Where's all the cookbook criticism?
A discussion of critics surrounding the Oscars and the lack of cookbook criticism, TikTok, Secret Food Moments, Menu Hotlines, Powerful Whiskey, The Oscars, and more!
Hello!
Back again, it’s been a crazy busy time!
We also just had the Oscars. We had a great ‘I’m Just Ken’ performance that drew inspiration from Marilyn Munroe’s ‘Diamonds Are A Girls Best Friend’. Ryan Gosling has a brilliant stage presence.
Just before the Oscars, I saw Anatomy of a Fall. I thought was very good. Deliciously ambiguous and intriguing. Incredible acting all round. And we haven’t had a good courtroom drama in a minute!
Special shout out to the dog Messi from Anatomy of a Fall who attended the Oscars and should’ve gone home with all the Oscars. Easily best performance.
Anyway, let’s get into this week’s newsletter:
Where’s all the cookbook criticism?
Is TikTok the new cookbook?
The Bad, The Ugly, and The “Good”
The Menu Hotline
Stolen Food Moments
Letters of Note: Drink it
Oscar Worthy Food Movies
Where’s all the cookbook criticism?
Thinking about the Oscars and who gets to decide what’s ‘good’ has prompted me to think about taste and criticism in hospitality and the food/beverage world.
I read an interesting blog post by Tim Mazurek in Lottie and Doof discussing the lack of cookbook criticism:
“Cookbooks, like all forms of cultural production, are mostly kind of bad. But unlike film, or literature, or even opera, they seem to exist within a culture of very strange universal praise because nobody really engages with cookbooks critically. They receive press. They appear on lists of the season’s best books compiled by editors who often have not read or cooked from them. They are posted about on Instagram by industry friends and colleagues of the author who got the book for free (#ad) and can’t wait to dive in to the book but probably never do. I might even be guilty of this! If the authors are very lucky (/have a good PR team) they get a spot on a morning or late-night television program. So it appears to the public as though everyone agrees they are good and have been vetted by experts. When the reality is that most cookbooks are not very good and very few people actually read them or cook from them, especially industry experts.”
“This general lack of criticism creates a strange feeling void around cookbooks. It is disappointing to encounter a cookbook you really hate and have nothing to do with that energy. No space for commiseration or shared outrage, no green splotches. It can make me feel inappropriate for having such strong feelings about cookbooks. It’s just a cookbook is what the cultural response can feel like.”
Paula Forbes similarly wrote a reply in her newsletter Stained Page News: “It’s just a cookbook” is an attitude I run into a lot. Frankly, it’s an attitude that feels extremely gendered to me: what does it mean that we don’t take cookbooks seriously enough to formally criticize them? Are we saying they’re fluff? That they’re domestic? Feminized? Not worth analyzing? Can’t be improved? And why aren’t we celebrating the ones that get it right? Take risks? Have the audacity to be weird or ambitious or wildly creative? Why aren’t we knocking down celebrity chefs who are resting on reputations from 25 years ago while barely looking at their books? Why are we letting TikTok stars with massive followings get away with half-assed recipes? Are cookbooks not serious enough to be treated like other intellectual pursuits, like novels or film?”
I completely agree, unfortunately, these good intentions and valid criticism fall short of creating real change when it comes to its first hurdle. The truth is, it takes an immense amount of time, and recipe testing to thoroughly review a cookbook. All of which cost, you guessed it, money.
Paula also raised a good point of who exactly is even buying all these cookbooks? And who are the editors commissioning them?
Is TikTok the new cookbook?
This leads me to the following question, ‘Is TikTok the cookbook for today’s generation?’
I admit there is an appeal to seeing a video of what you want to cook and watching someone else go through all the steps. The cookbook aisle in bookstores seems so overwhelming these days and it’s easy to get lost in a sea of mouth-watering pictures and good graphic design without learning anything about the quality of the recipes themselves. The algorithm is also freakishly good at somehow knowing what I’m craving.
Additionally, we want, and in some ways expect instant gratification now. A well-crafted TikTok recipe video is an immersive experience that fits an ‘aesthetic’, with ASMR sounds, maybe a quick personal story (unlike the ones that take 10 minutes to read on a blog), but importantly, well filmed attractive, easy-to-follow steps. “The appeal lies not just in the recipes but in the immersive experience of watching a dish come to life - all in under a minute.”
