June 13, 2026 • 38 mins
Do cookbooks still matter, or have they become expensive decorations for people who mostly cook from TikTok?
This week on Flavorphiles, Tanner and Jerry crack open the cookbook shelf to ask why we buy cookbooks and what they still give us that the internet can’t. We start with the strange joy of owning cookbooks we may never use, then talk with Matt Rodbard about how cookbooks actually get made and how they shape food culture.
Then we look back at cookbooks as the original food internet — part instruction manual, part status symbol, part cultural record. Finally, we dig into the books that earn their place on the shelf, from the practical workhorses to the ones that just make us want to cook.
Amuse Booze is a strange liquor we only read about in a book before tracking down a bottle.
For a full list of all the cookbooks recommended in this episode see flavorphiles.com and look for this episode.
Thank you for listening! Join us again every weekend for more food inspired fun. Have questions you want answered, comments to make the show better, do you want to join our growing list of radio stations partners, or just keep in touch? Let us know at Flavorphiles.com.
Follow on Instagram:
Flavorphiles: https://www.instagram.com/flavorphilespod/
Tanner: https://www.instagram.com/tagaragar/
Follow on Tik Tok:
https://www.tiktok.com/@flavorphiles
All episodes produced and owned by Tanner Agar. All rights reserved.
This week on Flavorphiles, Tanner and Jerry crack open the cookbook shelf to ask why we buy cookbooks and what they still give us that the internet can’t. We start with the strange joy of owning cookbooks we may never use, then talk with Matt Rodbard about how cookbooks actually get made and how they shape food culture.
Then we look back at cookbooks as the original food internet — part instruction manual, part status symbol, part cultural record. Finally, we dig into the books that earn their place on the shelf, from the practical workhorses to the ones that just make us want to cook.
Amuse Booze is a strange liquor we only read about in a book before tracking down a bottle.
For a full list of all the cookbooks recommended in this episode see flavorphiles.com and look for this episode.
Thank you for listening! Join us again every weekend for more food inspired fun. Have questions you want answered, comments to make the show better, do you want to join our growing list of radio stations partners, or just keep in touch? Let us know at Flavorphiles.com.
Follow on Instagram:
Flavorphiles: https://www.instagram.com/flavorphilespod/
Tanner: https://www.instagram.com/tagaragar/
Follow on Tik Tok:
https://www.tiktok.com/@flavorphiles
All episodes produced and owned by Tanner Agar. All rights reserved.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Today on Flavor Files, a whole episode on cookbooks. We'll
talk to a cookbook author. We'll take a look at
Tanner's cookbook shelf, which is enormous, by the way, and
the original food Internet. Can you guess what that was?
But first of all, before you get into amuse booze,
here Tanner, we're going to talk about why do we
(00:21):
buy cookbooks we never use? So we'll get to that
in just a second. But what's your amuse booze to
start us off today?
Speaker 2 (00:28):
Our ammuz boos today is something I had only read
about previously, and that's why I wanted it to be
the amuse Booze. It's a really interesting product. If you're
listening to the show, I have no idea how you
would ever get your hands on it, but it comes
from Copenhagen and it is distilled from pearl barley and
Pilsner molt. It's then fermented with koji, which is a
(00:51):
Japanese bacteria that makes things like soy sauce and all
kinds of really great Japanese ferments. It also has Belgian
sayson yeast in it, and then they add the botanicals
of Quint's Tea and kombucha going all into it. So
it's like a very weird, unique gin that only exists
(01:12):
in Copenhagen, and I read about it and I finally
tracked down a bottle. So if you also want to
drink kogi and Beljean Sayson sort of like gin, cheers
to you. But you can only read about those kinds
of things in books, which is a whole purpose of
this episode. Do cookbooks still matter? And to start with,
why do we buy cookbooks if we're never going to
(01:32):
use them? There's a Japanese term, and my Japanese is
not very good, but there's a Japanese term called sinduku
or sindoko. I'm not exactly sure how to say it.
That may sound sort of like the game, I guess,
but the term refers to buying books and letting them
pile up without the intention of reading them.
Speaker 1 (01:52):
Huh.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
And I couldn't. I'm certainly guilty of this because I
love acquiring cookbooks. I'm not very good at cooking out
of my cook books.
Speaker 1 (02:00):
Let's talk about various versions of what we're dealing with here,
cookbooks as aspiration. What do you mean by that?
Speaker 2 (02:07):
It's a version of myself that I might become right,
I might be a person who cooks like this. I
might be a person who mills my own flour so
that way I can start making my sour dough, right,
because everybody got into sour dough after COVID. But the
next step is do you even make your own flour?
Are you even trying? You know, because freshly milled flour
(02:28):
is actually great.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
One thing that this reminds me of is so many
people to watch the Food Channel but don't cook.
Speaker 2 (02:35):
Of course, food can be entertainment, and just because you're
not going to make something doesn't make it not great.
Our guests coming up to the next segment, he on
his show just had some guys I know just wrote
a cookbook called Vitaminate and it's all about like foods
that start with tea in Mexico, and they talk about
how it's important to like you can nix to molize
your own corn, and you can crush that and you
(02:57):
can make tortillas. Here's the deal. Do I know how
to do that? Yes? Am I going to go through
the hassle? No? Because I live in Texas and so
other people are doing it around me, I can just
buy their tortillas. But I love reading about it. I
love thinking about doing it. I love like, well, you
could do this or you could do that, and this
would be so interesting. And this is what's interesting is that,
you know, cookbooks have really shifted from here's how to
(03:19):
do something. There's like very coffee table friendly books now
where you just want to look at the pictures and
you just want to read the stories. There's a great
cookbook I love called North. It's all about Iceland, and
I bought it prior to my trip to Iceland. And
it's about the dairy farmers in Iceland, and it's about
the foragers in Iceland, and it's about Icelandic culture and
it's beautiful photos of Iceland. And I have cooked out
(03:41):
of that book. I've also been I've met the chef
who wrote the book signed it for me. But what's
funny about it is I love the book because it's
a vacation to Iceland. It's a trip to experience a
culture that I can take from my sofa.
Speaker 1 (03:57):
Yeah, so cookbooks is aspiration, cook books as travel. We
have cookbooks that people love just because they like the
way it looks. It's a coffee table thing.
Speaker 2 (04:08):
Absolutely, you know the because they're so well designed now,
the photography is so good, the pictures are good. I
mean I love to just have them. I mean it's
also just sort of like a little comfort, you know,
even if it's unopened. It's like I like knowing that
it's there. I like knowing I can visit those different
little worlds, right, I like knowing that if I really
wanted to do this, Like I have a Syrian cookbook.
(04:30):
I've never been to Syria. I don't know very much
about Syrian cuisine. But there's a comfort that I have
knowing that if tomorrow night for dinner, I want to
visit Syria, I know how it's right there and it's safe,
and so I mean I feel like Smoug sitting on
my pile of riches, you know, in the Lonely Mountain
from Lord of the Rings, just sitting there knowing I've
(04:51):
got all of my little treasures. I mean, does a
dragon use gold, No, but they like to hoard it.
And that's how I feel about my recipes.
Speaker 1 (05:00):
Well, I have a cookbook and I got it from you.
It's Texas Cowboy Cooking, and I don't really cook out
of it. I may have made one or two things
out of it, but it's there on the kitchen counter,
right next to the microwave. The thing is, I see
it all the time, and I like Cowboy cooking, and
it makes me think of what I might have when
I'm in Dallas next time, and it makes me think
(05:21):
about getting together with you, and that means something.
Speaker 2 (05:25):
Of course. So that's a perfect example, right. Lots of
restaurants will write a cookbook, and of course it's a
way to sort of capture what they were doing and
what that restaurant was like at the time. So that's
a really interesting thing. But what's also interesting about it
is that, like it does make you think about what
you could do, what you could eat, who you could be.
(05:47):
You know, these are all things that are really fun
and something that I love, And I mean I love
to think about food so much so that despite the
fact that I spend my entire week wholly focused on
the restaurant business and food and flavor, I still feel
it necessary to wake up and record this show with
you every week.
Speaker 1 (06:07):
What's the difference between I want to cook this or
something you mentioned a little bit ago. I want to
be that kind of person.
Speaker 2 (06:15):
Well, I want to cook this. You know, it does
obviously require the doing of the cooking, And it's not
really the cooking that's the problem. It's the washing up
that's always the part that I don't want to deal with.
Rights it's cleaning the whole kitchen after one of these projects.
But it doesn't matter even if it's an aspirational thing. Look,
I know you have plenty of James Patterson novels. You're
not going to become a lawyer, can't you? Just isn't
(06:38):
it okay?
Speaker 1 (06:39):
Right?
Speaker 2 (06:40):
I'm not going to become Jack Ryan, But I enjoy
watching the television program like it doesn't. I think that's
something that really is annoying is like people will say,
you have these cookbooks, but you don't cook. It doesn't matter.
They serve a different purpose therefore something else. They're entertainment.
I'm going I don't want to give away my whole list,
but I have some of my favorite cookbooks I'm going
(07:00):
to be talking about later on the show. There are
cookbooks that I have that I have literally read from
start to finish. I have purchased a cookbook and then
sat there and in one sitting, read an entire book.
