461: It's a Big Fall Cookbook Preview with Eater's Rebecca Flint Marx

0:28This episode is brought to you by Resi and American Express. This is a small thing, but I think about it a lot because I do cook from cookbooks. I want a cookbook that's going to stay open. I really want a cookbook that's going to stay open, and I won't have to keep losing my place and then taking my dirty hands and reopening the book and finding my place again. Spiral-bound books always stay open. This is Taste. I'm your host, Matt Rodbar.

0:59Fall cookbook season has arrived and there's nobody better to talk about this busy time than Rebecca Flint-Marx, editor of Eater at Home. Rebecca just dropped Eater's thoughtful fall cookbook preview and we go over a number of her selections in this episode. We also talk about Rebecca's journalism career and what she has been excited about in the world of restaurants, home cooking, and product trends, as well as the changing face of food media. Big conversation there. It's really fun having Rebecca in the studio, and I hope you enjoy our conversation.

1:39Rebecca Marks, welcome to This is Taste. How are you? I'm good, thank you. Thank you so much for having me. Well, it's really nice to see you. You were on our masthead for several years. You were a contributing editor and worked on so many great stories. You've also been nominated for a James Beard Award for your work on taste. So you're part of our fam. So welcome home. Thank you. It is nice to be back. I want to talk to you about the fall cookbook season. Eater has just published a really terrific preview. You always do great work with your previews for the spring and for the fall. And I'll definitely be linking to it in the show notes.

2:12So definitely click on that to get more information. But first, before we get to cookbooks, where have you been dining out in New York this summer? Oh, the eternal question. Well, Superiority Burger. I honestly, I go to Superiority Burger more than any other restaurant in the city, despite the fact I don't live anywhere near there. And then aside from that, continuing on the theme of restaurants, I don't live anywhere near is Caracas Arepas out in the Rockaways. The Rockaways. Yep. I love biking out there, stuffing my face with at least two arepas and biking home. Do they still have the guasacaca, like the guacamole and chicken or guacamole straight?

2:53Well, I wouldn't know about that one because I don't eat meat. Well, I eat fish, but not meat. So can't help you with a chicken. But I will say the menu is very strong and very good. Yeah, I love Caracas. And back to superiority, do you hit the lentils ever? I would love to hit the lentils, but the lentils don't like me. Got it. Yeah. We don't need to talk about that. But no, I'm a Yuba Verde girl, you know, mega mouth girl. Any side that Brooks throws at me, I will eat. You are the at home editor at Eater and you've really been publishing terrific work. I'm a huge fan. And let me let me ask you first, you know, what is Eater at home?

3:33What is Eater at Home? Well, Eater at Home, do you want the brief history or would you just like a basic definition? Let's go with like what you're publishing now. Okay. So then Eater at Home is really just about how people cook at home. That's all it really is. So, you know, we publish stories about things people like to cook with, cooking tools, how to maintain your cooking tools, ingredients that people love, why people cook the way they do, certain dishes, traditions. Like, basically, if it's something that can happen in your home kitchen, we want to write about it. Yeah. And you have such a deep bench of writers on staff and freelancers.

4:12But I remember going back to a time like the founders of Eater were like, never over our dead body will there be a recipe in Eater. We are restaurants only. I have to ask you, what changed? the pandemic. That's what changed. Yeah, because basically, you know, in March 2020, when everyone was freaking out, we were definitely among those freaking out because we were like, among other things, nobody's going out to eat right now. And if they are, it's looking a lot different. People are cooking at home. How can we meet our readers literally where they are at home? And that's how we started Eater at Home.

4:50It was really, it was completely the pandemic that did it. And then And I always say that we kind of like we were building the plane as we were flying it because we really didn't know what it was going to look like. We had an idea that we would have recipes, which, again, was, you know, obviously completely anathema to the original mission of Eater. But we were like, well, what can we do? We can use all these chef connections we have. Let's like start putting like, you know, chef recipes on the website. And then eventually that, you know, evolved over time. But, yeah, that's that's really what happened.

