It’s not enough to be a great cook. You must also be a great teacher.

Once the holidays are over, people are inspired to begin work on a cookbook. They’ve been enjoying serving great traditional family dishes and these recipes are indeed in demand and can sell well as cookbooks. But a well-known reviewer of cookbooks recently made some comments that I thought were important to pass on to our blog readers before anyone begins work on a cookbook.

This reviewer was getting ready to write about her top ten picks for cookbook of the year when she had to drop a favorite from her list. It is her custom to try at least one recipe from each book she approves for the list. But when she tried one from this book—the recipe failed. When this happens she always tries the recipe a second time and gives it to a tester to try independently. Both attempts were disasters. The oven temperature in the book, wasn’t correct, amounts were off, various timings were wrong—a real train wreck.

The reviewer, who also writes best-selling cookbooks herself, says it isn’t about just writing the recipes, it is about the cookbook author giving his or her recipes to other people who have never made the recipe before to be certain that it is absolutely correct. Then, of course, you set about getting them to tell you how it worked, how easy it was to follow, how accurate it was and anything else they did or didn’t like about it.

The book that got booted from the top-ten list is a truly beautiful cookbook, filled with lovely full color photos and beautifully produced in every way—except the one, of course. I would add that in addition to accuracy, a cook book writer should write about the recipe. It can be a little family story about it and an interesting description of how the dish should look, how it should taste, what to serve with it, and anything else that helps the reader to be interested in and finally succeed at using your wonderful recipes.

"Field Notes from Grief: The First Year is a unique collaboration of author Judith Gold Stitzel and artist Claudia Giannini, based on the private journals Judith kept during the year after her husband’s death. They had been married for forty-seven years.

“A story of love is encapsulated like a seed in a story of loss and then blooms on Judith Stitzel’s pages, accompanied by Claudia Giannini’s gorgeous images. ‘Grief requires its own syntax and vocabulary,’ Judith tells us in this chronicle of the first year after her husband’s death, and then proceeds to learn the language like a native. She rejects the clichés
customarily offered to and by the bereaved, instead gleaning her own complicated, honest, and resilient art.”
- Natasha Sajé, author of Bend

“Without being overly (and therefore unbelievably) encouraging, Field Notes from Grief affirms the reader through humor, honesty and attention to the emotional contradictions of loss. Different people need different things when they are grieving. But, as much as anything else, they need evidence that they will once again want to go on.”
- Stephanie Savitch, MS, LPC

More about this book