Cookbook Cool
Esoteric home cooks are increasingly sourcing their recipe collections and fully fledged cookbooks from an unlikely place: the magazine publisher. Non-food magazines, like design-led Apartamento and literary mag Worms, are dipping their toes into cookbook publishing, from multi-author compendiums to classic tomes. These new publications feel somewhere between a zine and a book, playing with our expectations of what a collection of recipes might be, what it might look like. This trend seems to run corollary to a broader dynamic, wherein the downturn of legacy print media is foregrounded by a bloom in independent publishing of magazines and zines dedicated to the niche stories and pieces now missing from mainstream publications.
While cookbook publishing maintains a rare growth market in print media, the industry suffers from many of the same problems that plague all publishing: risk-averse decisionmakers prioritize follower counts and Everyman content; writers from non-Western backgrounds struggle to place their proposals; and a lion’s share of sales are concentrated among a few titles. Celebrity cookbooks abound. The TikTok star to book deal pipeline is stronger than ever. But these industry problems also reveal the allure of the cookbook for non-traditional authors.
Cookbooks are a moneymaker, as well as a key relational tool for audience development.
For readers, independent cookbooks from nontraditional imprints fulfill the same desires that independent magazines are fulfilling in the broader landscape: offering singularity in an industry fixated on mass relatability.
Cookbook publishing is an ancient practice. The earliest surviving cookbook is De Re Coquinaria, a Roman catalogue with recipes ranging from the more baroque flamingo preparations to a surprisingly timeless salsa verde. For most of their history, however, cookbooks functioned more as trade publications for chefs to the elite. Only in the Victorian period did cookbooks target the home cook with Eliza Acton’s Modern Cookery for Private Families and later, Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management. It is in these books’ notes on homemaking that we begin to see the origins of modern cookery writing, which is just as much about the aspirations of the home cook as it is about the recipes within it.
Robbie Whitehead, editorial director at Apartamento, the Barcelona-based interiors magazine and now book publisher, told me about how cookbooks became such a large part of their work—they’ve put out almost twenty since 2016. For Apartamento, he says, food has always been central to the magazine’s audience engagement. He joined in 2009 and described his first meeting with the co-founders at a Tokyo bookstore where they were making sandwiches to promote the launch of the fourth issue. When the publisher began working on books, Whitehead tells me, the decision to publish a cookbook was organic.
He still looks back on Apartamento Cookbook #1, a “cakes and desserts” theme with contributions from Martha Stewart and Laila Gohar, and the earliest cookbooks they published with nostalgic fondness. In retrospect, he laughs at the seemingly redundant ideas of cakes and desserts, or winter soups, their second book in the series. “To be honest, I can’t remember how we came up with winter soups,” he says with affection.
But from there, the cookbook program grew, spurred by staff interest and interpersonal connections. Apartamento now publishes several cookbook series as well as single-author releases, from a collaboration with Belmond Hotels to a modern interpretation of De Re Coquinaria, a full-circle moment. Whitehead tells me that the decision to pursue cookbook publishing was not driven by metrics but that the metrics now back up the concept. “These different moments of launching a book and having them be well-received are not wake-up calls, per se, but good indicators that this is something that really connects with our readers, and something we can and should explore more.” After a decade of cookbooks, the team is reflecting on new directions. “It’s definitely become undeniably part of the core of Apartamento,” he says. “It’s something we’re aware of and continuing to develop.”
Dr. Anna Sulan Masing, writer and magazine publisher who edited the Penang edition of the Recipes & Wanderings collaboration series between Apartamento and Belmond, told me why the project felt like a fit for her. “Telling stories is the crucial part to magazines and cookbooks, but it only works well if these stories are anchored in the overall ethos of the magazine,” she said. “Why are you doing a cookbook? ‘Because it’s cool’ is not enough. Cookbooks are stories: what stories are you telling, what stories are you opening up the reader? Who are your storytellers? Are they also anchored in your ethos and overarching magazine’s story?”
The synergy between interiors and cookbooks is obvious: The home is where recipes come to life. But cookbooks aren’t just a vessel for one to transform their space by cooking in it; they are design objects themselves. They allow us to convey things about ourselves, our worldliness and special interests and political inclinations. The state of these objects signals something further; uncracked spines and dogeared copies are imbued with as much meaning as dull knives and scorched cocottes.
I grew up in a house with only a few cookbooks, anchored by a well-worn copy of The Joy of Cooking, but now I fill shelves with beautiful cookbooks that remain mostly un-referenced.
Aphrodesiacs, the latest in the Apartamento Cookbook series, feels physically more like a magazine, better displayed on my coffee table with copies of Pit, Guts, and Noble Rot than stacked on my shelves. It’s a thin, glossy hardback about the size of a school yearbook. Aphrodesiacs, like each book in the series, substitutes the conventional food photography of recipe books with illustrations from a single designer. Russian-born artist Sainte Maria’s illustrations blend images of the dish, the story, and the recipe developer themselves in black and white; Alessandro Giannetempo’s recipe for “Dom Top Slab Pie” shows him bare-legged in his disheveled kitchen, Yukiyasu Kaneko’s recipe for “Breathless Octopus Ceviche” shows him standing in the port city of his youth, bag of octopus in hand.
Its uniqueness makes me think of Extended Lunch by Mafruha Ahmad, a cookbook published by literary magazine Worms, a spiral notebook that slumps in its place on display at my local bakery next to the traditional hardbacks. Many of my own cookbooks look almost identical and, when stacked together, paint a picture of the last five years of cookbook publishing. This is perhaps another opportunity for non-food imprints exploring cookbooks: the ability to play with and ultimately subvert the physical form as well as the textual.
Aphrodisiacs has been well-thumbed by gentlemen callers surprised to see the word in large gold filigree so prominently displayed. “Aphrodesiacs, eh?” they ask, always my cue to pour more wine. It is here, where my sectional sofa meets my bookshelves—where every available surface is crammed with magazines, zines, and piles of cookbooks covered in trinkets; where my charity shop paperbacks mingle with the hardbacks my parents get me for Christmas; where I display the few galleys I’ve been so lucky to receive with pride—that the cookbook as object comes into focus. This particular thin cookbook, peppered with the names of friends and people I admire, joins the stacks of magazines I cling to like I once clung to copies of Teen Vogue, then Gourmet and The New Yorker. These stacks are different from my books—though they sit alongside them—moving from table to table, falling off my sofa, cycling through the order and disorder of interior life.
Rebecca Thimmesch is a writer and cook based in East London. Her newsletter Chic! focuses on food, culture, hospitality, and having fun.
