Pretty Cookbooks: Full of Facts or Fluff?
Originally published on Medium.
When it comes to food, it’s all about outward appearance. Think about it. A brightly colored photograph of a tomato soup will almost always trump a brown potato stew. That’s not because one is necessarily better or less flavorful than the other. But our eyes have a strong hold on our taste buds, and what looks delicious is typically what causes our stomachs to grumble.
The idea that good food photography sells food is nothing new. Just ask any food blogger or chef. If the meal doesn’t look good on a platter, it isn’t worth much. Anyone selling food online knows that much of what sells their brand isn’t the food, but the lighting. And of course, when it comes to buying cookbooks, we absolutely judge a book by its cover.
One could argue this isn’t really a bad thing. For some, cooking is a chore, uninviting, boring, and tedious. But exuberantly colored meals, fresh produce, great color contrast, and a well-decorated dessert makes cooking look lively and fun. It’s a stark contrast from older cookbooks with little (if any) imagery. Rarely would a reader see a photograph of what the final result should look like. Photos also allow the author to better explain something that’s difficult to describe in words. Speaking as a food blogger, there are scenarios where describing a step via picture is easier than attempting to write what I want my readers to do.
But food photography has also taken things to an extreme. While many cookbooks offer exceptional instructions as well as photographs, there are quite a few others that don’t always match up with the expertly taken images. I’ve cracked open many beautifully photographed cookbooks only to be disappointed in the recipe.
Or perhaps they aren’t really selling cooking at all. The infamous Prue Leith (you may know her as Mary Berry’s replacement on The Great British Baking Show) once called modern cookbooks ‘food porn’, citing that many will stay on the coffee table, designed to be browsed through but not to stir anyone into cooking. She has a point. Do modern cookbooks truly encourage cooking? Or are they becoming rather impractical, better served as art books rather than guides on what to do in a kitchen?
It’s a fear I’ve had when I’m browsing through a bookstore and stumble upon what is advertised as a cookbook that is full of pictures and impractical advice on cooking. It’s selling a lifestyle, designed to look unattainable, but pretty. All of which begs the question: what is the seller trying to achieve?
The Pencil of Nature from Henry Fox Talbot’s book of the same name. Image from Science Museum Group Collection. Creative Commons.
The History of Food Photography
Food art has been around in still-life paintings for several centuries, long before the invention of the camera. This probably explains why the first food photograph of the 19th century portrayed food in a similar manner to how it would be placed in such a painting. