Does it still Joy? spark
Joy of Cooking’s newest edition adds ramen, kombucha, shawarma, plus 600 new recipes
One of the most anticipated cookbooks this season is the anthesis of every cookbook currently on shelves. There are no pictures, the pages are black and white, and coming in at just under five pounds and over a thousand pages, it feels like flipping through an encyclopedia. In the age of recipe bloggers, YouTube cooking channels and food designed specifically to look good on Instagram, it’s hard to imagine a book like the “Joy of Cooking” would exist had its reputation not preceded it. Since “Joy of Cooking” was first published in 1931, it has become the essential guide to cooking almost everything and has sold 18 million copies. It’s become a family heirloom as cooks take pride in showing off the stained and missing pages, broken spines and scribbled notes in the margins from parents, grandparents and family friends.
The culinary compedium’s ninth edition ($50, Scribner) released this month, gets its first update since 2006. Its new editors, husband-and-wife team
John Becker and Megan Scott — the former the great-grandson of Irma S. Rombauer, the author of the original “Joy of Cooking” — have spent the last six years reviewing every line of the previous edition, deciding what to take out, what to keep and what culinary gaps needed to be filled. The book includes 600 new recipes (tested and developed in the couple’s home kitchen), a section on fermentation that includes kimchi and kombucha, gluten-free breads, hundreds more vegan and vegetarianfriendly dishes and American regional specialties including Nashville hot chicken, Chicago deep-dish pizza and a baked escarole dish called Utica greens.
“I don’t think we’re a normal example of the cookbook industry,” says Becker, who stopped by the Star’s test kitchen with Scott to make a batch of their updated raspberry streusel bars. “Our timeline is a book every 10 years and we never have to pitch anything. We’re just focused on this massive project that’s a
90-year work in progress and we’re trying to improve on something that’s already there. We’re not trying to find an angle, special subject or trend.”
While Scott, 31, and Becker, 40, are attuned to the latest trends of the food world online (both also run the “Joy of Cooking” Twitter and Instagram accounts) and live in hipster-central Portland, their mandate is not to make the new edition a distinctly 2019 cookbook, but to continue to make the book something that can be passed down.
They consider the keto diet a trend, but see ingredients and dishes such as asafetida, miso, shoyu ramen and kimchi to be staples they needed to include. There are still nods to the “Joy of Cooking” past, but with a nod to how it’s now an acquired taste (e.g., something called the Shrimp Wiggle was taken out, but the tomato aspic recipe remains). In the chapter on party planning, the section on formal dinner parties starts: “Here lie the hallowed rituals and rites of formal entertaining, presented for those readers who wish to re-enact the aristocratic table of a bygone age.”
The goal of making this a timeless book is also why “Joy of Cooking” never had photos outside of a few illustrations on filleting a fish or shaping dough. It started as a strategic move by Becker’s late-grandmother, Marion Rombauer Becker, who designed the cover for the original “Joy of Cooking” and oversaw the book’s subsequent editions after her mother Irma died in 1962.
“Marion was the artistic one and thought that photographs would date the book,” says Scott, adding that home cooks can also feel discouraged when comparing their results with those that have been prepared by professional food stylists. Becker points out there actually was a series of single-subject “Joy of Cooking” books published in the early 2000s that did contain photos and, yes, there is a very distinct late-’90s, soft-focus store catalogue look to them.
“There’s a lot of bad information being repeated over and over on websites,” she says. “We’re trying to provide a source by doing all the digging, by doing the testing and consulting science textbooks and journals.”
The book will never encapsulate all aspects of cooking, which is why for the first time a bibliography of culinary books for further reading is included in the back for those who want learn more about, say, Vietnamese cooking. Scott and Becker list off things they wanted to include in the book but ultimately didn’t: more Filipino and Peruvian dishes; Chinesestyle stocks; guides to cutting jackfruit and making acorn flour, explainers on calamansi and fonio, a West African grain.
Perhaps some of these will be in the next edition that’s slated for some time in 2031 to mark the book’s 100th anniversary.
“We can look at recipes and know who edited and wrote it,” Becker says. “My dad is big on soy sauce, Worcestershire and Tabasco. Irma’s recipes are probably the loosest in instructions.”
“The book is a look into American foodways,” Scott says.
“But it’s also a family cookbook, the things that Irma and Marion liked to eat and now it’s us.”