From the Publisher’s Desk: So You Want to Write a Cookbook? (The Cliff’s Notes)

Last month I got to visit the gorgeous offices of Harvard Common Press not once, but twice, and let me tell you – I’m about ready to move in there.

The second trip was with Boston Brunchers, founded by the multi-talented Renee Hirschberg. Renee works full time, is getting her masters, blogs several times a week, and runs a real life community whisking lucky bloggers to brunch several times a month in the Boston area.

This time she managed to swing a doozy – brunch for 40 at Harvard Common Press, complete with a question and answer session about publishing a cookbook with HCP’s associate publisher and digital media director Adam Salomone, owner Bruce Shaw, and marketing director Nancy Grant Mahoney (who’s name was too long for her Twitter handle, and got cut off – perhaps fortuitously? – to “Mahon”, a delightful cheese).

Writing a cookbook can be a two year process (or more). Here were some of the details in a snapshot:

Finding your Publisher:

  • Use Social Media to make friends with publishers: HCP has published authors they have gotten to know through Twitter!
  • In thinking about your blog and brand, remember what you are passionate about.
  • Engagement level: HCP will address many different aspects when evaluating a potential author. For bloggers, this includes writing, photography, voice, knowledge and interest, compete.com traffic, blog comments, twitter and facebook usage.

Process: so you’ve made it! You’ve waded through and have a publisher. What can you expect next?

  • Material Sources: It used to be that you could use 25% of previous blog recipes, now most publishers expect your cookbook to be 100% new material. (More work for you!)
  • Editorial Process: At HCP, editorial director Dan Rosenberg helps authors come up with a work plan, the developmental stage that helps you assess what needs to be in your cookbook.
  • Writing the manuscript: This can take 9-12 months, and realistically if you are a blogger, this means a lot less time eating out, cooking for the blog, and blogging in general.
  • Editors: You’ll likely have a robust back and forth with your editors. You’ll bang your head, panic, go a little crazy. This is good.

Ultimately, you, the editor and the publishers have the same goal in mind – to make your cookbook the best book it can be.

Once published (or almost published): Publishing houses used to have in-house marketing and do everything to pub and market a book. Now, authors can work closely with the publisher to promote the book. Bloggers have a built in market, and HCP works with the author with a wide variety of social media tools including tweet tours, blog tours (where the author may guest post on 10 or more different blogs), and in person tours.

(If you write a book, you can give a talk at Omnivore! Just make sure you ask Celia to provide some wine!)

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One more note, from me. If you want to write a cookbook, but aren’t ready to take the plunge, consider working for a published cookbook author on their next book. You will wash a lot of dishes, learn an enormous amount about the process, and be well–prepared when you eventually decide to write your own.

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Bruce Shaw, owner of Harvard Common Press, on Bloggers: “You are technically our competitors, but you are also our life blood here!”

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And some photos of the office:






A big thank you to the kind folks at Harvard Common Press for letting me snoop around!

Harvard Common Press

HCP Dishes Blog:
HCP Blog Eats (new in the blog world): http://www.blogeats.com/

Clifford A. Wright’s Swedish Sausage and Brussels Sprout Stew

For quite some time, the prevailing mental association I had of Sweden was Jamie Lee Curtis in ‘Trading Places’ running around a train claiming to be “Inga from Sweden” – despite the fact that she was wearing Austrian lederhosen. I still find myself laughing hysterically at this film when it comes on TBS. If you haven’t seen it, please do.

As for my current Swedish associations, Inga has been replaced with IKEA, the chef Marcus Samuelson, Trina Hahnemann’s lovely Scandinavian Cookbook, and Stieg Larsson’s Millenium trilogy. (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo books).

This weekend we went to see David Fincher’s version of “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”, which didn’t hold up for me as much as the Swedish films, which I adored.

What the movie did succeed in, was renewing my lust for the Swedish countryside. I became hungry for Swedish food. I wanted comfort food that reminded me of the simple, bare landscape. Also, I wanted comfort food that would help me to have the physique of Rooney Mara in her nude scenes of the film. Yes, I know that’s not going to happen. But loading myself up with healthy veg is a start.

So I picked up my copy of Clifford A. Wright’s “Real Stew: 300 Recipes for Authentic Home-Cooked Cassoulet, Gumbo, Chili, Curry, Minestrone, Bouillabaisse, Stroganoff, Goulash, Chowder and Much More” (what a mouthful! a tasty mouthful) which I got on a field trip to Harvard Common Press, and flipped to this Swedish Sausage and Brussels Sprout number. She’s not the most beautiful, but is chock full of tasty ingredients!

