The cookbook renaissance

We brought together Emilia Terragni, editorial director of Phaidon, Andy Baraghani, chef and author of The Cook You Want To Be and Bryant Terry, African-American vegan chef, food justice activist and author of Black Food, to talk about what makes a title stand out, how cookbooks have evolved and what they can tell us about society. 

DANIELLE PENDER So, let's start at the beginning. What are your childhood memories of food and meal times? Bryant, would you like to start?  

BRYANT TERRY Sure. Some of my fondest childhood memories are gatherings around food with my family. We would often meet at my maternal grandmother's house in Memphis. She would spend all day Saturday prepping for the meal on Sunday and invite me in to help with the prep — she'd have me harvest things from the kitchen garden, washing dark, leafy greens or mixing the wet and dry ingredients for her cornbread and her cakes. Those were some of the most important moments in cultivating a love for cooking. 

Then on Sunday, the whole family would come over with all my cousins, aunts and uncles; we’d sit around a big table in the backyard. I’m from a family of artists and singers, so my uncle would play the piano and people would sing. I think about my cookbook and how I bring together artwork, soundtracks and recipes – this all comes from that family experience. 

DANIELLE PENDER That's so beautiful. Andy, what are your childhood memories of mealtimes and cooking? 

ANDY BARAGHANI Well, I grew up in an Iranian household. My parents came to the States – Berkeley, California – in the 1970s, two years before the Iranian Revolution. They brought the food traditions of their homeland. I think that those practices, combined with the environment of the Bay Area, East Bay specifically, gave me such a unique experience growing up. My parents worked full time, but my mum somehow cooked every night. We have a large Iranian family in California and there was always an additional two or three people to feed, so it ended up being this very rich culture of Persian food, but with Californian ingredients. My mother is a creative cook; she introduced me to Iranian cooking and highly regional recipes.

DANIELLE PENDER And Emilia, you're in Como at the minute. Is that your family home? How were mealtimes for you as a child? 

EMILIA TERRAGNI It was all about family and friends. My mother was a fantastic cook and she loved to entertain. So there were always a lot of people around the table. For a big occasion like Christmas, we’d cook for days, and there was always a Sunday lunch at our grandparents’ – it was a very nice way to keep the connection with the rest of the family.  

The food was very simple, very healthy and very Italian. Italy has always been very regional, so you will often cook your local cuisine. My mother has this amazing palate and is very creative in the kitchen. When we started travelling with my parents, she would replicate the dishes we ate in different regions back at home. It was a way to learn and be curious about our broader culture.  

DANIELLE PENDER So, new recipes were introduced to the family through your mother’s adaptive menus and her intuitive cooking, rather than cookbooks? 

EMILIA TERRAGNI Yes. It was a learning process where you started to understand the ingredients and use them at their best. She was very good at that and passed it on to us. 

DANIELLE PENDER What about you, Bryant? Was there a special cookbook in the family kitchen? Or were recipes passed on through family and community? 

BRYANT TERRY Well, my mother had The Joy of Cooking and the Betty Crocker cookbooks, and she would refer to them on special occasions or when she wanted to experiment with something, but most of the meals that we ate were largely ingredient-driven. Edna Lewis was a big inspiration for me. I was the only black male in my cohort at culinary school, so when I discovered her work, specifically A Taste of Country Cooking, she became my heroine. She had this eclectic life, from being a secretary for the Communist Party to working as a seamstress for Oscar de la Renta. Her life really mirrored the kind of creative life that I wanted to cultivate for myself.

DANIELLE PENDER Andy, you talked before about how you loved the Iranian food of your childhood, but you didn't want that to be your cooking style, and then you came full circle. Can you talk about that journey? 

