There’s fandom within the cookbook world.
Photo taken by me at Omnivore Books in San Francisco
We don’t really talk about them this way. I see people call them tools, or references, or coffee table books, or gifts. But if you spend even a few hours around people who love specific cookbooks, that breaks down pretty quickly.
I just got back from Cookbook Week in San Francisco (I moderated an amazing panel) and it felt less like an industry event and more like a gathering of people orbiting the same thing from different angles. Authors, editors, photographers, home cooks, collectors. Everyone had a different entry point, but the center was the same. A deep attachment to books filled with recipes…that somehow become more than recipes.
One of the projects people kept talking about was Cookbooking: A Fan’s Guide by the late Debbie Berne, coming out this fall. I was able to meet Debbie last year and am so glad this work will be published so I can read it. It’s positioned as a fan’s guide to cookbooks, like a visual, pop-history look at the genre. Not just what we cook, but how these books become objects we live with. What makes a cookbook something you keep next to your bed? What makes it feel like a companion?
That framing unlocked something for me.
If you zoom out, cookbook authors are doing something that looks a lot like fan labor. They spend two or more years working on a book (even more if you consider the work it takes to pitch and get the thumbs up). They test recipes over and over again. They write, edit, rewrite. They often pay for photography, for testing, for editing. They build an entire world around their point of view. And financially, it often doesn’t make sense. Many of them lose money or barely break even.
There are easier ways to make recipes, faster ways to distribute them, and more profitable ways to build an audience around food. And yet…they make the book anyway.
That gap between effort and outcome is where fandom lives.
I read a piece recently in Cultured Magazine by Ella Quittner that gets at this tension inside food writing. The question of what recipes are for, who they’re for, and what gets lost when everything is optimized for clicks or speed. Another piece in Taste Cooking asks why the cookbook endures at all when the internet can give you any recipe instantly.
Cookbooks hold a point of view.
That was the thing I kept noticing all week. Not just that each book had a perspective, but that the perspective was the reason people gathered around it in the first place. Before a release, during the launch, after it’s been out in the world for years. People connect through the lens the author offers.
I got glimpses of a dining table, a sense of a portal into someone’s life, a mother’s kitchen recreated through memory, and reclaiming culture and name. Cookbooks are a way of saying “this is how I feed people I love” or “this is how I take care of myself” or “this is where I come from.”
You don’t just cook from a cookbook. You enter it. And then you carry parts of it with you. That’s why the format hasn’t gone away. It was never competing on utility.
The internet is very good at giving you answers. And cookbooks are very good at giving you context with those answers. One tells you how to make a dish. The other tells you why it exists, where it came from, and what it feels like to make it in a specific kitchen, with specific people, under specific conditions. (And I’m biased…but I think a really good website can do that too!)
It also explains why people collect them. Why they stack them on shelves, on nightstands, on kitchen counters. Why they gift them or why they revisit the same ones over and over again even when they already know the recipes.
Sure, there are instructions and guidance. But they’re also maintaining a relationship. And relationships are not efficient.
Which led me to talking to my friend and client, Hetty McKinnon, about the next observation (and I am not the first one to think it). Cookbooks (broadly) don’t just have fans. Sure, who doesn’t love the concept of a cookbook. But fans are different. Cookbook authors grow them.
Over years of writing, teaching, hosting, sharing, showing up…the book is what happens after that relationship is nurtured. Which is why treating cookbooks like a flat category is so strange. As if they are interchangeable or as if they succeed or fail based on format alone.
A few nights I was at a cookbook event here in LA for our client Katie Parla and Eric Wareheim said something that stuck with me. He called cookbooks “a piece of art…not a Substack.”
Everyone laughed, but it landed. Because a cookbook isn’t just a container for content. It’s an authored object!
It carries taste, perspective, editing decisions, restraint, and excess. It reflects a body of work and a way of seeing. You can feel when someone has spent years refining that point of view. You can also feel when something has been flattened to meet a trend or fill a gap.
And fans can feel that difference immediately.
They’re not showing up for “a cookbook.” They’re showing up for this author’s way of cooking, hosting, sourcing, writing, living. The book just gives them a place to deepen that relationship and to bring it into their own home.
Which is why optimization falls apart here too. (remind you of anything else I’ve written about?)
If you tried to standardize what makes a successful cookbook, you would end up stripping out the very thing that makes people care. You would reduce it to structure, format, timing, category. You would try to reverse engineer something that is built on accumulated trust and personal expression.
You would make it easier to produce. And harder to love.