Page turner. I'll tell you about at the end of
the episode. But that's what's just They're just fun. I mean, look,
you're listening to flavor files right now. Does that mean
(07:21):
that I expect you to go out and start a
restaurant or make a dinner or No. You're listening because
it's entertainment, it's culture, it's who we are. And I
think one thing that makes cookbooks so cool is that
it's also something that you can do. I could buy
a book about songwriting, but I have zero experienced songwriting,
So I could go through the book and my song
(07:44):
would be bad. I would get to the end and
I would have worked hard, but it would be bad.
But almost everyone has experienced cooking, and so having a
cookbook sort of show you a way to peek into
somebody's ideas or a way to peek into a culture.
That is just such a very cool thing that's unique
to cookbooks. You can get into cookbook. One thing I
would say too about cookbooks, you know, it's not just cookbooks.
(08:07):
You see people who stack up. I've been to people's
houses where they just have, you know, an entire collection
of like food and wine or bone appetite, just lining
shelves where they keep all of these because they're you know,
this sort of like look into what was food in
the nineties, what was food ten years ago? These are
cool things And regardless even if you never cook out
(08:28):
of these. Do you know that old George Carlin book
about if you go to a girl's house and she
has no books, don't sleep with her. Why is that, Well,
because she doesn't read. This is not somebody that you
should be with.
Speaker 1 (08:41):
Well, you know what. You know what also happens. We're
straying a little bit here, but sometimes some famous politician
or a person who's really popular with one segment but
not with others will put out a book and people
buy it and put it on the coffee table. Then
they don't even read.
Speaker 2 (08:55):
It, right, they just want to support that person.
Speaker 1 (08:58):
Which is or a book like someone who supports or
it's that person.
Speaker 2 (09:01):
And look, we don't even charge for flavor files. You know,
you're just supporting us by listening or sharing our information
on TikTok or Instagram or flavorfiles dot com.
Speaker 1 (09:11):
So you go out and you buy a cookbook for
whatever your reason is, and you hardly ever look at it,
and it just sits there on a shelf or a
coffee table. But you don't see that as a failure.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
No, it's not a failure to John Lennon has a
great quote about time and enjoyed is never wasted. It's
not a waste to have a cookbook that you don't
cook out of. What's a waste is to feel bad
about having something you like. And if you enjoy being
surrounded by your little treasures, then that's all that matters.
(09:42):
I love having my books. I love that they're there.
I love looking at them. We built, we did whole
built in shelves in our house so that we could
show them off. I mean, we love to have books
the same way that I also, you've seen my house,
I have what two hundred bottles of liquor just stacked up.
I have so many that the shelves that I built
to hold the liquor now can't hold it all, and
(10:04):
there's some just sitting on the floor of the pantry.
Then I don't drink all of them every day. I
don't even drink that much at home. But I like
looking at them. To me, they're my art, They're my museum.
This is the place I curated for myself to be restorative,
and it doesn't matter if you never cook ever, having
those things around you improves the quality of your life.
(10:25):
We're talking all about do cookbooks still matter? But I
couldn't think of a better person to ask, how does
a cookbook even get made? Is it worth making a cookbook?
Going through all of that hard effort. We have Matt
Rodbar joining us today. He is the award winning author
of Koreatown, Korea World Food IQ, which are both three
very different cookbooks. He also works with Taste and This
(10:47):
is Taste. He's the host of that podcast there. Welcome
to the show, Matt, Thank you, Tanner.
Speaker 3 (10:51):
I appreciate it.
Speaker 2 (10:53):
Obviously you've made cookbooks. What's the process of I think
I should do one? How do you go from that
ideation point?
Speaker 3 (11:00):
I mean, you first have to like think about the
next three years of your life and do you want
to really sacifice it? And then you have to look
at your bank account and realize, Okay, is is there
enough money in there to make this work? I'm kidding
a little bit. I think my role is is really
unique because I've written these cookbooks, but I also work
at Penguin Random House, so I work within the world
(11:23):
of making cookbooks. And I mean you really, honestly, you
start with with the passion and the real I would
say domain expertise. Those are two very different things, but
they're both required for a cookbook author to take this
this leap, this leap of faith. And if you have both,
(11:45):
meaning you you you love your topic enough to spend
hours and hours on weekends and nights to actually write
the manuscript and you you actually have something to say,
and you have some skills, and you have some knowledge.
You're you're right, you're your right fit for the cookbook.
Speaker 2 (11:58):
How do you know you're the right person for the cookbook?
Speaker 3 (12:01):
Well, it's a great question, because you know, you look
at a cookbook store, like a stack at a Barnes
and Noble, and you see like many many different authors
writing about the same stuff. And I mean, I think
one thing if you know you're right a right fit
is is you have an innate voice. And I think
(12:22):
like that's the biggest thing an editor is going to
look for, is that there's a real voice there and
that there's something really to say about this pile of recipes.
And you know, cookbooks are certainly a pile of recipes.
But I do think that in this day and age,
cookbooks serve much more of a purpose than just getting
dinner on the table. I think that cookbooks are documents
(12:45):
about culture. Cookbooks are literary works, works that are read
for deep pleasure. Cookbooks are are a way to tell
a family story, the drama and family relationships and the
celebrations and family relationships. Books can be other things too.
Cookbooks can be jokes, can be humor. I mean, we're
publishing a great book in the next couple of years
(13:06):
that is just all basically one big joke, which I
think is like a really great thing for the industry,
and I think it goes back to where the audience is.
So of course, with this digital age, there's so much
happening in food media that are not part of cookbooks,
that are part of like the social element, that are
on substack, that are in magazines online. So cookbooks have
(13:28):
to stand on their own and be their own work.
And we're seeing this audience reading cookbooks and putting cookbooks
on their nightstands. Cookbooks are on coffee tables. They're far
away from the kitchen, and I believe this fully. The
other thing too, and I'll close, is like cookbooks are
a collection of recipes that are put out like they're
(13:49):
bound and it's like three hundred to four hundred maybe
even more pages. You're not getting that with a social feed.
You're not really getting that with a substack. And that's
why think cookbooks are here to stay and are riving
because I think the large, this large audience of food lovers,
you know, your show addresses them every episode. There's a
huge audience for food knowledge, but they're not getting that
(14:12):
deep investment in a topic with a social feed or
a sub stack.
Speaker 1 (14:17):
Matt. We had on the show a friend of mine.
Her name is lee Ane Phillips, and she's a registered nutritionist.
She has a thing called Eat This with Lee Aanne Phillipson,
and she has a cookbook. And she was telling me
that she had to make every one of the recipes
and make sure it was right, and then she had
to make it again. When the photographer came around, I
can see why, you said, what are you doing for
(14:38):
the next three years?
Speaker 3 (14:40):
Yeah, I mean there's so much there, Jerry. It's like,
you have to be able to write the recipe on paper,
you have to be able to test it, and you
have to test it a second time. Contractually, they obligate
you to have a tested recipe in the book and
then you have to style it again for the photoshoot.
So sometimes at the minimum it's three but many more
versions of the of the recip and uh, it's time
(15:01):
intensive and you have to have it goes back to
that passion. You have to have a real passion for it.
Speaker 2 (15:07):
So are you tired of the book by the time
it comes out? Are you eat had all the Korean
food you can possibly handle?
Speaker 1 (15:14):
Tanner?
Speaker 3 (15:15):
First off, I can never have enough Korean food in
my life. I will be having it this week. But Tanner,
you are one hundred percent correct when you're in copy
edits and it's like your fourth pass of the copy
and that's before we even start a look at design elements.
You're like, I'm I'm done with this book.
Speaker 1 (15:33):
Yeah, you have to.
Speaker 3 (15:34):
Like know going in that there's going to be a
lot of pain involved. And I say that with all
respect to people who have pain in their lives, because
there's lots of different ways pain can be articulated, but
writing a coop books is a very special kind of pain,
and it's it's really being in a word doc that
has over four hundred pages and seventy five thousand words.
I mean, these word docs are so big, and we
(15:56):
have so many edits and notes that they sometimes crash
your computer. And so a lot of cookbook authors are
feeling this pressure around three, round four, round five, and
really you just have to be ready for it. But
in the end, when you're there on pub day and
you have this book in your hand and you're talking
about something you have a deep passion for and you're
sharing it with everyone in the world, it really is
(16:18):
worth it.
Speaker 2 (16:19):
There are cookbooks I own that I have never cooked from.
In fact, most of my cookbook collection is that way. Yeah,
So how do you find the right balance.
Speaker 3 (16:27):
Well, it's a good point because I think you look
at our books. You know, we wrote two books about
Korean food, and like a big part of it was,
you know, telling the story of the Korean American diaspora
in our first book and in our later book, Korean
Food in Korea and around the World. So a big
goal of ours was just to instruct and teach and
really just tell these great stories. So we were like
(16:48):
really targeting that as one of our main audiences. So
we if you like read, you know, the introduction and
read a few of our essays. I'm like, we're good. Like,
you don't have to cook any of the recipes now,
I hope you find some recipes that you like and
maybe are cooking. But like I have to recognize as
an author, like we're not seeing social Like we're not
seeing mentions of all of our recipes. There's like probably
(17:11):
ten recipes that we see mentions of time and again.