5:23And it's really formed into a terrific read. You know, the work that Jaya and Bettina and your staff, you know, put out every week. Big fan here. Big fan of what you're doing. Thank you so much. Yeah. Yeah. I'm a huge fan of our writers and our contributors. It really takes so many people to make Eater at Home what it is. So I'm very grateful to all of them. How do you think about covering cookbooks then? You know, with your mission being what you're doing at home, we obviously cook from cookbooks at home. I'd love to get a sense of how you think about cookbooks. Well, I mean, so it's interesting because we do two cookbook previews a year, the spring and the fall.

6:06But cookbooks, it's a year-round, obviously it's a year-round thing. And so I think of cookbooks in the sense of who's doing something interesting right now? How can we best feature that on the website outside of previews as well? Because the thing about previews is they're wonderful, but there are so many cookbooks that come out every single year. And you're not going to be able to stuff – you know this. You're not going to be able to stuff everything into a preview, no matter how deserving it is. And so I'm really, throughout the year, looking for opportunities to talk about cookbooks, whether that's exerting a recipe or interviewing a chef or a cookbook author.

6:45or just writing about trends in cookbook publishing as well. So it really is like a year-round thing. I mean, cookbooks are how many of us cook at home, not all of us. But you don't really have home cooking without some form of a cookbook, whether it's an actual bound object you're holding in your hand or something you're looking at on somebody's blog. It's recipes, right? So without that, what are we? I don't know. It becomes very existential. It's a hollow life without cookbooks, I agree. I'll just add quickly, and I've said it many times on the show, the cookbook is such an affordable luxury.

7:25Yes. For between$15 and$30, you're going to get 75 to 150 well-tested recipes with a lot of context and an object that you can hold in your hand and you don't have to deal with really terrible UX and pop-up ads. QR codes. QR codes and all the stuff that online digital recipe aggregation kind of brings you outside of the New York Times cooking, of course, which I think it does a lovely job. Right. I'm just like so bullish on cookbooks. Oh, yeah. Extremely biased working at a cookbook publisher, but I have to recognize that. But also, I think I thought that years ago, too. Yes. Yes, definitely. No, I've always been a big cookbook person, even after technology told us we didn't have to use paper materials anymore.

8:06I have stuck by cookbooks. Not to say I never use something on screen because I absolutely do. I'm also a New York Times Cooking subscriber. I love it very much. But yeah, I prefer to have something there in front of me where I can turn the pages, get it really dirty. Love it to death, basically. So Rebecca, let's talk about the season at hand. And you've done such a great job of reviewing all the publishing, both from the majors and from indies, from overseas, from local. And really, you've kind of narrowed it down to a dozen or so titles. But generally speaking, during this research, did you see any broad trends in the industry?

8:45Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting question because the answer is yes and no. So the yes part is what's interesting to me. I mean, so certain things are eternal, right? You know, cookbook publishers are always trying to figure out a way to, I don't want to say exploit, but, you know, build upon what people are doing at any given moment in time, what trends they're following, you know, what things they're interested in cooking, who's talking to them, you know, who's interesting. So I would say that if there's any overriding trend, though, it's just that cookbooks really want to reassure people that they can cook or they can bake.

9:35Like, so that is an eternal trend, right? That really has not changed. But I think what I've been noticing more of in this specific, like, cohort of books, baking right now, and this might in part be because it's the fall, baking is huge. There's so many baking titles right now. And I'm a home baker, so I'm very biased. And in putting together this preview, I had to really step back and say this cannot be all bacon titles because there's so many good ones from really good people coming out. Another thing that I've noticed is there's a lot of big names who have, and that's also, again, to be honest, not unusual for the fall.

10:15Fall is when a lot of big names tend to publish cookbooks. So you have Martha Stewart, for example, doing her 100th cookbook. I don't know how it's her 100th cookbook. It's crazy. I said that exactly on the show. I did the math. I'm like, how does that work? But apparently it's 100 books. It is. And it makes sense. I mean, the woman never stops. But still, to really say 100 is crazy. But then you also have people like Christina Tozzi is doing another book. Bobby Flay is doing the portentously named Bobby Flay Chapter One. You know, so like I'm like, how many chapters are there? But it's endless.