I’ve been cooking out of “Real Stew” for the past few weeks (beginning with a stellar recipe for “Classic Egyptian Lamb and Green Bean Stew). With New England weather the way it is, this cookbook came at the perfect time, right when I needed warming recipes for the quickly cooling weather.

I’m a big fan of any sort of soup, stew, or braising book, particularly when it is cold out and my strongest desire is keep warm and stir things for a couple of hours.

Real Stew isn’t full of glossy photos, but since stews aren’t usually the most photogenic, I wasn’t at all bothered. Wright does a marvelous job in the headnotes whetting your appetite for each recipe. The book is just as much a food history primer as it is a cookbook, and I learned a lot curled up in bed with it. (Although, this is unsurprising as Wright won a James Beard for food writing for his book A Mediterranean Feast. He is very good at the craft of cookbook writing.)  

This is a very simple recipe that can be put together in under twenty minutes from start to finish.

I made this recipe almost to the letter, which wasn’t hard, as there were nine ingredients including salt and pepper. I used smoked Turkey kielbasa from Trader Joes, which made it tasty enough, but if you can get the Swedish sausage that Wright mentions, I’m pretty sure it would make this recipe spectacular. Rather than a bouillon cube, I used “Better than Bouillon”, which, unless you have home made beef stock on hand (and praise you if you do), is pretty much the bees knees.

Now, my one word of warning is: this soup tastes like Brussels Sprouts, which, may in fact be obvious, because it is one of the two main ingredients in the title, but you won’t convert Brussels Sprouts haters with this recipe. Which is fine, because that makes more for you.

Swedish Sausage and Brussels Sprout Stew
recipe by Clifford A. Wright, “Real Stew” p. 164
reprinted with permission from Harvard Common Press

makes 4-6 servings

“This stew is one suggested to me by my Saab mechanic Haken Wiberg, who tells me that this stew, called korv-och kal-gryta, uses a kind of sausage called falukorv (or falnkorv), which comes from the town of Falun, northwest of Stockholm. It is a thick, bologna-like sausage popular throughout Sweden and made of beef, lean pork, and pork fatback. Sometimes dried milk is added to it. It is then smoked before finding its way into stews. The Swedes are nuts about falukorv, as you will see by visiting www.falukorv.net on the Internet. In this recipe it is cut into chunks to cook, after peeling the skin off. A good substitute would be a small, one-pound mortadella sausage, such as that made by Arzuman (ask your store manager). Arzuman uses dried milk. If you prefer beef, try Hebrew National beef bologna. A Swedish housewife would typically use a beef bouillon cube, but if you do, make sure you don’t use more salt than called for because the cubes are high in sodium.”

1 pound small mortadella sausage or large cooked or smoked Polish kielbasa, skinned and cut into large dice
1 large onion, chopped
2 large carrots, cut into 1/4-inch-thick rounds
1 1/2 pounds small Brussels sprouts, sliced lengthwise into thirds
1 bay leaf
2 teaspoons salt
6 black peppercorns
2 cups Beef Broth
1 cup water
Finely chopped fresh parsley leaves for garnish

1. Put all the ingredients, except the parsley, in  a stew pot, and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat to medium, cover, and cook until everything is tender, about 12 minutes.

2. Sprinkle with parsley and serve.

Tea Project: Types of Tea – CafeNation – MEM Russian Caravan

Tea Project
MEM Russian Caravan (pot, $2.50)
Cafenation, Brighton, Massachusetts

I thought it might be fun to create a list of different types of tea to try – the basis of my tea curriculum. So, I came up with one – that little flow chart in the picture above. Included are green teas, white teas, black tea, oolong, pu-erh, rooibos, mate and other herbal infusions. Some are true teas, others are not.

There is a lot of tea out there to drink. How do you narrow it down? Most grocery stores have a good half aisle devoted to tea. I actually snapped a few illicit tea photos in Whole Foods to see if I was missing anything obvious. It’s always shocking to me how many types of tea each brand carries! One possibility for this project is making it simpler for myself – working through all the teas imported by MEM Tea Imports and Samovar, but that still won’t get me to 500. (Although if either were to sponsor me, I’d be one happy tea drinker! Please??)

So, my goal, I think, is for quality rather than quantity, and making sure to get a good representation of different families of tea. I plan on working methodically, and going on the hunt for some really special experiences.

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Another aspect of this project is the excuse to acquire tea paraphernalia. Even though I most commonly drink hot tea out of a glass (just like Michael Pollan, apparently), I’m fascinated with all sorts of tea cups, pots, kettles and brewing contraptions.