But then there's the other ninety that probably don't even
get touched. That said, we don't know, and there's maybe
somebody out there who is actually cooking through the book,
which happens sometimes, and so we have to think about
all those different audiences. But I think with the books
we do at Crown Publishing Group where I work, which
is Clarkson Potter intends to be Pressed, I think that
(17:32):
they do an amazing job kind of balancing the utility
of a book but also having real narrative, having great
photography that kind of backs up the narrative and makes
it really an enjoyable read, and that's hard to do.
Speaker 1 (17:46):
Well. Your name is Matt Rodbard and you don't look
Korean over the computer here, So what attracted you to
do not one, but two cookbooks on Korean food.
Speaker 3 (17:57):
Absolutely, so I am not Korean. I wrote both books
with a dear friend of mine, Dookie Houng, credible chef.
We just saw this huge opportunity and you know, as
a journalist, I saw this big story that wasn't being told.
And so at that point, like Korean food, there were
some books out there, but not many, and there weren't
many being written from the journalistic point of view, you know,
(18:19):
with the deep help of a chef in collaboration. So
for me, I was like, this is the story of
my life and of a generation. And we've seen that
really play out here in twenty twenty six. Korean food
is everywhere, both in the States and in Canada and
around the world, and you know, it's a big part
of it is Korean culture is everywhere. So we were
(18:40):
really ahead of that when we were writing our first book.
But I think the hope was always that the world
would recognize Korea as a very special place, in a
unique place with a very specific culture and amazing thing
to celebrate within books.
Speaker 2 (18:53):
How do you know that a cookbook's going to age, Well,
it's obviously important to you that this document isn't just
on the internet that it does exist in physical nature
in twenty fifty. How do I know this will still
be a good book that I'm proud of.
Speaker 3 (19:08):
Yeah, So I think, like I look at books as
two things, like obviously you want them to be around
forever and to be a you know, the recipes are
are universal and travel and time and space. But also
it's a document of that period of time. So when
we make a reference like in food IQ, that book,
we're writing that in twenty twenty, twenty twenty one, So
(19:28):
we had to acknowledge kind of the zeitgeist at the time.
And I think people maybe go back to it, and
hopefully if we do a good job it's like entertaining
enough and worthy of reading that maybe that reference to
like Chugi and like, you know, the lexicon of the
time maybe doesn't doesn't like feel out of place. It
just feels like, okay, yeah, they were writing in twenty
twenty one, and and so I don't we don't really
(19:48):
like we're not that concerned. But like I think with
like the availability of products, like we're hoping that as
we as these books age, like some of the products
will be more available and that some of the techniques
that we over explaining in our twenty sixteen book is maybe,
like people know what kimchi is now, we didn't assume
that in twenty thirteen, so we had to be very
overly over explain what kimchi is. So it kind of
(20:12):
is always in the back of our head, but it's
not that big of a concern.
Speaker 1 (20:16):
Matt Rothbard is a food author and a cookbook author
and podcaster and it was great of you to spend
time with us. Thank you very much, Jerry and Tanner.
This has been a lot of fun.
Speaker 3 (20:26):
Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (20:27):
The original food internet is the cookbook.
Speaker 2 (20:30):
Yeah, it's the original food Internet. When you think about cookbooks,
you know, something that we've been talking about is it
allows you to kind of capture people thoughts, ideas kind
of in one place. And if you think about kind
of the way original cookbooks used to be, that's what
they were doing. Did you ever know, obviously you grew
up a different time than me, did you ever have
like a box of recipes, like a physical box of
(20:52):
recipes and some of them would say like Mary's chocolate
chip cookies, hats, dinner rolls, things like that. Of course,
so that was the original food internet. That's how stuff
was spread around, right is you had your personal intranet
almost of little recipes that you gathered from your friends.
And you know, I don't know if you've ever seen this,
(21:13):
but like you know, people have put recipes on their
tombstones before you can google this. Really yeah, there's actually
this person online who made this blog basically of finding
recipes on gravestones and then making the recipes and letting
you know how they are.
Speaker 1 (21:31):
So that's that's terrific. And of course I think some
of the original cookbooks were put together by church groups
or a ladies organization and it literally would have Mary's casserole.
Speaker 2 (21:43):
Or that kind of thing exactly. I remember having a
church cookbook back in the day. I remember mom submitting
to the church cookbook and it was a thing like
what recipe are you going to pick? Or is a
recipe perfect? And one thing that's always funny if you
get these books that are sort of collected, it's cool
because it's a snapshot of a community. It's a snapshot
(22:03):
of the people that are at this church at this time, right,
or it's this school because it's a fundraiser they're putting
something together the Junior League. It's huge for this. If
you go to used bookstores, use cookbookstores are an absolute
treasure trove. I love them, and you can find tons
of Junior League books and it's interesting, right, It's very
interesting for me to take a book from the eighties
(22:25):
and it was a whole bunch of random people in
Dallas in the eighties saying, these are our favorite recipes
that we want to share with our friends. Before we
could text, before we could save on TikTok, before you
could watch flavor files on TikTok or Instagram, like, this
is where I got them, and you can see handwriting.
And I also think it's funny like cookbooks these days,
(22:45):
you know, they work so hard to make sure that
the formatting of all the recipes is the same and
it's consistent, and the measurements are all consistent. You pull
these like family collected books together, none of that stuff
matches at all. They're totally different, and measurements are in
different sizes. You'll have people say enough flower, because you're
just supposed to know what enough means.
Speaker 1 (23:07):
Tennor, I saw a video where this guy was cooking
with his mother and she was the stereotypical Italian nona
at this point, and she goes and then the flower
and look, she grabbed a handful and he goes, well
how much? Well that that much? Yeah, but how do
I know? I know that was their answer. I know,
how are you gonna put that in a recipe?
Speaker 2 (23:28):
You can't. You can't, right, But and that's sort of
what's cool about them too, is they also sort of
like that they capture the way people actually cook, not
the way that they aspire to cook, not the way
that they think, not the way that you know, this
is chefy. It's just actual people's actual cooking. And there's
such a wonderful piece of like modern archaeology to be
(23:48):
able to maintain and see what people really like. And look,
I said before that they're not really that organized. They
can be chaotic, okay, they can just not have steps
that are in it, but there's like a I don't know,
there's just a charm in them because they're you can see,
like just people who are really proud of it. I
think that's one of the things that's so cool to
(24:09):
me is you know, this is something that was meaningful
to somebody, you know, like Okay, Taylor my business partner,
the chef at the restaurant, his mom makes this seven
layer dip and I remember it from when we were kids.
And when Taylor throws a party at his house, especially
the super Bowl party, he makes that dip, it's Don's dip, right,
and like it has her name on it, it's her brand.
(24:30):
Like her son, who you know is fairly accomplished as
a chef now still pulls out his mom's recipe and
cooks it for friends. And it's so cool to leave
through a book and imagine all the people for whom
that's true. This was their thing, right for you, it
would be your mom's dinner rolls, right, Pat's dinner rolls.
(24:50):
They have like a special place in our hearts. And
it doesn't matter if they could have been technically better,
because they were the way that they were. And it's
to see those things preserved, even if sometimes along the
way you get jello salad and very bizarre castle roles
and people a little misguided about what maybe they should
(25:11):
have been eating. It's part of it. It's a part
of the culture, okay.
Speaker 1 (25:16):
But if you go even further back and get recipes
from say a couple hundred years ago, and that's kind
of fun on the one hand, but they'll have units
of message you don't understand what they mean.
Speaker 2 (25:26):
The farther you look back, actually, the more fun it
becomes because things also used to be spelled different ways,
or they would have really different things. There's so many
funny different things. There's a dish that I read about
one time where it's basically I think it's like the
backside of a hair sewn to the front side of
a goose. It was something like absolutely crazy like this
(25:47):
that they would book and like Tudor England, a hair
as in a rabbit, you mean right, yeah, yeah, yeah,
not just one single hair.
Speaker 1 (25:56):
It's time capsules of a time. And do you think
that the internet has totally replaced this sense of community.
Speaker 2 (26:05):
I think the Internet has definitely created these sort of
parasocial relationships which change how we interact. But that's why
you know when you're trying to get a recipe and
you can't because all you can see is this like
giant long, like five paragraphs of their personal life that
you have to scroll through before you can finally get
(26:27):
to the recipe you want. Yeah, I think that's what's
happening is people are saying the Internet has taken away
the closeness of recipe sharing and we're going to replace
it now.
Speaker 1 (26:38):
If you are putting up recipes on the Internet and
you want to do that, God bless you. You want
to tell your life story, you want to talk about
your adventure with this dish, please have a button that
says jump to.
Speaker 2 (26:49):
Recipe please please, because it's it's kind of estme. I've
heard though that like the search engines prioritize ones that
feel like there's more to it than just a list recipe,
so that's part of the reason that they do it.
So if anybody out there from chat ept or Anthropic
or Google is listening, please change that because it's getting
(27:12):
in the way of my recipe research.
Speaker 1 (27:14):
Yeah, it's just I love to see people online showing
how they cook a recipe, but sometimes it's sometimes it
feels as though you're just doing this to stick these
ads in here that please don't do that. That's why
I like to jump the recipe button.