10:50Stephen Colbert has a cookbook, which is I don't know what it's about. I'm sure it'll be very funny. I love Stephen Colbert. And then like Maddie Matheson, Mark Bittman has a cookbook. So, yeah, you have a lot of big names. And then, you know, there's like Marcella Hazan is like being, you know, resuscitated again, which is great. Madhuri Joffrey's Indian Cookery is getting another printing, which is wonderful. So you do have these like heavy hitters who all have these titles. Another thing I've noticed in a few of the books, not a lot, but enough to make me sort of notice, is the pandemic. The pandemic and generally the feelings that come with having lived through a pandemic.

11:30So what I mean by that, you have some books that are very specifically, you know, the authors say as much in their introductions. This happened because of the pandemic. So you have Christina Tozzi's Baking Club, for example. You also have this really delightful-looking cookbook called Jiggle, which is all about gelatin foods, which I'm so excited about, even though I don't eat gelatin because I don't eat meat. But that started as a pandemic project for its author. You have Margaret Eby's book, You Gotta Eat, which, although it's not, you know, explicitly a pandemic cookbook, it's for cooking when you're burned out.

12:10Yeah. People are burned out. You know, it's a long tail of this pandemic we're still living through. You know, so there's things like that. Wonderful. I mean, you really have articulated the trends we see in acquisition process during our work here at Penguin Random House, but also just in general in the market. And going back to baking, I want to ask you a follow up. You know, I Eliza and I observed as well that this is a very rich season for for baking, not just bread baking. But there's a great book about Indian baking that we'll talk about. And there's and it's kind of this like new math for baking.

12:45Like people, I think, are baking more than ever and actually doing the baking, not just like virtue signaling. Are there any baking trends from this selection of books that you've reviewed that you can come away with? I think maybe, you know, it's baking through more of a, for lack of a better term, world lens. So, you know, where a lot of baking books in the past tend to hue very, like, quote unquote, American traditional. You're getting books like Desi Bakes, which is the book that you mentioned by Heddle Vasavada. And that's, you know, bringing, you know, flavors from like the Indian culinary canon into baking.

13:24You're getting Bodega Bakes, which is Paola Velez's book. Her Bodega Bakes, I mean, her heritage is Dominican and she grew up in the Bronx. And that is all over that book. It's wonderful. It's beautiful and a lot of fun. I baked something out of it just the other day. Yeah, so you are seeing more flavors that you don't necessarily, you haven't historically necessarily seen represented as much in American baking books, which is like super exciting. Yeah. And you're also just seeing like like Ben Mims has a new book that's all about, you know, desserts from around the world. So, yeah, it's it's really sort of like pulling back on baking and looking at just like what makes baking so endlessly fascinating.

14:07It's really, really well said. And another follow up, we talk about names. You mentioned some some big television names. But I'm also seeing, you know, new names that some of our listeners may not be familiar with, but actually have massive audiences either on Substack or on social or both. How did you and the team in Eater think about, I'll just say with big air quotes, the influencer book? Because I think your list has a couple. It's not like you're leaning into it by any means. How did you do the math there? Well, you know, so specifically on our list, we have Justine Dwaran and Carolina Gellin.

14:43And they both have very large social media followings. Really there, it was just like, what's in this cookbook? Like, do we like the recipes? Do they have something interesting to say? And in both cases, the answer was yes. Justine's book is fantastic. It's really made for a cook like me, somebody who has a lot of ideas, not a lot of time, and loves saving every scrap of food that I can. Carolina's book is lovely. I mean, and her recipes, again, she's somebody who just puts a lot of care into her food, into her recipes. And that really is, you know, the metric that we use is like, who are the people who are really sort of, you know, this is a cliche, but cooking from the heart versus those who are cooking for clicks.

15:30You know, we don't like like viral stunt food, for example. But if you're going to give me a good recipe, that's something I will happily consider for a fall preview. Yeah, I love that. Well, let's go into a few other books that I've noted from the list. We're not going to go through all of them. And I recommend just hitting that link in the show notes. It's a terrific roundup. One is Wafu Cooking. I would like to get a sense of why pick this. You know, Wafu Cooking is maybe not familiar with everybody of our listeners. What does that mean to you? Well, so the author of this book is Sunoko Sakai, who is a legend.