Interestingly Vanessa Santos the executive vice president of a publicity firm that represents several cookbook writers says “A recipe doesn’t need to be all that new or perfect, it is really just: Are they connecting with a personality?”
Without getting too philosophical either, I think there’s an element of identity-seeking within our consumption. When recreating a viral recipe on social media there is a part of us that want to ‘try on’ the identity sold with either the content creator or the associations attached to the food itself. The amount of times I’ve heard “Oh I’d just love to be the type of person who bakes sourdough bread in the morning” or comments about wanting to switch to a European Summer lifestyle and diet.
Equally, these endless and cyclical microtrends or ‘aesthetics’, purport to provide a ‘lifestyle’ or ‘identity’. Your breakfast in the morning isn’t just about what you are nourishing your body with, but what that says about you as a person. Think of the ‘wellness girlies’ who start their mornings with acai bowls vs those (most) who eat toast running out the door. Cooking is increasingly presented as a route to ‘self-optimisation’ and an path to become a the person you want to be. It’s not that this is inherently bad, or that food isn’t a huge part of our daily lives but it reminds me of Jia Tolentino’s book Trick Mirror:
“The ideal woman, in other words, is always optimizing. She takes advantage of technology, both in the way she broadcasts her image and in the meticulous improvement of that image itself.”
Interestingly, the New York Times published a piece titled ‘Are These Recipes Good, or Is the TikTok Chef Just Good-Looking?’
“My feed used to be dominated by a style of video popularized by BuzzFeed’s “Tasty” series in the 2010s: The action was generally shot from above or from the side, featuring close-ups of a creator’s hands chopping ingredients. But lately, more and more of the cooking video creators appear as their full selves, and most of them are blandly attractive. Sometimes, they don’t seem to even be cooking in the traditional sense. It’s reached the point where I can’t tell: Are these recipes good, or are the people leading me through them just good-looking in a way that’s rewarded by social media algorithms?”
Vox’s Rebecca Jennings wrote, “The internet has made it so that no matter who you are or what you do — from nine-to-five middle managers to astronauts to house cleaners — you cannot escape the tyranny of the personal brand.”
So, are more attractive people just preferred by the algorithm? Are these videos just a ‘trend’? And what does this mean for the recipes themselves? How do we know how much of a food content creator’s following is due to skill, expertise, entertainment, or attractiveness and the algorithm?
I’ve written about the positives and negatives of social media in the cocktail industry before, but I really think it’s such a huge part of our industry now, and am fascinated to look at it from an industry, societal, generational, and personal perspective.
The Bad, The Ugly, and The “Good”:
To wrap up this discussion, Wil Reidie’s newsletter The Recovering Line Cook made me chuckle in his summary of the food horrors to be found on social media in 2024 in a segment of his newsletter he calls ‘The Bad, The Ugly, and The “Good”.
The Ugly includes trends like “dry-aging” a steak for 6 months in Nutella, “a perfectly good steak, shoved rudely into a jar, then boiled for an hour, and some kind of casserole that consists of potato chips, sour cream, and processed bacon bits slow-cooked to a gluey mush in a Crockpot. Of course the results are horrible. And of course this is precisely the point.”
The “Good” captures a group of food creators that are genuinely passionate about sharing appealing dishes, that are building huge communities even though they don’t really have any training or professional experience.
He also raises the question: “Why did actually being a professional, experienced, authority on food who has spent years testing and refining their craft stop being important?”
The Menu Hotline:
“There is something inherently compelling about listing foods out loud. Think of Harlan Pepper naming those nuts in a film that holds a top 5 spot in my heart, Best in Show, or Bubba’s ode to shrimp in Forrest Gump. We love to hear the names of different foods, organized into a list and recited one after the other. While examples abound in TV and film, I’m happy to report that the most engaging paradigm exists in real life.
Consider the menu hotline. A quirky relic adrift in modern American food culture, an analog antidote to the Instagram drop, a curious window into the eating habits of folks across the country, menu hotlines provide an essential service to older, less web-literate demographics and an ephemeral snapshot of American foodways to curious callers. More evocative of landlines and phone books than websites and apps, these hotlines—and the deep food traditions they preserve—are still hanging on at a dwindling number of institutions and restaurants across the country. And they are all, by their very nature, just a phone call away.”