Speaker 2 (27:33):
There's definitely people who are abusing that that are sort
of you know, they're just trying to farm out content
and this is something where you know this is going
to be an interesting thing that we'll see coming up
is will the rise of AI can create you know,
people talk about AI slop. There's AI food slop coming
out right, bad articles, bad recipes, and you know, it'll
(27:55):
be interesting to see how that happens, how that changes.
Are the people who are able to farm likes to
their website going to be doing that sort of in
a negative way because they're just trying to get the
ad revenue and all the recipes will be terrible. And
will it erode the credibility in some ways of people
that are putting out actually good content, actually good stuff.
Speaker 1 (28:17):
Yeah. I quote Anthony Burdain here sometimes from Kitchen Confidential,
and I think I remember from that book where he
was saying, you know, with the Internet now you can
look up anything, you can look up how to cook anything,
and so what's the point of a cookbook? And he
was saying, it's because, if it's done right, it has
kind of the soul of the chef. I mean, I'm
paraphrasing because I haven't read it for a while, but
(28:39):
it's the person who made the book brings something to
it beyond just the recipe. And so I would say
that if you're going to do some recipes online. You're
listening to us and think, yeah, I can do that.
I'm a good cook. Give us your soul. That's what
we want.
Speaker 2 (28:53):
Absolutely.
Speaker 1 (28:54):
I think the biggest cook book shelf I've ever seen
is the one that you have tan or you have
an enormal a number of cookbooks and when you go
out to book buy cookbooks, I think I know how
you do it. The cookbooks there, and you're not out
of money yet.
Speaker 2 (29:08):
So yeah, that's true.
Speaker 1 (29:09):
Yeah, you just buy everything. We have photos somewhere of
you coming out of a cookbook store and you've just
got armloads of these things. But most people don't operate
that way. So if someone's going to buy a cookbook
for a gift, what's a good place to start, A
good way to go?
Speaker 2 (29:25):
Well, a great way to buy cookbooks always is use bookstores. Okay,
And there are treasure tros there, especially used bookstores in
neighborhoods where you know there's a lot of wealthy old people.
Because unfortunately wealthy old people they do pass and their
kids go, what are we going to do with all
this stuff? And so they just start donating it. There's
(29:47):
a company called Half Priced Books, the family that owns it.
It's a big chain, but the family that owns it
are actually big supporters of our restaurant. I love going
to there because you can get so many books at
half price. There's nothing wrong with the used cookbook. In fact,
some of the cookbooks I'll show you of mine you
have to be careful with because I've broken the bindings
from reading them or using them or throwing them around
(30:08):
the restaurant. If you're going to buy somebody a gift,
there's nothing wrong with the used cookbook in my opinion,
especially if you can get a signed copy. Those are
always fun. But what I would try to find is
is there something you know they like to make? But
a place oriented book is the perfect thing to get
somebody as a gift. I just went to China. I
know you love to cook. Here's a cool book that
(30:29):
has some of those recipes. Or you're having a destination wedding.
What better thing to give somebody than a cookbook for
the destination where they got married. Really cool gift idea.
Speaker 1 (30:39):
You have a stack of cookbooks in front of you
from yourself, so why don't we just do a thing
here where you pick up the book and tell us
what it is and why you have it cool. I'm
going to go someone else might want it.
Speaker 2 (30:50):
I'm going to try to go quickly because there's, you know,
so many of them here.
Speaker 1 (30:53):
All right.
Speaker 2 (30:54):
So if you're a person who, like, during COVID, got
into sourdough and you're like, what's something else I could
make at home? That's not that complicated, but it's really rewarding.
This is a really cool book. So this book is
called Charcuterie. It is by Michael Ruhman, who has done
many famous books. It's all about how to make charcuterie
meets at home, how to cure whole muscles at home,
(31:15):
how to make salami at home, how to make all
kinds of cool things. And I've talked lots of times
about charcuterie and how it's cool to make. But you
could make your own from scratch charcuterie board. A lot
of people don't realize that it's easier than you think.
That book will tell you how. All right, then I
just like just expounded upon the values of having books
(31:35):
you don't cook out of just because they're fun. This
would be two of these, because these books are complicated.
These are books that I read and think how does
that go together? So one, I mean, these are not
original books for me to recommend. But the Noma Cookbook
is absolutely wonderful. It's really fun to read.
Speaker 1 (31:52):
You know.
Speaker 2 (31:53):
I started this segment talking about the use of Kogi
bacteria in Denmark. Where do you think I read about
stuff like that in the writings of the Noma team.
The Noma team what they're doing, and the photography is
absolutely stunning. This restaurant's about to close forever, so probably
the only way you're ever going to get to see
(32:13):
it is via these pages. Okay, next, And this is
definitely an aspirational book. I remember, it's very fun for
me now. I remember getting this book for the first
time and not knowing how to cook very well, and
now being on the other side, I can pull off
all the magic tricks that are in this book. But
if you would like to pull off culinary magic tricks,
(32:34):
the a Linear Cookbook is probably absolutely one of the
very best for that. It's a gorgeous book. The photography
is amazing, the techniques are still there are still pioneering, challenging,
interesting techniques. But the good news is that book is
so old now and so many people have knocked off
and ripped off everything that they did that you can
actually the ingredients, the tools, all the things that were
(32:57):
kind of impossible to get when this book came out
you can actually now get and so you can cook
from that book now. And so if you're like I
want to step up my game, like I'm good at cooking,
but I had all the send drive to made a
positive veg variations that I want. I want something where
I think this is pushing my limit. That's an amazing
book to do that. Alinea a restaurant out of Chicago.
(33:19):
And if you're going to get into food science, an
amazing book this would be The Food Lab by j
Kenji Lopez Alt Better home Cooking through Science. He was
a line cook and by his own admission, would get
in trouble for asking too many questions. So he's now
made a career out of answering questions for people. And
this book, I mean, this thing is a ton He
(33:42):
is like completely dedicated to better cooking through science, explaining
why your food is better or not as good as
you wanted. And you can learn so much from him,
even at the professional level. I think some of his
deep research and testing is amazing to look at, and
I love it. The food Lab, I did want to
make sure I showed off this one. I teased it
at the beginning of the show. A book that I
(34:03):
sat down and read cover to cover in one sitting
Aaron Franklin at Franklin Barbecue in many ways sort of
helped sort of propel the next generation of Texas barbecue
and the quality that we see everywhere. He's a really
important barbecue figure. It's funny he got really famous for barbecue.
And they came to him and said, we want you
(34:24):
to write a cookbook here a famous chef. And he said,
what do you mean, I only have four recipes? What
do you How do you only have four recipes? Ago,
I make brisket, I make sausage, I make turkey. I
guess I have a couple sides. Maybe I've got six.
I can't write a cookbook. He calls it a meat
smoking manifesto here on the front. And what I found
(34:47):
such a good page turner about it is there's an
entire chapter basically just about how to pick wood. This
is the type of wood you should use, this is
what your wood should look like. This is how you
manage your wood. Here's how you build your fire, Here's
how you do all of this.
Speaker 1 (35:00):
It.
Speaker 2 (35:00):
I understand how like nerdy this sounds. But a genuine
page turner, A fabulous book.
Speaker 1 (35:09):
Franklin Barbecue.
Speaker 2 (35:11):
Franklin Barbecue, a phenomenal book.
Speaker 1 (35:12):
Yes, the thing is fascinating to read, even if you
never do any of it.
Speaker 2 (35:17):
In a lot of ways, cookbooks aren't actually about the cooking.
They're about the capturing of culture. They're about the imagination
that it sturs up. I do not own an offset smoker,
but I'll tell you this cookbook makes me want to
own one. A cookbook that I think serious food people
should own is The Flavor Bible. It's a very unique
(35:37):
cookbook and that it has no recipes. All you do
is you turn to a page. You turn to a page.
So this page has mars Capone, and it sort of
tells you a little bit about Marx copone, and then
it gives you a list of all things that taste
good with mars Capone. And then it even has a
special little section where it tells you like, but these
are the things that are absolutely the best. These are
(35:59):
the combos. So if you like Marskapone, you should try
it with chocolate and strawberries, or cinnamon and pumpkin, or
fix and persudo. Okay, So this book is a whole
book that tells you how to do stuff. And so
if you're cooking at home and you're tired, how do
I eat healthy but then also make stuff that's more
interesting and mix it up fantastic. You can just turn
(36:20):
to a page and you'll say, wonderful. I'm gonna be
eating a lot more pomegranates for whatever reason. And here's like,
I don't know, there's got to be thirty different ingredients
that they say are perfect with pomegranates.
Speaker 1 (36:33):
It's like a color wheel for chefs.
Speaker 2 (36:36):
Almost everybody has this book. Almost everybody. And when you think,
how do you come up with these combinations? I don't.
I look them up in the Flavor Bible.
Speaker 1 (36:45):
There's your secret.
Speaker 2 (36:46):
Quickly. If you love wine, you want to learn more
about wine, you're kind of getting into it, maybe wine folly.
I buy copies of this and give them to my staff.
It's a wonderful tool for teaching people that like wine
but don't know a lot academically about wine. It's a
phenomenal book. I got my Level one Samuier test and
I use that book to study for it. Next Punch,
(37:10):
this is a book all about the history of punch.
