Your (Cook)Bookshelf Tells a Story

Recently, we rebooted our Cookbook Design Lab with a session meant to inspire you to find a niche and an audience for your cookbook projects, whether those projects be books to sell, books to giveaway, or individual recipes to complement your other projects or for your newsletters.

While researching this session, I was struck again and again by how cookbooks can tell the stories of our lives. On my own crowded bookshelf sits the Joy of Cooking book that I purchased after moving into my first apartment because that was the cookbook tome my mother had, and likely her mother before her. The other major tome on my shelf, How to Cook Everything, was a gift from a roommate some years later.

There are two home-grown cookbooks on my shelf: the Greek food cookbook Blaine and I created several years ago after a family trip to Greece, and the three-ring binder holding Blaine’s family’s recipes, which had been collated for my brother-in-law’s wedding.

Sandwiched between those are gifts, theme books tied to gadgets we have loved (or hoped to love), food choices we have tried, and a stack of kids’ cookbooks from our daughter’s baking phase.

Individually, these books are cookbooks; mostly instructional in nature, many with lovely photography. But as a whole, they tell part of the story of our lives over the last twenty-five years.

And the memories don’t stop there! I can still recall a few of the cookbooks that sat on my mother’s shelves when I was a child. One had a brown cover and a just terrible 1970s photograph on the front. It taught busy cooks how to cook just about anything in a microwave.

Thankfully, I don’t recall my mother ever cooking anything from that book, but still it sat on the shelf, a reminder of an era… a time in history when the microwave was still a relatively new appliance in American kitchens. Today, countertop appliances abound, but approximately 96% of American homes still have microwave ovens.

(Note from Blaine…my step-father used to use the microwave for everything from ears of corn to full-on turkeys! Thankfully, he also was great on the grill so I learned my grilling skills from him and ignored everything else…)

I wonder, if you peruse your own bookshelves, what do the cookbooks there say about your own history? Do you have books passed on from family members who have come before you or passed sideways from siblings, cousins, friends?

Maybe you have recipes handwritten on loose sheets of paper stuffed inside some of those books for “safekeeping.” (I do.)

Maybe you have a recipe box with proper recipe cards inside. Where did those recipes come from? Do you still make those recipes?

Open up the books on your shelves. Do some of them have decades' worth of smudges and handwritten notes? Have you adapted the ingredient list to encompass a new way of eating? Or maybe not; maybe you make the recipes exactly as your family has made them, generation after generation.

On the other hand, some of your books may have spines that still crack when you open them. Maybe you really thought the Paleo diet was going to be your key to a healthy lifestyle when you spotted the book in your local bookstore, but quickly figured out it wasn’t for you. Maybe your great aunt was sure that grill-master cookbook would be perfect for your long summer season, having forgotten you became a vegetarian in your 20s.

What happens if we look beyond our own shelves?

Researching online and in local bookstores and libraries led me on a food journey through unique ingredients (The Insect Cookbook, anyone?) and diverse cultures. It led me to consider how food is a language for identity, migration, and adaption. And how cookbooks can shine a spotlight on class, aspiration, and consumption.

I found books on cooking for health, comfort, joy, and sustainability, showcasing the diverse interests of cooks and their families. I found books, like Watermelon and Red Birds, that celebrate holidays I am still learning about, giving me a small insight into an American tradition that wasn’t part of the region I grew up in.

I found books, like Taste of the World and World Kitchen, A Children’s Cookbook, that encourage the whole family to learn about world cultures through cooking. I found books, like The Immigrant’s Table, that explore what it’s like to be new in a place and how that newness affects food choices. I found books, such as The World Central Kitchen Cookbook, that remind me of the essential nature of food and the hope that a meal can bring.

While it would be a fascinating project to complete an in-depth study of cookbooks past and present and delve into the cultural and political storylines we can glean from them, that isn’t the focus of the Cookbook Design Lab. (If you do undertake this project, please be sure to let us know.)

So, I’ll leave off with some practical homework:

• Prompt 1: If you have not yet done so, watch Cookbook Design Lab Reboot, Session One. Then, choose a niche for your cookbook. What types of recipes will be in your book? Will you focus on a single ingredient? Will you focus on a particular diet? Will your book be full of cupcakes? Will you focus on regional food?
• Prompt 2: Write one sentence describing the audience for your own book. Be specific: not “home cooks,” but “busy parents who want weeknight meals under 30 minutes using five ingredients” or “first-gen kids cooking family dishes with American pantry staples.”
• Prompt 3: Search for recipes. Whether you pick recipes from your own collection, you plan to create brand new recipes, you get recipes from family and friends, you use AI to assist you in finding and creating recipes, you choose public domain recipes to update, or you find inspiration from recipes in cookbooks, blogs, or online recipe collections, get started collecting them.
• Prompt 4: Start thinking about your content framework. Will your book be a collection of recipes with little else? Will it pair recipes with stories in a memoir-style book? We’ll discuss front and back matter you can include when we work on the design of your books, but you should decide how you would like the main sections of the book to appear. To help you, choose a single recipe and write the backstory in 50–100 words: where it came from, who makes it, and what it means at the table. This exercise helps you see whether your cookbook will emphasize narrative (memories and histories) or be strictly practical. Many successful books find a balance, but clarifying your starting point makes the rest easier.

Cookbooks can be many things. Practically, they teach us how to feed our bodies and diversify our food options. But they also teach us how to remember, adapt, belong, and respond to crises.

What story will your cookbook tell…and who will you invite to the table?

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