This is from TASTE Magazine. I had never heard of a menu hotline before! I’m utterly fascinated by it!
In addition to it being a cute, quirky relic, I think it taps into the issue of accessibility as well. Whether that’s because of illiteracy (21% of adults in the US are illiterate), visual impairments/eyesight difficulties, or wanting to access the menu before going to a restaurant (very common for neurotypical and anxious people).
“What’s most striking is the way regional specialties (and even the more prosaic everyday foods) are brought to life through oral histories in miniature. “Even if you’re just doing your job,” Sturdevant says, “you’re still imbuing whatever dish is on the menu with some kind of lived experience in a way that’s really profound.”
They offer a glimpse into how different Americans eat, live, cook, and sound.
If you’re interested in hearing them for yourself, here’s a list of hotlines in use, alternatively you can buy the Directory of American Menu Hotlines.
St. Charles Parish Hospital (The Oyster’s Pearl Grill and Cafe), Luling, LA, 985-786-4286
Kirtland Air Force Base, Albuquerque, NM, 505-846-8050
South Shore Hospital, Weymouth, MA, 781-624-8434
Creech Air Force Base, Indian Springs, NV, 702-404-0844
The Original Harvey’s Family Restaurant, Taylors, SC, 864-631-2806
Westwood Lutheran Church, St. Louis Park, MN, 952-767-5579
South Central Regional Medical Center, Laurel, MS, 601-426-4975
Stolen Food Moments:
Back in February, I wrote about the idea of ‘Secret Food’, inspired by Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher’s essay. “Fisher's concept of the Secret Food was more about idiosyncrasy; about the eating practices one carried out in private not because they were shameful but because it was inconceivable that anyone else might find similar rapture in them”.
The Bureau of Eating and Drink wrote a substack post in a similar vein about the “quieter memories that are just as visceral and memorable”.
They discuss the Off Menu Podcast (which I’ve shared before, and you should check out if you haven’t already), and their game of choosing the final dream restaurant meal.
“My choice for starter usually fluctuates between a dozen perfectly pristine oysters, or an elaborate Lyonnaise style charcuterie board. But if I’m actually, truly honest with you, my real favourite food is Vegemite toast, and not using particularly amazing bread either. And it’s that third, overly buttered, deeply unnecessary piece, eaten on the back porch as I take a stolen moment of pure private gluttony, that is the best of all.”
They go on to list a few of these Stolen Food Moments, such as the tip of a baguette torn directly from the bag, eaten while perambulating around the shops or the leftover chips in the fast food bag or the Bonus Nugget, the exhilarating and triumphant ‘found chocolate’ on an assuming Wednesday in the back of the pantry.
A little different from Secret Food Moments in that these are not necessarily odd idiosyncratic habits or hidden indulgences, but are unexcepted glimmers1 that can disrupt the monotony of everyday life.
The little things that often get left out in food writing.
Letters of note, Drink it:
Speaking of ‘glimmer’ moments, I am subscribed to Letters of Note and am regularly delighted by the little gems it puts into my inbox. This week it shared a letter from 1887 that American lawyer and orator Robert G. Ingersoll sent to his future son-in-law with a bottle of whiskey. The charming letter did the rounds and was printed by in the newspaper The Nation.
The letter was also spotted by the editor of The Christian Advocate Rev. Dr. J. M. Buckley who did not approve and responded with a letter of his own. Which includes the line “Drink it—and you will have woe, sorrow, babbling and wounds without cause. Your eyes shall behold strange women and your heart shall utter perverse things.”
Here are the two letters here for your enjoyment:
And the response from Buckley:
I think we need to know what whiskey they were drinking.
Oscar Worthy Food Films:
To bring this newsletter full circle, here is a list of the ‘All-Time Best Food Movies’ according to Eater Mag.
That’s all for this week, I’ll leave you with a tweet that made me both disheartened and chuckle:
Carlie xx
Glimmers- are tiny, seemingly insignificant moments when you feel a sense of joy, pleasure, peace, and gratitude. The opposite of triggers, psychology research is now showing just how important these moments are to our mental health and nervous system.