Punch is the original cocktail.
Speaker 1 (37:14):
They were.
Speaker 2 (37:14):
It was a way for people on long ship voyages
if they mixed the rum ration in with citrus. The
rum kept the citrus from spoiling, and the citrus helped
the sailors not get scurvy. They also then would drink
it because I got them drunk. This is not a cookbook. Really,
there's recipes in it. It's a cook abook, but it's
more about history and again an absolute page turner. And
(37:38):
last book I have to promote. I don't know if
you know this, but there is exactly one published cookbook
with one of my cocktail recipes in it, and it
is this book, Texas Cocktails, an elegant collection of one
hundred recipes from around the state, and he put one
of Apothecary's cocktails of cocktail. I'm very proud of that.
Speaker 1 (37:57):
You should be hey. For a complete list of all
the books that we're mentioned here on flavor Files today,
go to our website flavorfiles dot com. We've listed them there.
Go to the cookbooks episode and if you haven't been
listening to the episodes. Go there anyway, because we've got
a lot of them there, and hey, I recommend why
(38:17):
don't you start with food that kills. That's flavor files
p h i l e. S dot com
Today on Flavor Files, a whole episode on cookbooks. We'll
talk to a cookbook author. We'll take a look at
Tanner's cookbook shelf, which is enormous, by the way, and
the original food Internet. Can you guess what that was?
But first of all, before you get into amuse booze,
here Tanner, we're going to talk about why do we
(00:21):
buy cookbooks we never use? So we'll get to that
in just a second. But what's your amuse booze to
start us off today?
Speaker 2 (00:28):
Our ammuz boos today is something I had only read
about previously, and that's why I wanted it to be
the amuse Booze. It's a really interesting product. If you're
listening to the show, I have no idea how you
would ever get your hands on it, but it comes
from Copenhagen and it is distilled from pearl barley and
Pilsner molt. It's then fermented with koji, which is a
(00:51):
Japanese bacteria that makes things like soy sauce and all
kinds of really great Japanese ferments. It also has Belgian
sayson yeast in it, and then they add the botanicals
of Quint's Tea and kombucha going all into it. So
it's like a very weird, unique gin that only exists
(01:12):
in Copenhagen, and I read about it and I finally
tracked down a bottle. So if you also want to
drink kogi and Beljean Sayson sort of like gin, cheers
to you. But you can only read about those kinds
of things in books, which is a whole purpose of
this episode. Do cookbooks still matter? And to start with,
why do we buy cookbooks if we're never going to
(01:32):
use them? There's a Japanese term, and my Japanese is
not very good, but there's a Japanese term called sinduku
or sindoko. I'm not exactly sure how to say it.
That may sound sort of like the game, I guess,
but the term refers to buying books and letting them
pile up without the intention of reading them.
Speaker 1 (01:52):
Huh.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
And I couldn't. I'm certainly guilty of this because I
love acquiring cookbooks. I'm not very good at cooking out
of my cook books.
Speaker 1 (02:00):
Let's talk about various versions of what we're dealing with here,
cookbooks as aspiration. What do you mean by that?
Speaker 2 (02:07):
It's a version of myself that I might become right,
I might be a person who cooks like this. I
might be a person who mills my own flour so
that way I can start making my sour dough, right,
because everybody got into sour dough after COVID. But the
next step is do you even make your own flour?
Are you even trying? You know, because freshly milled flour
(02:28):
is actually great.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
One thing that this reminds me of is so many
people to watch the Food Channel but don't cook.
Speaker 2 (02:35):
Of course, food can be entertainment, and just because you're
not going to make something doesn't make it not great.
Our guests coming up to the next segment, he on
his show just had some guys I know just wrote
a cookbook called Vitaminate and it's all about like foods
that start with tea in Mexico, and they talk about
how it's important to like you can nix to molize
your own corn, and you can crush that and you
(02:57):
can make tortillas. Here's the deal. Do I know how
to do that? Yes? Am I going to go through
the hassle? No? Because I live in Texas and so
other people are doing it around me, I can just
buy their tortillas. But I love reading about it. I
love thinking about doing it. I love like, well, you
could do this or you could do that, and this
would be so interesting. And this is what's interesting is that,
you know, cookbooks have really shifted from here's how to
(03:19):
do something. There's like very coffee table friendly books now
where you just want to look at the pictures and
you just want to read the stories. There's a great
cookbook I love called North. It's all about Iceland, and
I bought it prior to my trip to Iceland. And
it's about the dairy farmers in Iceland, and it's about
the foragers in Iceland, and it's about Icelandic culture and
it's beautiful photos of Iceland. And I have cooked out
(03:41):
of that book. I've also been I've met the chef
who wrote the book signed it for me. But what's
funny about it is I love the book because it's
a vacation to Iceland. It's a trip to experience a
culture that I can take from my sofa.
Speaker 1 (03:57):
Yeah, so cookbooks is aspiration, cook books as travel. We
have cookbooks that people love just because they like the
way it looks. It's a coffee table thing.
Speaker 2 (04:08):
Absolutely, you know the because they're so well designed now,
the photography is so good, the pictures are good. I
mean I love to just have them. I mean it's
also just sort of like a little comfort, you know,
even if it's unopened. It's like I like knowing that
it's there. I like knowing I can visit those different
little worlds, right, I like knowing that if I really
wanted to do this, Like I have a Syrian cookbook.
(04:30):
I've never been to Syria. I don't know very much
about Syrian cuisine. But there's a comfort that I have
knowing that if tomorrow night for dinner, I want to
visit Syria, I know how it's right there and it's safe,
and so I mean I feel like Smoug sitting on
my pile of riches, you know, in the Lonely Mountain
from Lord of the Rings, just sitting there knowing I've
(04:51):
got all of my little treasures. I mean, does a
dragon use gold, No, but they like to hoard it.
And that's how I feel about my recipes.
Speaker 1 (05:00):
Well, I have a cookbook and I got it from you.
It's Texas Cowboy Cooking, and I don't really cook out
of it. I may have made one or two things
out of it, but it's there on the kitchen counter,
right next to the microwave. The thing is, I see
it all the time, and I like Cowboy cooking, and
it makes me think of what I might have when
I'm in Dallas next time, and it makes me think
(05:21):
about getting together with you, and that means something.
Speaker 2 (05:25):
Of course. So that's a perfect example, right. Lots of
restaurants will write a cookbook, and of course it's a
way to sort of capture what they were doing and
what that restaurant was like at the time. So that's
a really interesting thing. But what's also interesting about it
is that, like it does make you think about what
you could do, what you could eat, who you could be.
(05:47):
You know, these are all things that are really fun
and something that I love, And I mean I love
to think about food so much so that despite the
fact that I spend my entire week wholly focused on
the restaurant business and food and flavor, I still feel
it necessary to wake up and record this show with
you every week.
Speaker 1 (06:07):
What's the difference between I want to cook this or
something you mentioned a little bit ago. I want to
be that kind of person.
Speaker 2 (06:15):
Well, I want to cook this. You know, it does
obviously require the doing of the cooking, And it's not
really the cooking that's the problem. It's the washing up
that's always the part that I don't want to deal with.
Rights it's cleaning the whole kitchen after one of these projects.
But it doesn't matter even if it's an aspirational thing. Look,
I know you have plenty of James Patterson novels. You're
not going to become a lawyer, can't you? Just isn't
(06:38):
it okay?
Speaker 1 (06:39):
Right?
Speaker 2 (06:40):
I'm not going to become Jack Ryan, But I enjoy
watching the television program like it doesn't. I think that's
something that really is annoying is like people will say,
you have these cookbooks, but you don't cook. It doesn't matter.
They serve a different purpose therefore something else. They're entertainment.
I'm going I don't want to give away my whole list,
but I have some of my favorite cookbooks I'm going
(07:00):
to be talking about later on the show. There are
cookbooks that I have that I have literally read from
start to finish. I have purchased a cookbook and then
sat there and in one sitting, read an entire book.
Page turner. I'll tell you about at the end of
the episode. But that's what's just They're just fun. I mean, look,
you're listening to flavor files right now. Does that mean
(07:21):
that I expect you to go out and start a
restaurant or make a dinner or No. You're listening because
it's entertainment, it's culture, it's who we are. And I
think one thing that makes cookbooks so cool is that
it's also something that you can do. I could buy
a book about songwriting, but I have zero experienced songwriting,
So I could go through the book and my song
(07:44):
would be bad. I would get to the end and
I would have worked hard, but it would be bad.
But almost everyone has experienced cooking, and so having a
cookbook sort of show you a way to peek into
somebody's ideas or a way to peek into a culture.
That is just such a very cool thing that's unique
to cookbooks. You can get into cookbook. One thing I
would say too about cookbooks, you know, it's not just cookbooks.
(08:07):
You see people who stack up. I've been to people's
houses where they just have, you know, an entire collection
of like food and wine or bone appetite, just lining
shelves where they keep all of these because they're you know,
this sort of like look into what was food in
the nineties, what was food ten years ago? These are
cool things And regardless even if you never cook out
(08:28):
of these. Do you know that old George Carlin book
about if you go to a girl's house and she
has no books, don't sleep with her. Why is that, Well,
because she doesn't read. This is not somebody that you
should be with.
