What are Cookbook Authors Trying to Sell Us?

The "vibes" are feeling off...

I’ve never cooked from my favorite cookbook: The Kitchen Diaries, by English food journalist Nigel Slater. There are recipes, but it’s not a traditional cookbook with page after page of glossy dish photos or a detailed “Pantry and Equipment Staples” section. Instead, The Kitchen Diaries is an intimate look at one person’s cooking and consumption record over twelve months, highlighting seasonal foods and ingredients, farmers' market hauls, and trips to cheese shops and butchers. Some recipes are categorically English, like January’s sausage and blood sausage with baked parsnips. Others highlight seasonality, like June’s strawberry mascarpone tart.

I’m too chicken to try blood sausage, but there’s no reason why I haven’t made the tart. Strawberries found at Los Angeles farmers markets taste like juicy globs of candy come late spring and early summer. And yet, I still prefer to read the pages more like a novel, devouring Slater’s musings on eating hot desserts during the summer, while flipping to that month’s recipe index to remind myself what’s more or less in season, before finding inspiration in Slater’s subsequent food chronicles.

Before writing, I had to Google what Nigel Slater looked like (for the record, he looks kind). Outside of The Kitchen Diaries, I don’t know about his previous or subsequent work. I just followed him on Instagram. It got me thinking about other cookbook authors I follow online and buy books from, whom I’ve formed these weird parasocial relationships with, like Molly Baz, Alison Roman and Ina Garten. Glazing over IG Stories and reading memoirs, I feel as if I know too much about the inner sanctum of their personal lives, yet nothing at all. Their cookbooks reflect this too: a peek inside their homes, their IG famous pets and husbands. The books are less about the food, and more about the aesthetic, and in the case of Baz and Roman, the ~vibes~ of being social media personalities who happen to be professional cooks.

Take Molly Baz, a professional cook who became a regular host on Bon Appétit’s once popular YouTube channel. After the brand’s public reckoning in 2020, she left the magazine, and in 2021, published her first cookbook, Cook This Book, a New York Times bestseller that was praised not only for its fun and flavorful takes on recipes, but also for its punchy design and typography created by Paris-based studio, Violaine et Jérémy. The cookbook was rife with Molly-isms, like Cae Sal (caesar salad) and Morty-d (mortadella cold cuts). It was a good book. Her orzo al limone recipe is a top 10 recipe in my kitchen. The QR codes embedded within the pages offer readers step-by-step video instructions for more technical cooking practices. The cookbook was for the cook.

Then came the YouTube channel (to promote the cookbook of course), followed by the low-intervention wine (Drink This Wine), the Crate and Barrel line, the IG sponsorships and brand partnerships, a second cookbook, the mayo (Ayoh) line, and in 2026, a purported third cookbook. In the age of the gig economy, content creation and influencing, this all sounds like a familiar trajectory. Grab and maintain the audience while you’re hot. Get the bag.

Baz’s 2023 cookbook, More is More feels less like a cookbook and more like a product line extension slide in Baz’s ‘Brand Strategy’ deck. Don’t get me wrong, the design and photography are stunning (although too many ‘feet near food’ photos IMO), the QR codes are still available, but the recipes are what you might have expected in her first cookbook, like Grandma Pie with Morty-D and Peperoncini Pesto. Similar things can be said, with Alison Roman’s trio of cookbooks and the cookbook empire Ina Garten has built. It’s more of the same. I do not doubt the work that went into making these cookbooks, but they’re not books for cooks. They’re books for Molly/Alison/Ina fans who want the merch.

New York Times reporter (and cookbook author and former Bon Appétit contributor) Priya Krishna, recently wrote how many of the buzziest restaurants aren’t necessarily popular because of the food, but because of their “vibe” and branding, which is all by design. The comments to the piece did not disappoint. We expect restaurants to provide these visceral experiences for us, to engage and delight all five basic human senses, but not to the detriment of why we go out to eat in the first place: for an objectively good meal. Why, then, are we not holding cookbook [authors] to the same standards?

The lack of cookbook criticism has been explored by writers Tim Mazurek, from his blog, “Lottie + Doof” and Paula Forbes, in her newsletter, “Stained Page News.” In sum, this form of criticism is prohibitively expensive and time-consuming when you factor in recipe testing. A quick Google search will tell you that the average cookbook has around 150 recipes. I counted 105 recipes in More is More and 127 recipes in Alison Roman’s second cookbook, Nothing Fancy. Culturally, we don’t take cookbooks seriously as other literary media. Albeit this seems to be changing with the proliferation of cookbook clubs that can invite critique, but only within the limits of the group. Instead, cookbook critique is formed in the hum of one’s kitchen, when the “glug of oil” written instructions warrant a moment of anxiety at best, or a grease fire at worst. Is a “glug” one tablespoon? Two tablespoons? Or ¼ cup? Please let me know in the comments.

Of course, we all want different things from cookbooks. Where one person might rely on books heavy in photography, another might want detailed recipe instructions and anecdotal headnotes to communicate why the author chose to include the recipe and why the reader will love it. Others want a story, an adventure, taking them out of the book and into a culture’s cuisine, region, or a singular topic. Food writer and author,

Alicia Kennedy

, asks her Substack audience this question with insightful answers providing further the difficulty of cookbook criticism.

I do wonder if I could objectively critique Nigel Slater’s The Kitchen Diaries if I made the majority of the recipes in his book. Up until writing this, I didn’t know that he made appearances on TV shows and docs, and is the author of several books, including cookbooks and memoirs. His memoir, Toast, was made into a BBC film starring Helena Bonham Carter and Freddie Highmore. One could argue that his cookbooks and books are a proliferation of his brand too.

Looks like I’ve been sold.