Something odd is going on in cookbook merchandising, and I'm
trying to understand it.
We're all familiar with the explosion of food websites and food
blogs in the last 10 years and their inevitable transition into
print. From Heidi Swanson and the Tipsy Baker to Food52 and Serious
Eats, there's an abundance of popular online hosts who've turned
author, and there are more every day.
Many, like
Ree Drummond (the "Pioneer Woman Cooks") and Fifi O'Neill (the
"Romantic Prairie" magazine) sell a DIY kind of lifestyle that
their readers don't necessarily have the time or life circumstances
to undertake themselves. It's not the first time that
cooks who are also talented photographers and stylists have taken
off in print. It's certainly not the first time a domestic-shelter
editor has successfully sold a lifestyle (see "Stewart,
Martha".) So that's not what's odd.
What I don't quite get is that
if you look at these cookbooks closely--and they are real eye
candy, some of them--something doesn't quite add up. Consider
the Romantic
Prairie Cookbook (by an expatriated Parisian living in
Florida). Grilled chicken with mandarin oranges? No mandarin
oranges on the prairie, unless I'm mistaken. There are sausages and
breads in the recipes, but they're mostly storebought. Recipes for
salmon, mussels, fish in a salt crust? Exactly where is this
prairie? And is it near Balducci's?
The new Pioneer Woman
Cookbook: Food from My Frontier makes me wonder, in the same
sort of way, which frontier we're dealing with: Italian meatball
soup? Thai chicken pizza? ChickenParmesan? Mango
margaritas? It's true that there is a recipe for pickles and
a recipe for jam in the back. But the language of
sustainability, self-reliance, and rugged wholesomeness conveyed by
the photographs is not spoken equally by the food.
I'm not wearing my reviewer hat, and I don't mean to denigrate
the food itself, which I haven't tested and which looks perfectly
fine. No matter where it hails from (and I think it's safe to
say it's not from Kansas), it's straight-ahead comfort food, like
what you might find in hundreds of midrange urban brunch
places.
Some may find themselves asking, "Why make it when I can
buy it in Brooklyn?" I'm not sure I can answer that.
But my guess is that it's not the cookbook's content but its
aura that you're buying--that glimpse of a life not lived by most
of us--a life of pale sunrises, endless horizons, quiet insights
silhouetted on horseback. Question is: is that life even
being lived by those who sell it?