Speaker 1 (08:41):
Well, you know what. You know what also happens. We're
straying a little bit here, but sometimes some famous politician
or a person who's really popular with one segment but
not with others will put out a book and people
buy it and put it on the coffee table. Then
they don't even read.
Speaker 2 (08:55):
It, right, they just want to support that person.
Speaker 1 (08:58):
Which is or a book like someone who supports or
it's that person.
Speaker 2 (09:01):
And look, we don't even charge for flavor files. You know,
you're just supporting us by listening or sharing our information
on TikTok or Instagram or flavorfiles dot com.
Speaker 1 (09:11):
So you go out and you buy a cookbook for
whatever your reason is, and you hardly ever look at it,
and it just sits there on a shelf or a
coffee table. But you don't see that as a failure.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
No, it's not a failure to John Lennon has a
great quote about time and enjoyed is never wasted. It's
not a waste to have a cookbook that you don't
cook out of. What's a waste is to feel bad
about having something you like. And if you enjoy being
surrounded by your little treasures, then that's all that matters.
(09:42):
I love having my books. I love that they're there.
I love looking at them. We built, we did whole
built in shelves in our house so that we could
show them off. I mean, we love to have books
the same way that I also, you've seen my house,
I have what two hundred bottles of liquor just stacked up.
I have so many that the shelves that I built
to hold the liquor now can't hold it all, and
(10:04):
there's some just sitting on the floor of the pantry.
Then I don't drink all of them every day. I
don't even drink that much at home. But I like
looking at them. To me, they're my art, They're my museum.
This is the place I curated for myself to be restorative,
and it doesn't matter if you never cook ever, having
those things around you improves the quality of your life.
(10:25):
We're talking all about do cookbooks still matter? But I
couldn't think of a better person to ask, how does
a cookbook even get made? Is it worth making a cookbook?
Going through all of that hard effort. We have Matt
Rodbar joining us today. He is the award winning author
of Koreatown, Korea World Food IQ, which are both three
very different cookbooks. He also works with Taste and This
(10:47):
is Taste. He's the host of that podcast there. Welcome
to the show, Matt, Thank you, Tanner.
Speaker 3 (10:51):
I appreciate it.
Speaker 2 (10:53):
Obviously you've made cookbooks. What's the process of I think
I should do one? How do you go from that
ideation point?
Speaker 3 (11:00):
I mean, you first have to like think about the
next three years of your life and do you want
to really sacifice it? And then you have to look
at your bank account and realize, Okay, is is there
enough money in there to make this work? I'm kidding
a little bit. I think my role is is really
unique because I've written these cookbooks, but I also work
at Penguin Random House, so I work within the world
(11:23):
of making cookbooks. And I mean you really, honestly, you
start with with the passion and the real I would
say domain expertise. Those are two very different things, but
they're both required for a cookbook author to take this
this leap, this leap of faith. And if you have both,
(11:45):
meaning you you you love your topic enough to spend
hours and hours on weekends and nights to actually write
the manuscript and you you actually have something to say,
and you have some skills, and you have some knowledge.
You're you're right, you're your right fit for the cookbook.
Speaker 2 (11:58):
How do you know you're the right person for the cookbook?
Speaker 3 (12:01):
Well, it's a great question, because you know, you look
at a cookbook store, like a stack at a Barnes
and Noble, and you see like many many different authors
writing about the same stuff. And I mean, I think
one thing if you know you're right a right fit
is is you have an innate voice. And I think
(12:22):
like that's the biggest thing an editor is going to
look for, is that there's a real voice there and
that there's something really to say about this pile of recipes.
And you know, cookbooks are certainly a pile of recipes.
But I do think that in this day and age,
cookbooks serve much more of a purpose than just getting
dinner on the table. I think that cookbooks are documents
(12:45):
about culture. Cookbooks are literary works, works that are read
for deep pleasure. Cookbooks are are a way to tell
a family story, the drama and family relationships and the
celebrations and family relationships. Books can be other things too.
Cookbooks can be jokes, can be humor. I mean, we're
publishing a great book in the next couple of years
(13:06):
that is just all basically one big joke, which I
think is like a really great thing for the industry,
and I think it goes back to where the audience is.
So of course, with this digital age, there's so much
happening in food media that are not part of cookbooks,
that are part of like the social element, that are
on substack, that are in magazines online. So cookbooks have
(13:28):
to stand on their own and be their own work.
And we're seeing this audience reading cookbooks and putting cookbooks
on their nightstands. Cookbooks are on coffee tables. They're far
away from the kitchen, and I believe this fully. The
other thing too, and I'll close, is like cookbooks are
a collection of recipes that are put out like they're
(13:49):
bound and it's like three hundred to four hundred maybe
even more pages. You're not getting that with a social feed.
You're not really getting that with a substack. And that's
why think cookbooks are here to stay and are riving
because I think the large, this large audience of food lovers,
you know, your show addresses them every episode. There's a
huge audience for food knowledge, but they're not getting that
(14:12):
deep investment in a topic with a social feed or
a sub stack.
Speaker 1 (14:17):
Matt. We had on the show a friend of mine.
Her name is lee Ane Phillips, and she's a registered nutritionist.
She has a thing called Eat This with Lee Aanne Phillipson,
and she has a cookbook. And she was telling me
that she had to make every one of the recipes
and make sure it was right, and then she had
to make it again. When the photographer came around, I
can see why, you said, what are you doing for
(14:38):
the next three years?
Speaker 3 (14:40):
Yeah, I mean there's so much there, Jerry. It's like,
you have to be able to write the recipe on paper,
you have to be able to test it, and you
have to test it a second time. Contractually, they obligate
you to have a tested recipe in the book and
then you have to style it again for the photoshoot.
So sometimes at the minimum it's three but many more
versions of the of the recip and uh, it's time
(15:01):
intensive and you have to have it goes back to
that passion. You have to have a real passion for it.
Speaker 2 (15:07):
So are you tired of the book by the time
it comes out? Are you eat had all the Korean
food you can possibly handle?
Speaker 1 (15:14):
Tanner?
Speaker 3 (15:15):
First off, I can never have enough Korean food in
my life. I will be having it this week. But Tanner,
you are one hundred percent correct when you're in copy
edits and it's like your fourth pass of the copy
and that's before we even start a look at design elements.
You're like, I'm I'm done with this book.
Speaker 1 (15:33):
Yeah, you have to.
Speaker 3 (15:34):
Like know going in that there's going to be a
lot of pain involved. And I say that with all
respect to people who have pain in their lives, because
there's lots of different ways pain can be articulated, but
writing a coop books is a very special kind of pain,
and it's it's really being in a word doc that
has over four hundred pages and seventy five thousand words.
I mean, these word docs are so big, and we
(15:56):
have so many edits and notes that they sometimes crash
your computer. And so a lot of cookbook authors are
feeling this pressure around three, round four, round five, and
really you just have to be ready for it. But
in the end, when you're there on pub day and
you have this book in your hand and you're talking
about something you have a deep passion for and you're
sharing it with everyone in the world, it really is
(16:18):
worth it.
Speaker 2 (16:19):
There are cookbooks I own that I have never cooked from.
In fact, most of my cookbook collection is that way. Yeah,
So how do you find the right balance.
Speaker 3 (16:27):
Well, it's a good point because I think you look
at our books. You know, we wrote two books about
Korean food, and like a big part of it was,
you know, telling the story of the Korean American diaspora
in our first book and in our later book, Korean
Food in Korea and around the World. So a big
goal of ours was just to instruct and teach and
really just tell these great stories. So we were like
(16:48):
really targeting that as one of our main audiences. So
we if you like read, you know, the introduction and
read a few of our essays. I'm like, we're good. Like,
you don't have to cook any of the recipes now,
I hope you find some recipes that you like and
maybe are cooking. But like I have to recognize as
an author, like we're not seeing social Like we're not
seeing mentions of all of our recipes. There's like probably
(17:11):
ten recipes that we see mentions of time and again.
But then there's the other ninety that probably don't even
get touched. That said, we don't know, and there's maybe
somebody out there who is actually cooking through the book,
which happens sometimes, and so we have to think about
all those different audiences. But I think with the books
we do at Crown Publishing Group where I work, which
is Clarkson Potter intends to be Pressed, I think that
(17:32):
they do an amazing job kind of balancing the utility
of a book but also having real narrative, having great
photography that kind of backs up the narrative and makes
it really an enjoyable read, and that's hard to do.
Speaker 1 (17:46):
Well. Your name is Matt Rodbard and you don't look
Korean over the computer here, So what attracted you to
do not one, but two cookbooks on Korean food.
Speaker 3 (17:57):
Absolutely, so I am not Korean. I wrote both books
with a dear friend of mine, Dookie Houng, credible chef.
We just saw this huge opportunity and you know, as
a journalist, I saw this big story that wasn't being told.
And so at that point, like Korean food, there were
some books out there, but not many, and there weren't
many being written from the journalistic point of view, you know,
(18:19):
with the deep help of a chef in collaboration. So
for me, I was like, this is the story of
my life and of a generation. And we've seen that
really play out here in twenty twenty six. Korean food
is everywhere, both in the States and in Canada and
around the world, and you know, it's a big part
of it is Korean culture is everywhere. So we were
(18:40):
really ahead of that when we were writing our first book.
