Creative Colebrook couple can’t stop writing cookbooks
Mark Scarbrough, was a restless professor with a degree in American literature in Texas. Bruce Weinstein was a native New Yorker and aspiring writer who dropped out of culinary school but never lost his love for cooking.
Together, they’ve been a twoman publishing house and a couple for more than two decades.
Pairing their talents, they launched their 32nd cookbook last month, adding to their pantry of podcasts, YouTube videos and cooking classes. Bruce, the chef behind the thousands of recipes in their books, also teaches knitting in Avon, New Haven and Needham, Mass., while Mark leads literary seminars in Cornwall, Norfolk and Salisbury.
Their introduction in 1996 was as turbo-charged as their lives. Mark was in Manhattan for a few days writing food and travel articles for America Online. He went to an online chat room that Bruce also was browsing at the time. They chatted for hours online, talked for hours via phone and met the next day at the Guggenheim Museum.
“I picked the Rauschenberg at the Guggenheim because museums are public spaces,” Mark says.
“There’s not only something to do at a museum, but you can learn about someone,” Bruce says. “There’s nothing worse than a dinner as your first date.”
Mark had a plane ticket back to Austin, Texas, the next day. “I was not looking to stay in New York,” but after spending the day with Bruce, he stayed for the weekend.
Bruce, who grew up in Queens, N.Y., had not been out of the state, other than one year he spent in culinary school at Johnson and Wales University in Rhode Island. When Mark took him to an outdoor barbecue event outside Austin, “There was a sheriff pointing where to park with his gun,” Bruce says.
Getting out of the car, Mark, a Dallas native, said, “Don’t touch me. This is rural Texas. Alternate rules apply.”
They spent the summer flying to see each other, which ended with Bruce stating, “One of us is moving, or it’s over.” He worked in advertising as a freelance copywriter and creative director.
Although he never graduated from high school, Mark enrolled at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, at age 16, and later earned his Ph.D at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.
“I was extremely dissatisfied with academics,” especially at the small university where he taught, Mark says. “We were an extremely bad fit, so I got out. I packed everything I had in eight UPS boxes. I drove to New York and arrived on Yom Kippur” at sunset.
“We emptied Mark’s car and drove to my mother’s house for lox and bagels,” Bruce says.
The adjustment was rough. “I didn’t realize academia is not a job. It’s an identity,” Mark says. “For the first couple of years, I had no identity. I was writing for AOL. I was used to people letting me finish my sentences. I lost my authoritative value,” Mark says.
“I had written a cocktail book and was trying to move from advertising to writing cookbooks,” Bruce says. He left culinary school because “I realized there was no way I’m ever going to work in restaurants.” He earned his bachelor’s degree at New York University, went to the School for Visual Arts, leapt into an ad agency in 1984, but never lost his interest in cooking.
Their living arrangement in Manhattan was so “tight financially” that, in Feb. 1998, Bruce took a full-time job as a creative director. Immediately, he was asked to write “The Ultimate Ice Cream Book.” Mark told Bruce to grab the opportunity, and he would help write the text. The following year, Bruce had two more cookbook contracts. “By the
time we got to the second book and the third book, we had to make changes,” Bruce says.
“Bruce is the chef testing the recipes,” says Mark, who writes the books and manages the photo shoots and related tasks. In the early 2000s, they began contributing to major food magazines while writing cookbooks focused on singular topics: Ham, Goat,
Vegetarian Dinner Parties. They have also written books on maximizing kitchen gadgets such as “The Instant Pot Bible” and “The Great Big Pressure Cooker Book.” On the lighter side, there’s “The Ultimate Chocolate Cookie Book.” They write cookbooks for celebrities as well. Their newest cookbook, “The Essential Air Fryer Cookbook,” went on sale three weeks ago.
As their work commitments expanded, they outgrew their space In Manhattan. “We lived in a 600-square-foot apartment,” Bruce says. “The city was driving me crazy. … I needed more space. … I wasn’t getting any peace.”
They started looking beyond the suburbs into rural Connecticut. “We looked for 2 1/2-3 years and exhausted half a dozen realtors,” Mark said, before moving to rural Colebrook in November 2006.
“We went from the middle of New York to the middle of nowhere,” Bruce says. They also took on the challenge of a quarter-mile driveway downhill to their front door. “The only problem is making plans in the winter.”
Twenty years ago, on Sept. 25, 1999, they called timeout to for a non-legal civil union on Deer Isle, Maine. Thirty-five family members and friends attended.
On the same date in 2007, Bruce and Mark had a legal civil union and party with 65 guests at their new home. On the same date the following year, they were legally married by a rabbi.
When they’re not hibernating to meet a cookbook deadline, they’re shooting weekly podcasts — 205 in four years — and creating YouTube videos. For a breather, they hike on their property with their collies, Nosh and Spritz.
Mark now puts his Ph.D. in American Literature to use by presenting literary seminars at libraries in Cornwall, Salisbury and Norfolk, and leads book groups in Norfolk and Sharon. He will lead a seven-week seminar on Toni Morrison’s novels in February in Salisbury.
Bruce teaches knitting at Knits and Pearls in Avon, Knit New Haven and Black Sheep Knitting in Needham, Mass. As dexterous with knitting needles as he is with a paring knife, Bruce is teaching a one-day workshop on German short-row knitting in New Haven on Dec.15.
The business partners sequester themselves in Manhattan every year for a four-day movie blitz, and travel to see Mark’s family in Texas and Bruce’s family on the West Coast. They hope to go to New Zealand for Mark’s 60th birthday in 2020.
Bruce “was very foreign to me,” Mark says, “because I grew up in a Christian fundamentalist home. … I found Bruce to be an extremely kind person. I liked that he was incredibly curious about everything.”
Bruce says his life was very different from his spouse’s.
“I’m a liberal, atheist, New York Jew. … The rocks in my head fit the holes in his head,” Bruce says, joking about their relationship. “He was happy. He had a life. He had a community, and he was willing to share all of that with me. He’s also smart as hell and into things I never was. … He took me to Paris for a week,” the year they met.
Their initial “chemical” attraction has sizzled, simmered, stewed over the last 23 years, and continues to be enriched with travel, humor and the diverse ingredients of their personalities. “We live for dinner parties,” they say on their website, and they win followers with the cooking credo: “It should be fun.”
To get a taste of their joviality and a free class on making semi fred do, goto http://www.bruceandmark.com/.