ANDY BARAGHANI I have a very strong connection with Iranian food. Those flavours were the first that I was introduced to, so I have a deep love for it. But – and I think this happens a lot with children of immigrants – I didn't want to cook that food professionally. I wanted to create my own identity. Then for a Saveur article, I worked with my mother to adapt Iranian recipes, and they featured as part of a story on Iran. Around the same time, I was also hosting these dinners out of the industrial apartment I had in Brooklyn, where I started to serve highly seasonal Iranian food, and I ended up really bringing those flavours and techniques into my cooking. That said, I would never describe the food I cook as solely Iranian, and my book is not an Iranian cookbook. I wanted to be able to stretch and not be put in a box, but I also wanted to showcase this food and our culture at large. 

DANIELLE PENDER Bryant, you mentioned the influence of your family earlier and your cross-disciplinary approach to life and your career. The curation of your book very much mirrors this in that it features recipes alongside essays, artwork and playlists. I wonder how you went about putting it all together. 

BRYANT TERRY In 2015, I co-created this programme at MoAD (Museum of the African Diaspora) in San Francisco around health, food and farming issues. Many of the chapters in the book are inspired by this programming, such as the Black Women, Food and Power programme and the Black Queer Food programme, where I invited many of my LGBTQIA+ colleagues to come and talk about the intersection of their joys and their connection and food, and how they experience homophobia, transphobia, queerphobia and racism within the food space. And then there’s the Land Liberation and Food Justice programme, where we brought together farmers and food justice activists.  

There's this reductive way that a lot of people think about Black food. The way the institution of slavery played out wasn’t a monolith, so this idea that there's one flattened “slave food,” as it's often kind of pejoratively framed, is just historically inaccurate. The other things that people imagine about Black food are the big-flavoured meats, overcooked vegetables and sugary desserts that one might find at a soul food restaurant. What's often missing from the conversations about what Black people have traditionally grown, prepared and eaten are the nutrient-rich dark leafy greens, the collards, the kale, the dandelions, the sugar-snap peas, the pole beans, the black-eyed peas, the sweet potatoes, butternut squash and muscadine grapes. These were all the foods my grandparents and many people in their community were growing in their home gardens or on rural farms. Much of my work has been about highlighting those histories and ensuring that they’re not erased, because people like to simplistically frame what Black food is.  

DANIELLE PENDER Emilia – with your work at Phaidon, the visuals, design aesthetic and photography are all crucial. Can you talk about the editorial process there?  

EMILIA TERRAGNI We are traditionally a visual art publisher, and we actually stumbled into publishing cookbooks. It started with The Silver Spoon, which was originally published in 1950 by Domus. I had the third edition in my kitchen and took it to London when I moved there. We published a new edition through Phaidon, and it was an amazing success. Part of it was that we treated it as one of our art books, so it was about working with good typography, strong photography, selecting the right paper and working on how it opened flat. We didn’t put food on the cover. At the time, this was seen as a big mistake for a cookbook, but we had a vision of something that was not only about food but also about culture.  

DANIELLE PENDER How has that side of the business evolved since The Silver Spoon? 

EMILIA TERRAGNI Well, it's practically half of our business now. The cookbook market is super crowded, but we are creating a product for the people who want this beautiful object. We’ve built the series from The Silver Spoon and expanded it to what we call the “national cuisine” – where either we acquire a book that already exists in a country or we commission someone to research and develop recipes. 

BRYANT TERRY Can I just quickly say that when we conceived Black Food, Phaidon was a major inspiration. I wanted to avoid having food on the cover. I wanted to have a very graphic and arresting cover. I wanted this book to move from the kitchen to the coffee table to the night stand and really be an object that people adored, beyond it being a practical tool for making recipes. So thank you, Emilia. 

EMILIA TERRAGNI That’s really great to hear!

DANIELLE PENDER Andy, I was thinking about the title of your book [The Cook You Want To Be] and how it invites people in. How did you land on that title? 

ANDY BARAGHANI I’d worked in all these different kitchens, across various publications, and travelled, so initially, I thought it would be a culmination of all of this. But I realised it doesn’t end with me and it's important to bring the reader in. With this book, I really wanted the reader to have an understanding of a certain ingredient or technique or a better understanding of a culture. That’s the biggest thing I was hoping for, and that inspired a change in the title.  