But I think the hope was always that the world
would recognize Korea as a very special place, in a
unique place with a very specific culture and amazing thing
to celebrate within books.
Speaker 2 (18:53):
How do you know that a cookbook's going to age, Well,
it's obviously important to you that this document isn't just
on the internet that it does exist in physical nature
in twenty fifty. How do I know this will still
be a good book that I'm proud of.
Speaker 3 (19:08):
Yeah, So I think, like I look at books as
two things, like obviously you want them to be around
forever and to be a you know, the recipes are
are universal and travel and time and space. But also
it's a document of that period of time. So when
we make a reference like in food IQ, that book,
we're writing that in twenty twenty, twenty twenty one, So
(19:28):
we had to acknowledge kind of the zeitgeist at the time.
And I think people maybe go back to it, and
hopefully if we do a good job it's like entertaining
enough and worthy of reading that maybe that reference to
like Chugi and like, you know, the lexicon of the
time maybe doesn't doesn't like feel out of place. It
just feels like, okay, yeah, they were writing in twenty
twenty one, and and so I don't we don't really
(19:48):
like we're not that concerned. But like I think with
like the availability of products, like we're hoping that as
we as these books age, like some of the products
will be more available and that some of the techniques
that we over explaining in our twenty sixteen book is maybe,
like people know what kimchi is now, we didn't assume
that in twenty thirteen, so we had to be very
overly over explain what kimchi is. So it kind of
(20:12):
is always in the back of our head, but it's
not that big of a concern.
Speaker 1 (20:16):
Matt Rothbard is a food author and a cookbook author
and podcaster and it was great of you to spend
time with us. Thank you very much, Jerry and Tanner.
This has been a lot of fun.
Speaker 3 (20:26):
Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (20:27):
The original food internet is the cookbook.
Speaker 2 (20:30):
Yeah, it's the original food Internet. When you think about cookbooks,
you know, something that we've been talking about is it
allows you to kind of capture people thoughts, ideas kind
of in one place. And if you think about kind
of the way original cookbooks used to be, that's what
they were doing. Did you ever know, obviously you grew
up a different time than me, did you ever have
like a box of recipes, like a physical box of
(20:52):
recipes and some of them would say like Mary's chocolate
chip cookies, hats, dinner rolls, things like that. Of course,
so that was the original food internet. That's how stuff
was spread around, right is you had your personal intranet
almost of little recipes that you gathered from your friends.
And you know, I don't know if you've ever seen this,
(21:13):
but like you know, people have put recipes on their
tombstones before you can google this. Really yeah, there's actually
this person online who made this blog basically of finding
recipes on gravestones and then making the recipes and letting
you know how they are.
Speaker 1 (21:31):
So that's that's terrific. And of course I think some
of the original cookbooks were put together by church groups
or a ladies organization and it literally would have Mary's casserole.
Speaker 2 (21:43):
Or that kind of thing exactly. I remember having a
church cookbook back in the day. I remember mom submitting
to the church cookbook and it was a thing like
what recipe are you going to pick? Or is a
recipe perfect? And one thing that's always funny if you
get these books that are sort of collected, it's cool
because it's a snapshot of a community. It's a snapshot
(22:03):
of the people that are at this church at this time, right,
or it's this school because it's a fundraiser they're putting
something together the Junior League. It's huge for this. If
you go to used bookstores, use cookbookstores are an absolute
treasure trove. I love them, and you can find tons
of Junior League books and it's interesting, right, It's very
interesting for me to take a book from the eighties
(22:25):
and it was a whole bunch of random people in
Dallas in the eighties saying, these are our favorite recipes
that we want to share with our friends. Before we
could text, before we could save on TikTok, before you
could watch flavor files on TikTok or Instagram, like, this
is where I got them, and you can see handwriting.
And I also think it's funny like cookbooks these days,
(22:45):
you know, they work so hard to make sure that
the formatting of all the recipes is the same and
it's consistent, and the measurements are all consistent. You pull
these like family collected books together, none of that stuff
matches at all. They're totally different, and measurements are in
different sizes. You'll have people say enough flower, because you're
just supposed to know what enough means.
Speaker 1 (23:07):
Tennor, I saw a video where this guy was cooking
with his mother and she was the stereotypical Italian nona
at this point, and she goes and then the flower
and look, she grabbed a handful and he goes, well
how much? Well that that much? Yeah, but how do
I know? I know that was their answer. I know,
how are you gonna put that in a recipe?
Speaker 2 (23:28):
You can't. You can't, right, But and that's sort of
what's cool about them too, is they also sort of
like that they capture the way people actually cook, not
the way that they aspire to cook, not the way
that they think, not the way that you know, this
is chefy. It's just actual people's actual cooking. And there's
such a wonderful piece of like modern archaeology to be
(23:48):
able to maintain and see what people really like. And look,
I said before that they're not really that organized. They
can be chaotic, okay, they can just not have steps
that are in it, but there's like a I don't know,
there's just a charm in them because they're you can see,
like just people who are really proud of it. I
think that's one of the things that's so cool to
(24:09):
me is you know, this is something that was meaningful
to somebody, you know, like Okay, Taylor my business partner,
the chef at the restaurant, his mom makes this seven
layer dip and I remember it from when we were kids.
And when Taylor throws a party at his house, especially
the super Bowl party, he makes that dip, it's Don's dip, right,
and like it has her name on it, it's her brand.
(24:30):
Like her son, who you know is fairly accomplished as
a chef now still pulls out his mom's recipe and
cooks it for friends. And it's so cool to leave
through a book and imagine all the people for whom
that's true. This was their thing, right for you, it
would be your mom's dinner rolls, right, Pat's dinner rolls.
(24:50):
They have like a special place in our hearts. And
it doesn't matter if they could have been technically better,
because they were the way that they were. And it's
to see those things preserved, even if sometimes along the
way you get jello salad and very bizarre castle roles
and people a little misguided about what maybe they should
(25:11):
have been eating. It's part of it. It's a part
of the culture, okay.
Speaker 1 (25:16):
But if you go even further back and get recipes
from say a couple hundred years ago, and that's kind
of fun on the one hand, but they'll have units
of message you don't understand what they mean.
Speaker 2 (25:26):
The farther you look back, actually, the more fun it
becomes because things also used to be spelled different ways,
or they would have really different things. There's so many
funny different things. There's a dish that I read about
one time where it's basically I think it's like the
backside of a hair sewn to the front side of
a goose. It was something like absolutely crazy like this
(25:47):
that they would book and like Tudor England, a hair
as in a rabbit, you mean right, yeah, yeah, yeah,
not just one single hair.
Speaker 1 (25:56):
It's time capsules of a time. And do you think
that the internet has totally replaced this sense of community.
Speaker 2 (26:05):
I think the Internet has definitely created these sort of
parasocial relationships which change how we interact. But that's why
you know when you're trying to get a recipe and
you can't because all you can see is this like
giant long, like five paragraphs of their personal life that
you have to scroll through before you can finally get
(26:27):
to the recipe you want. Yeah, I think that's what's
happening is people are saying the Internet has taken away
the closeness of recipe sharing and we're going to replace
it now.
Speaker 1 (26:38):
If you are putting up recipes on the Internet and
you want to do that, God bless you. You want
to tell your life story, you want to talk about
your adventure with this dish, please have a button that
says jump to.
Speaker 2 (26:49):
Recipe please please, because it's it's kind of estme. I've
heard though that like the search engines prioritize ones that
feel like there's more to it than just a list recipe,
so that's part of the reason that they do it.
So if anybody out there from chat ept or Anthropic
or Google is listening, please change that because it's getting
(27:12):
in the way of my recipe research.
Speaker 1 (27:14):
Yeah, it's just I love to see people online showing
how they cook a recipe, but sometimes it's sometimes it
feels as though you're just doing this to stick these
ads in here that please don't do that. That's why
I like to jump the recipe button.
Speaker 2 (27:33):
There's definitely people who are abusing that that are sort
of you know, they're just trying to farm out content
and this is something where you know this is going
to be an interesting thing that we'll see coming up
is will the rise of AI can create you know,
people talk about AI slop. There's AI food slop coming
out right, bad articles, bad recipes, and you know, it'll
(27:55):
be interesting to see how that happens, how that changes.
Are the people who are able to farm likes to
their website going to be doing that sort of in
a negative way because they're just trying to get the
ad revenue and all the recipes will be terrible. And
will it erode the credibility in some ways of people
that are putting out actually good content, actually good stuff.
Speaker 1 (28:17):
Yeah. I quote Anthony Burdain here sometimes from Kitchen Confidential,
and I think I remember from that book where he
was saying, you know, with the Internet now you can
look up anything, you can look up how to cook anything,
and so what's the point of a cookbook? And he
was saying, it's because, if it's done right, it has
kind of the soul of the chef. I mean, I'm
paraphrasing because I haven't read it for a while, but
(28:39):
it's the person who made the book brings something to
it beyond just the recipe. And so I would say
that if you're going to do some recipes online. You're
listening to us and think, yeah, I can do that.
