What’s the point of cookbooks? Hope, love and beauty (but not cooking)

A novel I once read described a protagonist as the sort of woman who reads a cookbook in bed. I glance at my bedside and ponder the hardcovers sitting there. Hetty McKinnon. Anna Jones. Alison Roman. Are these not the great writers of our time? Steinbeck lies under a glass of water; the essential, reliable storyteller and coaster. But for practical, everyday beauty, for hope, for love, for mind-changing advice, it was always cookbooks.

My bookshelf heaves with excellent advice: the stories, instructions and bulky tomes of my chosen profession and passion. My grandmother, Margaret Fulton, – who sold 1.5m copies of her first cookbook and went on to write twentysomething others, plus countless mini-books and magazine lift-outs – once explained to me why she chose the profession. I paraphrase: Once you discover something truly magical as well as practical, it’s impossible not to want to share that with people who you can see could really use the help.

Cookbooks – and by that I mean a collection of recipes that have been triple tested, edited, checked and dreamed about by their author, passed by an editor and publisher, re-cooked by a recipe tester, compiled thoughtfully and painstakingly in a helpful way and, perhaps less importantly, printed on paper – are what my family does. My mother, Suzanne Gibbs, is a London Cordon Bleu cook and food editor who has written twentysomething books; my sister, Louise Keats, has written at least a handful. Announcements of a new cookbook deal at my place get a partially attentive nod, the kind of acknowledgment you’d get in another family if you’d been to the supermarket that day. It’s not news, exactly, and it’s markedly less interesting than telling the table you have a new kvass recipe and asking if anyone would like to try it.

So it is with zero objectivity that I look at the rise and fall and rise again of cookbooks in recent history, and ask: is there a future for them in our kitchens, on our bedside tables?

In October 1961, The New York Times reported that publishers could not keep up with the constant demand for cookbooks. “Until very recently,” journalist June Owen began, “food, especially the dishes served, was not a proper subject for conversation at dinner … Today, the situation is reversed. A hostess who has spent several hours concocting a complicated bouillabaisse would be crushed if not a single one of her dinner guests complimented her on it.”

The writer didn’t have statistics available, she said, but “publishers report that they cannot get enough good books on cooking. The demand, they say, is constant … [They] know that the chances of making money are greater on a cookbook than on a novel.” People suddenly liked talking about food, about cooking, and the conversation has continued ever since.

Earlier that same year, an almost unknown cook called Julia Child handed a 726-page manuscript to her publisher, Alfred A Knopf, who declared: “I’ll eat my hat if that title sells.” By the end of 1964 Mastering the Art of French Cooking was selling 4,000 copies each month, and by 1969 about 600,000 copies had sold. The book, co-authored with Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle, helped revolutionise cooking in the United States and went on to sell 1.5m copies.

Thirty years earlier, Irma Rombauer self-published a collection of her recipes in a bid to provide for her family after her husband died. She could only afford an initial printing of 3,000 copies, and her first instruction for readers of the day was “stand facing the stove”. Her Joy of Cooking went on to sell 18,000,000 copies.

Nobody’s cookbook sells 4,000 copies a month these days. But that is not the important statistic. Those who say cookbooks don’t sell any more are looking at individual author sales, not total cookbook sales. When Julia, Irma and Margaret wrote their books, they were groundbreaking authors, forging new paths with the backing, eventually, of huge publishing-house marketing budgets. And there was not – year by year – much competition. Individual authors rarely/never hit these numbers now, sure. But the appetite for cookbooks has only grown since the 1970s. In 2017 roughly 17.8m cookbooks were sold in the US alone.

Nielsen BookScan data shows that cookbook sales in the US grew 8% year-on-year between 2010 and 2020, with sales numbers boosted even further by the pandemic.

We don’t usually, however, actually cook from cookbooks.

Poisonous recipes and pristine pages

A very senior editor in a top publishing house once told me that it is considered good going – a downright success, even – if the consumer cooks two recipes from a cookbook they buy. Two! I love cookbooks and I own an awful lot of them – more than one hundred (I cull regularly). But I do not cook from these books every night; I do not even cook from all these books. There are some I have never technically cooked a recipe from. It’s absurd.

In her history of British cookbooks, Culinary Pleasures, Nicola Humble includes a pertinent story from the 1940s when a magazine inadvertently published a recipe with a fatally poisonous combination of ingredients. She doesn’t go into detail on what that might have been – a rhubarb leaf stew? A leftover rice dish involving sautéed autumn skullcap mushrooms? No doubt reeling, the editors notified the police and desperately tried to recall copies, then waited anxiously for reports of people falling ill. They waited … and waited. But none came. The editors could only conclude that not one of their readers had actually cooked from the recipe.

Fans used to approach my grandmother, Margaret, at events or book signings, professing their adoration and proudly presenting their 1969 yellow-bound original of The Margaret Fulton Cookbook. They’d tell stories about the book’s place in their hearts – it had been given to them when they moved out of home, or when they’d married, or it had been passed through two generations. Margaret would smile sweetly and flick through the pages as though looking for something. Then, often, she would close the book firmly and look mock-crossly up at them (I say “up” because she was usually seated, but was also only just over five-foot tall). “You’ve never cooked from this book. Where are the splatters, the markings of the kitchen, the stuck-together pages?”

But her books were loved and treasured – albeit very occasionally uncooked from – so she autographed anyway.

But cook from recipes we must. It’s the only way the food you cook will stop tasting like the food you’ve always cooked. Using better quality ingredients aside, following the recipe is the only way to deliciousness.

My grandmother used to say this also: “I tell people to cook the onions until soft and translucent. When they do not, I have to shrug and tell them, well, I told you so. They think they know better than the professional cook.” Once you have mastered the expert’s way, advised Margaret, add your own spin, but come back to the original every now and then to make sure you haven’t steered completely off course.

A close friend of mine – and self-described “average cook”, author Meg Mason – wrote hilariously in Delicious magazine about the patience of recipe-followers:

The cold fact is no matter what new dish we turn a hand to, eventually it will come to taste and look like everything else we’ve ever made. It’s remarkable, really, that given enough weeknight iterations, the middling chef’s spicy Asian chicken becomes almost indistinguishable from their sausagey pasta. I’ve tried to work out the point in a recipe when things start to go off course for us … The answer is: right away.

So if people are not cooking from the cookbooks they buy, what are they doing with them? They’re fantasising, partly. They’re imagining dinner parties and beautiful gatherings, the table set and the conversation riveting. It’s the same reason why we buy Vogue, even though we never plan to take off our Birkenstocks. It is why we buy home renovation magazines even though we can barely afford our rent. I’m as unlikely ever to roll my boeuf in truffles and pastry as I am to click “Add to cart” for a white leather Eames recliner … but a girl can dream.