BACKSTAGE ON A COOKBOOK SET
COOKBOOKS
are a lot like restaurants. They require long hours and yield low profits. And even though neither would be possible without a large and talented team, there is often only one name gracing the cover.
But a chef or author wouldn’t be able to produce any cookbook — from the tiniest Instant Pot collection to a French tome shot on location — without recipe testers, co-authors, photographers, stylists, designers and art directors. Are we forgetting anyone? Probably.
So, why do cookbook makers do it? For the love of the medium. To build a portfolio. To get one’s name out there. Co-writers, especially, are in a good position to gain recognition, at least within the industry, as most chefs aren’t known for their writing skills — or the time to develop them.
Berkeley’s Sarah Henry, co-author of Preeti Mistry’s 2017 memoir-style “The Juhu Beach Club Cookbook,” says her role is “to make the chef shine on the page in the same way they do on the plate, whether it’s through the force of their personality, the creativity in their food or the culture they’ve created in their restaurant community.”
To write the narrative, which is organized by feelings rather than courses and delves into Mistry’s background as a queer immigrant, Henry spent six months tucked into a corner table at the nowshuttered Oakland restaurant, interviewing Mistry
about everything from social justice to her culinary journey.
Then Henry would go home, transcribe the recorded interview, come back with follow-up questions and do it all over again. She says by the end, they were dear friends — they still are — and she could practically finish Mistry’s thoughts on the page.
Steve Siegelman has followed this collaborative format dozens of times over his 25-year career. The Berkeley food writer has co-written or ghost-written 38 cookbooks, including 14 for Williams-sonoma as well as “Mourad: New Moroccan” with Mourad Lahlou and “The Pizza Bible” with Tony Gemignani. Both chefs were generous with their time and stories; others, not so much.
“A person … I worked with only texted and didn’t even email,” he says.
Siegelman has a great story about Gemignani: While working on the first chapter’s master dough recipe, which takes two and a half days to complete, Siegelman attempted to replicate it at home, but his efforts were falling short. He says they yielded flat and chewy “amateur” pizza. So Gemignani told him to make two dough balls — one for each of them — and bring them into the restaurant.
“I watched him work his dough without even looking at it,” he says. “It instantly surrendered into this perfect circle, and when we baked our pizzas, his rose twice as high as mine and actually tasted better. It was incredible. His ‘pizza-whisperer touch’ made all the difference.”
Of all the culinary content he has written, it is the recipe headnote — the description at the top — that remains Siegelman’s favorite. “I often think of them like haikus: With just a few words, they can offer something compelling or intriguing — a new idea, a surprising insight, a mini-recipe before the recipe — that makes the reader think, ‘Okay, I’ve got to try this.’”
Ultimately, it is the imagery in a cookbook that makes our mouths water. That’s where a food stylist comes in. Long before the food photographer starts clicking away, a food stylist tests recipes, shops for groceries and cooks the dishes, six to 10 a day for a typical
week-long shoot. Then, she uses tricks of the trade to make them look stunning.
“Things get passed down, but it’s always a learning process,” says Marin County’s Kim Kissling, who has styled more than 80 cookbooks, including “Boulevard: The Cookbook” and Michael Recchuiti’s “Chocolate Obsession,” since finishing culinary school in 1995. Back then, photographers shot with film, so fake food was common in the studio. Ice cream? Easy: Crisco, powdered sugar, corn syrup.
With digital came real ingredients, making the stylist’s job more challenging. But that has never stopped Kissling from making her food — including quick-melting ice cream — look perfect.
While styling Jennie Schacht’s 2013 “I Scream Sandwich” — 99 recipes in five days — Kissling figured out a way to prep her scoops without a single drip. She stood on an apple box and bent down into a dipping cabinet — an open freezer — which held her ice cream below the freeze line. “If you’re trying to make cones and stacked scoops look beautiful, you work upside down,” she said.
Chocolate bloom? She eliminates that whitish coating with heat from a very low torch. Voila, sheen. Need steam? Turn off that boiling pot of liquid and instantly get a puff of steam. Melting cheese for that gooey, grilled cheese money shot? “I brush it with hot water or Pine Sol,” she says. “I don’t know why that works, but it does, especially on white cheese.”
One of Kissling’s favorite gigs was working on 2019’s “Weber’s Ultimate Grilling” with Jamie Purviance, who was on set the entire time. “I learned so much from him about grilling,” she says. “It was a fascinating, full-on education for me.”
The 125 recipes were styled and shot in Burbank in the heat of summer. In addition to designating one person to clean the grill after every steak and burger
shoot, Kissling had her assistant purchase and drive down meat from Kissling’s most trusted source: San Francisco’s Golden Gate Meat Co. “I trust them,” she says. “They get me the most beautiful stuff.”
A cookbook’s art director often hands out mood boards to frame that beautiful stuff in relation to the text. That’s where photographers like San Francisco’s Nader Khouri come in. As a former photojournalist, Khouri is always looking for action in his subjects, even beverages. For 2017’s “Kombucha, Kefir and Beyond,” Khouri worked with a prop stylist to produce just the right aesthetic for the active, fizzing world of fermented drinks.
“I want to help people see static food or beverages a bit differently, so part of that is to show the actual process,” says Khouri, who spent time with co-author Alex Lewin learning how to make the drinks. “A floating scoby, foaming lassi and the perfect strainer shot of drips in motion. You sit and wait for every drip to come down. The detail is so fine, and you need to show that.”
For a typical 200 to 400-page cookbook, Alameda’s Sara Remington may take 1,000 pictures a day, and deliver only 600 final images at the end of a six-day shoot. Remington, who has photographed more than 50 cookbooks, counts her far-flung assignments as the most rewarding. She has photographed vineyards in the Veneto for Shelly Lindgren’s “SPQR” and monks making vegan meals in southern France for an upcoming book on the Buddhist monastery, Plum Village.
But it was traveling to southwestern Italy to shoot “My Calabria” with Rosetta Costantino and Janet Fletcher that remains the most memorable.
“I feel so lucky to have had that experience,” Remington says of watching Costantino create seasonal pastas and breads from scratch. “Meeting her and learning about this traditionally poor area where they have long used what simple ingredients they had on hand to make the best thing you’ve ever tasted. It changes your life for the better.”