How This Fall’s Biggest Cookbooks Got Made

I’ve come to see best cookbooks lists as a love-hate fixture of our industry. They bring publications clicks, authors well-deserved promotion — and hopefully sales — but putting them together I’ve always found particularly agonizing. Not because they are hard to write, but because I’m a people-pleasing eldest daughter who wants to throw a parade for anyone with enough gumption to take on the thankless job of writing a cookbook. It is a lot of work. To me a paragraph of extolments and praise feels hardly enough — and, let’s be honest, a little generic — in capturing all that grit and quiet grind (the occasional scream into a pillow notwithstanding). 

So this year, we’re approaching our list a little differently. Rather than us babble away about what we love about these books (everything; the end), we had the authors of five of our favorite titles out this fall tell us about how their recipes actually made it from the brain onto the page: The objectives and rules that guided their method, how co-authors collaborated, and when they knew when to stop tinkering with a recipe or shelve it altogether.