As time went by, I realized that the instructions and extra tips were what determined how successful a recipe would turn out for me. As I have become a better cook over the years, I do not necessarily need a book with pictures. I am a visual learner and once I get the hang of something, I can take that skill and use it going forward. I do enjoy having a community of people that cook through recipes in a cookbook where you can share tips and tricks. The new-ish cookbooks on rotation for me is Pati Jinich Treasure of the Mexican Table, Hawa Hassan, In Bibi's Kitchen, Six Seasons: A New Way with Vegetables by Joshua McFadden, Falastin by Sami Tamimi & Tara Wigley, Fresh India & Made in India by Meera Sodha, To Asia with Love by Hetty McKinnon, Any of the Smitten Kitchen cookbooks. Classic which I did not know about but I have started to buy used copies are: A variety of Ina Garten older cookbooks, the Moosewood Cookbook by Mollie Katzen, Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone by Deborah Madison, Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking by Marcella Hazan and The Taste of Country Cooking by Edna Lewis. Lastly, if I need to brush up on how to make a dish from my home, I like to read through the recipes from this cookbook that was created by a high-school: The Multi-Cultural Cuisine of Trinidad & Tobago & the Caribbean.
I've been annoyed with what I also consider too much photography in cookbooks (and online recipe sites) for a while because so often they are overly-food-styled seductive shots that don't even give you a great picture of what you're aiming for. For aesthetic purposes they might contain additional garnishes or some other overly-styled flourish. This has gotten a bit better since the early 2010's but the glamour shot persists.
I hadn't really put it together before your recipe that even with good food photography and styling some of this minimalism in text is likely due to the reliance on pictures of the dish. Personally, I prefer a thorough description to a reliance on precision in amounts and timings (though I'm not much of baker). Ideally a recipe will have clear and concise measurements and directions, but also text that describes, for example, the doneness/texture desired to move on to the next step and a good description of the finished dish. The ideal recipe can lead an inexpert cook to produce a decent version of a dish that they are not necessarily familiar with beforehand.
Of course I've my preference is not everyone's. Most of my friends are busy moms who never really had the cooking bug and many of them find a recipe with a lot of text intimidating, a sign it will be too difficult.