I'm a good cook. Give us your soul. That's what
we want.
Speaker 2 (28:53):
Absolutely.
Speaker 1 (28:54):
I think the biggest cook book shelf I've ever seen
is the one that you have tan or you have
an enormal a number of cookbooks and when you go
out to book buy cookbooks, I think I know how
you do it. The cookbooks there, and you're not out
of money yet.
Speaker 2 (29:08):
So yeah, that's true.
Speaker 1 (29:09):
Yeah, you just buy everything. We have photos somewhere of
you coming out of a cookbook store and you've just
got armloads of these things. But most people don't operate
that way. So if someone's going to buy a cookbook
for a gift, what's a good place to start, A
good way to go?
Speaker 2 (29:25):
Well, a great way to buy cookbooks always is use bookstores. Okay,
And there are treasure tros there, especially used bookstores in
neighborhoods where you know there's a lot of wealthy old people.
Because unfortunately wealthy old people they do pass and their
kids go, what are we going to do with all
this stuff? And so they just start donating it. There's
(29:47):
a company called Half Priced Books, the family that owns it.
It's a big chain, but the family that owns it
are actually big supporters of our restaurant. I love going
to there because you can get so many books at
half price. There's nothing wrong with the used cookbook. In fact,
some of the cookbooks I'll show you of mine you
have to be careful with because I've broken the bindings
from reading them or using them or throwing them around
(30:08):
the restaurant. If you're going to buy somebody a gift,
there's nothing wrong with the used cookbook in my opinion,
especially if you can get a signed copy. Those are
always fun. But what I would try to find is
is there something you know they like to make? But
a place oriented book is the perfect thing to get
somebody as a gift. I just went to China. I
know you love to cook. Here's a cool book that
(30:29):
has some of those recipes. Or you're having a destination wedding.
What better thing to give somebody than a cookbook for
the destination where they got married. Really cool gift idea.
Speaker 1 (30:39):
You have a stack of cookbooks in front of you
from yourself, so why don't we just do a thing
here where you pick up the book and tell us
what it is and why you have it cool. I'm
going to go someone else might want it.
Speaker 2 (30:50):
I'm going to try to go quickly because there's, you know,
so many of them here.
Speaker 1 (30:53):
All right.
Speaker 2 (30:54):
So if you're a person who, like, during COVID, got
into sourdough and you're like, what's something else I could
make at home? That's not that complicated, but it's really rewarding.
This is a really cool book. So this book is
called Charcuterie. It is by Michael Ruhman, who has done
many famous books. It's all about how to make charcuterie
meets at home, how to cure whole muscles at home,
(31:15):
how to make salami at home, how to make all
kinds of cool things. And I've talked lots of times
about charcuterie and how it's cool to make. But you
could make your own from scratch charcuterie board. A lot
of people don't realize that it's easier than you think.
That book will tell you how. All right, then I
just like just expounded upon the values of having books
(31:35):
you don't cook out of just because they're fun. This
would be two of these, because these books are complicated.
These are books that I read and think how does
that go together? So one, I mean, these are not
original books for me to recommend. But the Noma Cookbook
is absolutely wonderful. It's really fun to read.
Speaker 1 (31:52):
You know.
Speaker 2 (31:53):
I started this segment talking about the use of Kogi
bacteria in Denmark. Where do you think I read about
stuff like that in the writings of the Noma team.
The Noma team what they're doing, and the photography is
absolutely stunning. This restaurant's about to close forever, so probably
the only way you're ever going to get to see
(32:13):
it is via these pages. Okay, next, And this is
definitely an aspirational book. I remember, it's very fun for
me now. I remember getting this book for the first
time and not knowing how to cook very well, and
now being on the other side, I can pull off
all the magic tricks that are in this book. But
if you would like to pull off culinary magic tricks,
(32:34):
the a Linear Cookbook is probably absolutely one of the
very best for that. It's a gorgeous book. The photography
is amazing, the techniques are still there are still pioneering, challenging,
interesting techniques. But the good news is that book is
so old now and so many people have knocked off
and ripped off everything that they did that you can
actually the ingredients, the tools, all the things that were
(32:57):
kind of impossible to get when this book came out
you can actually now get and so you can cook
from that book now. And so if you're like I
want to step up my game, like I'm good at cooking,
but I had all the send drive to made a
positive veg variations that I want. I want something where
I think this is pushing my limit. That's an amazing
book to do that. Alinea a restaurant out of Chicago.
(33:19):
And if you're going to get into food science, an
amazing book this would be The Food Lab by j
Kenji Lopez Alt Better home Cooking through Science. He was
a line cook and by his own admission, would get
in trouble for asking too many questions. So he's now
made a career out of answering questions for people. And
this book, I mean, this thing is a ton He
(33:42):
is like completely dedicated to better cooking through science, explaining
why your food is better or not as good as
you wanted. And you can learn so much from him,
even at the professional level. I think some of his
deep research and testing is amazing to look at, and
I love it. The food Lab, I did want to
make sure I showed off this one. I teased it
at the beginning of the show. A book that I
(34:03):
sat down and read cover to cover in one sitting
Aaron Franklin at Franklin Barbecue in many ways sort of
helped sort of propel the next generation of Texas barbecue
and the quality that we see everywhere. He's a really
important barbecue figure. It's funny he got really famous for barbecue.
And they came to him and said, we want you
(34:24):
to write a cookbook here a famous chef. And he said,
what do you mean, I only have four recipes? What
do you How do you only have four recipes? Ago,
I make brisket, I make sausage, I make turkey. I
guess I have a couple sides. Maybe I've got six.
I can't write a cookbook. He calls it a meat
smoking manifesto here on the front. And what I found
(34:47):
such a good page turner about it is there's an
entire chapter basically just about how to pick wood. This
is the type of wood you should use, this is
what your wood should look like. This is how you
manage your wood. Here's how you build your fire, Here's
how you do all of this.
Speaker 1 (35:00):
It.
Speaker 2 (35:00):
I understand how like nerdy this sounds. But a genuine
page turner, A fabulous book.
Speaker 1 (35:09):
Franklin Barbecue.
Speaker 2 (35:11):
Franklin Barbecue, a phenomenal book.
Speaker 1 (35:12):
Yes, the thing is fascinating to read, even if you
never do any of it.
Speaker 2 (35:17):
In a lot of ways, cookbooks aren't actually about the cooking.
They're about the capturing of culture. They're about the imagination
that it sturs up. I do not own an offset smoker,
but I'll tell you this cookbook makes me want to
own one. A cookbook that I think serious food people
should own is The Flavor Bible. It's a very unique
(35:37):
cookbook and that it has no recipes. All you do
is you turn to a page. You turn to a page.
So this page has mars Capone, and it sort of
tells you a little bit about Marx copone, and then
it gives you a list of all things that taste
good with mars Capone. And then it even has a
special little section where it tells you like, but these
are the things that are absolutely the best. These are
(35:59):
the combos. So if you like Marskapone, you should try
it with chocolate and strawberries, or cinnamon and pumpkin, or
fix and persudo. Okay, So this book is a whole
book that tells you how to do stuff. And so
if you're cooking at home and you're tired, how do
I eat healthy but then also make stuff that's more
interesting and mix it up fantastic. You can just turn
(36:20):
to a page and you'll say, wonderful. I'm gonna be
eating a lot more pomegranates for whatever reason. And here's like,
I don't know, there's got to be thirty different ingredients
that they say are perfect with pomegranates.
Speaker 1 (36:33):
It's like a color wheel for chefs.
Speaker 2 (36:36):
Almost everybody has this book. Almost everybody. And when you think,
how do you come up with these combinations? I don't.
I look them up in the Flavor Bible.
Speaker 1 (36:45):
There's your secret.
Speaker 2 (36:46):
Quickly. If you love wine, you want to learn more
about wine, you're kind of getting into it, maybe wine folly.
I buy copies of this and give them to my staff.
It's a wonderful tool for teaching people that like wine
but don't know a lot academically about wine. It's a
phenomenal book. I got my Level one Samuier test and
I use that book to study for it. Next Punch,
(37:10):
this is a book all about the history of punch.
Punch is the original cocktail.
Speaker 1 (37:14):
They were.
Speaker 2 (37:14):
It was a way for people on long ship voyages
if they mixed the rum ration in with citrus. The
rum kept the citrus from spoiling, and the citrus helped
the sailors not get scurvy. They also then would drink
it because I got them drunk. This is not a cookbook. Really,
there's recipes in it. It's a cook abook, but it's
more about history and again an absolute page turner. And
(37:38):
last book I have to promote. I don't know if
you know this, but there is exactly one published cookbook
with one of my cocktail recipes in it, and it
is this book, Texas Cocktails, an elegant collection of one
hundred recipes from around the state, and he put one
of Apothecary's cocktails of cocktail. I'm very proud of that.
Speaker 1 (37:57):
You should be hey. For a complete list of all
the books that we're mentioned here on flavor Files today,
go to our website flavorfiles dot com. We've listed them there.
Go to the cookbooks episode and if you haven't been
listening to the episodes. Go there anyway, because we've got
a lot of them there, and hey, I recommend why
(38:17):
don't you start with food that kills. That's flavor files
p h i l e. S dot com
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