I love this wonderful infographic by Wendy Chan on the taxonomy of teas. It includes several tea drinking countries around the world, represented both by type of tea drunk, and the cups used. I love it!

And a close-up of the center of the tea wheel:

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And finally, a few notes about my experience. Cafenation is in Brighton on Washington Street. It’s sort of an odd location, but the window ledge is a nice place to read a book and sip a pot of tea.

To drink, I went with the Russian Caravan, and added cream to complement the smokiness. I oversteeped it as I drew my little flow chart, but I never mind a little bitterness in my tea.

Russian Caravan is a blend of Chinese black teas, named after the caravans that used to import teas from China to Europe. It’s deep and smoky, and reminds me of old men arguing and playing backgammon. 

There were three notable occurrences this trip, which reminded me how fascinating humanity can be:

1. I sat behind a fellow wearing big headphones who took out about 25 pens and put them on the ledge, and proceeded to organize them and stick them in some sort of putty like he was making a Christmas Pomander (an orange studded with cloves).

2. A Russian gentleman, who actually ordered Russian Caravan tea and asked for “room”, proceeded to pour what must have been more than 1/4 cup of honey in his cup.

3. Two people sat next to me one table over, hugging. Yes, hugging, in full embrace, for at least five minutes until their order was ready.

And that was it. I spent several hours there, unconnected, computer-less, writing lists and thinking about tea. I’m looking forward to seeing where this project goes.

What type of tea are you drinking? 

Kitchen Resolutions, 2012.

Julia Child, photographed in her Cambridge, Massachusetts kitchen, June 29, 1970. By Arnold Newman/Getty Images.

I love this photo of Julia, because it reflects a level of organization that I aspire to – a sort of chaotic organization where everything is in plain view and accessible. And we all know that Julia Child got stuff done. 

Kitchen Resolutions, 2012:

I keep lists all year long, but January is a nice time to share them because everyone else seems to be sharing theirs, and it makes me feel a little less crazy to have a moleskin filled with thousands of bullet points. Here is my current kitchen list, in no particular order. I call them my “Kitchen Resolutions” because it has a nice ring to it. Some of these I do already, some I’m just starting, and others I’m working towards.

:: Take time each weekend to plan meals for the week. The goal here is to avoid the inevitable laziness that happens when I’m starving and haven’t thought of ideas for a meal. The main benefit is that it saves money and time, and it allows me to actually plan out new things to cook in advance.

:: Stock the larder with home made goodies. Once a month (at least) I like to make a new condiment. I’ve been working lately to put together a “condiment calendar” with ideas for each season.   

:: Wash all dishes and wipe down counters before going to bed each night. I’m too often guilty of leaving things until the next day. A clean slate makes life infinitely easier in the morning, and I feel even better when I have my coffee mise en place ready to go to avoid confusion during my morning grogginess.

:: Keep a running Kitchen Journal. I usually record what I eat in loose notes anyway, but I’d like a more concerted effort to put together a real kitchen diary that I can look at in the future, and maybe even pass on as a keepsake.

:: Take stock of what is in my pantry. J. Kenji Lopez-Alt has this ridiculous spreadsheet that I admire immensely. I’m pretty good at itemizing and knowing where things are, particularly with my large cookbook collection, but keeping better track of spices, expiration, etc. is the way to go.

:: Make a list of easy pantry meals. In addition to my meal planning, I’m working to compile a list of easy pantry meals to make if I’m really tired, or just don’t want what I’ve planned. Having this list will make things easier, and help me to avoid my standby spaghetti nights.

:: Start more food traditions. I love traditions. Maybe pizza night? Sunday brunch? I haven’t quite figured out one that works best for our household, but I’d love to find something.

:: Sign up for a few cooking classes. I learn a lot out of cookbooks, from cooking shows, videos on the internet, but hands on in the way to go. I’m particularly interested in Thai, Japanese, Filipino and Persian food at the moment.

:: Work on my “Things I’d Like to Cook List”. I’m working on my life list, but this one goes in tandem. So far I’ve been adding just a few things at a time to my Pinterest board.

:: Assess and update kitchen for efficiency. The kitchen needs some more love. I’d like ideally to get some metro shelving, maybe a peg board, and figure out the best layouts to move smoothly in the place.

:: Identify and celebrate my kitchen rituals. David Tanis and Nigel Slater (two of my favorite writers) have written so well about ritual – those little private moments in the kitchen that remind us why we love the place so much. Morning coffee, heating oil to re-cure my cast iron pan, afternoon tea, frying eggs, using my Microplane to zest, and making oats are some of my favorites, but I always love discovering new ones.

What are your kitchen resolutions? Do you keep a list?