DANIELLE PENDER What are some of the cookbooks that have influenced you? 

ANDY BARAGHANI Before I started working there, I spent a lot of time with the Chez Panisse Café Cookbook, and The Zuni Café Cookbook is still really important to me. I love it for many reasons, one of which is that there are very few photos of food, but the prose really stands up. And then there’s Food of Life by Najmieh Batmanglij, who is really the godmother of Iranian cooking.  

DANIELLE PENDER Bryant, your work is heavily involved in the food justice movement. How do you feel about this area moving forwards? 

BRYANT TERRY I've always seen cookbooks as organising and base-building tools for the food justice movement. Cookbooks have played a powerful role in helping the movement to grow, because a lot of people are feeling more invested in eating fresher foods and supporting local growers. But, ultimately, it's bigger than just that kind of individual consumer action. It has to be about supporting community organisations doing the work on the ground to transform food systems and also thinking about the world of public policy. It’s about helping people overcome the barriers that prevent them from eating healthy food or that prevent small to mid-sized farmers from thriving. 

DANIELLE PENDER Emilia, you mentioned before that the cookbook landscape is rather crowded, and it’s actually really amazing to see physical cookbooks thriving. Why do you think there’s this demand and interest in cookbooks? 

EMILIA TERRAGNI I think that it is still an object that people want to treasure and return to. There is pleasure in looking at the pages with the most stains because they’re the best, most loved recipes. I think that when you look at a cookbook, you’re inspired; there is a much deeper relationship with the paper and with the cookbook as an object. Of course, you can find anything online, but that’s just it – perhaps there’s too much.  

ANDY BARAGHANI I do think we're in a cookbook renaissance of sorts. What's so special right now is that cookbooks have become much more personal. The authors' voices are coming through a lot more, there’s a lot more regional cooking and more storytelling, so the books become cherished objects in people’s homes.  

DANIELLE PENDER Bryant, you have your own imprint, 4 Color Books. What books are you excited about publishing in the food space? 

BRYANT TERRY The cookbooks I'm excited about working on with our imprint have this texture of autobiography. They tell stories and are really focused on craft; this is much more exciting to me than something with hundreds of recipes.  

DANIELLE PENDER I wanted to end by talking about this incredible Klancy Miller quote from Bryant’s book, where she talks about cooking and joy: “After (cooking) class, I learned to bring my sensual self to life in lots of different ways — from dressing well to having dinner parties, going to museums and parks, exploring the city, enjoying idle moments, romancing myself, flirting.” How do you all feel about the impact that cooking and cookbooks can have on our wider lives? 

EMILIA TERRAGNI For me, it’s about being around the table with family. We always share and discuss problems; we solve problems together. So I really hope that people go back to cooking, having a proper meal with their family and talking to each other. 

BRYANT TERRY I just want people to live joyfully, be present in the moment and connect with their networks and kinships. That's why Black Food has chapters on radical self-care, leisure and lifestyle. It’s not just about consuming food. It’s about living a good life and taking a step back to enjoy being on this journey.

Danielle Pender  Founder and editor of Riposte, a print magazine and online platform for women, Danielle Pender also runs Riposte Studio, where she works with some of the best international brands on commercial partnerships. 

Andy Baraghani  Chef and food writer, Andy Baraghani is the author of The Cook You Want To Be. The cookbook features recipes inspired by his Iranian upbringing and his training at formidable restaurants like Chez Panisse. 

Emilia Terragni  According to the Wall Street Journal, Emilia Terragni is “The Queen of Cookbooks”. Editorial Director of Phaidon Press, she is the visionary mind behind some of the most successful food-based book series. 

Bryant Terry  Bryant Terry is the founder and editor-in-chief of 4 Color Books and the author of Afro-Vegan and Vegetable Kingdom. His latest book is Black Food, a collection of recipes, art and stories.