16:07She is an astounding home cook. It's a, like I said, it's a beautiful book. I haven't had a chance to try the recipes yet, although I have bookmarked a few. But I think what is exciting for me about this book is just that it's Sunoko Sakai's book. And she, again, she is just somebody who, if you're a home cook, you want to know who this person is. You want to cook her recipes. Another book that sticks out is Our South, Black Food Through My Lens by Ashley Shanti. And I've gotten a chance to check this out. I'm going to have hopefully have Ashley on the show. And why pick this book right now? Oh, well, a lot of reasons.

16:46I mean, she OK. And so this goes to what I'm looking for in cookbooks. She has something to say. She really has something to say. She has a very specific view of, well, southern food. Her book is about Southern food, but it is Southern food through a black lens, as the title implies. And so she's really talking about her own upbringing there, her own, you know, the people she grew up cooking with, the family she grew up cooking with, and how that has shaped how she relates to the foods of this region. And it's a beautiful book. That's the thing. It is such a beautiful book. So when you look through it, you're going to see recipes that are familiar to people who have either, you know, grown up in the South or have cooked Southern food for sure.

17:29But you're also going to see food that has her specific imprint on it. I love it. And her voice is so strong throughout that book. And when I saw it, I got really excited because that's, again, what I'm always looking for is, you know, I want something that really tells me something about the author as much as it, you know, teaches me something about the food of a region. Dolly Parton has a book. Yes, she does. Good looking cooking. We publish it here. So I've been hearing about it for about a year now. I love that you pick it because I think it's a really nice book. I think that it's not just a celebrity vanity project.

18:01It's actually really well done. Why select this one? Well, OK, first and foremost, one of our staff writers, Amy McCarthy, is a lifelong Dolly Parton fan. So as soon as we saw this title, it was like, well, Amy obviously has to write about this. Definitely. So this book, which is by Dolly and her sister, Rachel, it is, again, another Southern food book, very different kind of Southern food book. And this is very, very, I guess what you could call, I mean, in a sense, it's traditional Southern food. You know, you're getting your banana pudding. You're getting your fried chicken. It's going to sell well on QVC.

18:33It will sell so well. And Dolly and her sister are on literally almost every page of the book, which brings me to another thing that makes this book special, which is the photographs. which are by Aubrey Peck, who very sadly is no longer with us. But this might have been her last book, and it's stunning. Yeah, I love that you brought up Aubrey, and I think it is one of the last projects she worked on. And I love the cover. It's so fun. It's a fun book. It sort of invites you in. Dolly is Dolly. You know, she and her sister look like lovely people who you'd want to share a meal with, you know. Tell me more about Jiggle a Cookbook.

19:09I love this idea of thinking about gelatin and konjac and like anything that kind of makes things wiggly, solid and cooking more with it. So what drew you to this book? I think the title, first and foremost. I mean, jiggle is such an appealing word. And then when you apply it to food, it becomes infinitely more appealing. I think it's just delightful. I think it's really inventive. It's gelatin, but, you know, it's gelatin in many, many different uses. So you're getting throwbacks to, you know, the glory days of gelatin when people were doing all sorts of like kind of horrifying molds. Horrifying.

19:49Horrifying. Like in aspic and things like that. Oh, yeah. Like anything you could put in a jello mold, they would put in it. Yeah, I mean, it's incredible. But like it really sort of shows you like the artistry of these gelatin foods as well. So, I mean, it's just a fantastic book. So there's savory and sweet. Yeah. And it does hint at this like mid-century gelay style. But also it's giving you like actually good things to make. Yeah. Let's talk about Desi Bakes. Yeah. From Hetel Vasavada, Bay Area chef. I've loved this book. I talked about it on a fall preview as well here. And hopefully you have the chef on the show.

20:30Yeah. Why pick this one? Desi Bakes. Well, much like Jiggle, I was drawn in by the photography. It was so colorful and beautiful. But then also just, again, like baking through an Indian lens is really fascinating to me. And Hettel, in her introduction, you know, points out, like, this isn't authentic Indian. It's not like, you know, but it's fun. It's like taking the flavors that she grew up with and that she loves and applying them to things like, you know, French pastry, for example. or, you know, doing icebox pies that are flavored with like cardamom or, you know, all these incredible different flavors.

21:09And her work is so beautiful. That's the other thing. This is one of these books that I'm looking through more just, I mean, for the recipes, yes, but also just to look at the photography. I mean, the amount of artistry she puts into her desserts, it's incredible. And I think, you know, giveaway, even before you get to the recipes, is that when she's talking about her kitchen tools, for example, and her ingredients, gold dust is in there. And you know when you hit on gold dust in a baking book that you're in for a special ride. So, yeah, it is a lovely book to look at. I have not baked from it yet, but I am really looking forward to it.

21:49There are a lot of cookies in there, for example, that. Yeah, the cookies really hit home. and I was thinking, I'm getting into my cookie days. I'm becoming a cookie guy. It's a good place to be. It's a good place to be. And I agree, like, this is another reason why cookbooks are so special is, like, photography coming together with production. You open up these books and you've got beautiful printing. Yes. You're just not going to get that from, like, XYZ online site. Like, you're just not going to get it with your food. And, like, you're going to get it with some print publications, but those are going away, unfortunately, for the most part.

22:20Yeah. Back to, like, cookbooks as a genre, as an object to study. What aren't you seeing, Rebecca, in the industry that you love us here at book publishers, both indie and the majors, that we aren't creating? I mean, broadly speaking, I want to see more voices being represented. You know, people from different backgrounds, different cultures, people who have something to say, really have a strong voice. That, to me, is what draws me to a cookbook as much as the recipes. So I want to see more representation, you know, for sure. And then this is admittedly more of a niche thing for me. Having grown up as a child of the 80s, I grew up with like a very specific kind of cookbook.

23:12And it was one of those cookbooks that's like spiral bound, doesn't have any photographs. It has like hand-drawn illustrations. I would love to see a resurgence of those books, not only because like there's just something really approachable and accessible about them, but also and this is a small thing, but I think about it a lot because I do cook from cookbooks. I want a cookbook that's going to stay open. I really want a cookbook that's going to stay open and I won't have to keep losing my place and then like taking my dirty hands and reopening the book and finding my place again. Spiral bound books always stay open.

23:45Oh, my gosh. It's like a really technical answer, but you're so right. I mean, the lie flat technology, I think we do a lot of the books here. We try to keep them open as much. But not all have lie flat technology. Yeah. I call it technology. It's a spiral bound notebook. But do a spiral. All right. I love a spiral bound notebook request. Rebecca, what noise the fuck out of you about cookbooks? You've looked at so many this year and there's got to be pet peeves of yours. How much time do you have? Okay. Okay. Something that bugs me to no end. And this is not limited to this year's crop of cookbooks.

24:18This is an eternal issue. I can't stand it when a cookbook author is like, measure out some fractional permutation of a teaspoon of freshly ground pepper. What kind of sadist does that? I'm sorry. It's like, you want me to sit there with my pepper grinder and like grind my pepper grinder over a quarter teaspoon. It drives me nuts. It drives me nuts. I've seen this in so many places. So please, please, please just stop that. It is completely unnecessary. So like basically it should be pepper to taste or like 20 cranks. Just pepper to taste. Unless you're making like something where it's like cacio e pepe where you're like you need to use like a full tablespoon.

25:04Or like black pepper, like sugar cookies or something. But whatever. You can also just say do 25 cranks or whatever. Yeah. And then on top of that, recipes that don't work. There's a lot of them. Okay, like you went from this pepper pet peeve to literally recipes that don't work. No, seriously. There's recipes that just don't work. And this happens in books that win James Beard Awards, by the way. No, I know. It's shocking to me. I just want recipes to work. The other thing I just can't stand, and I promise this is that I'm not going to sit here complaining for the next hour. I asked you to. You did ask me.

25:37I asked you to. You did ask me. And it won't be an hour. It can be another five minutes. I don't like flagrant, how shall I put this, baby talk. Don't aggressively abbreviate everything. Like, I hate that. It drives me crazy. It makes your book look like Scooby-Doo wrote it. Like, it drives me friggin' nuts. I don't know if I can swear on this podcast, so I won't. But it drives me nuts. Cutesy abbreviations. Yeah. Please stop. Yeah, but really I just want the recipes to work. And I don't want to be told how much, you know, ground pepper I need to grind over to like a half teaspoon. I love these specific takes, Rebecca.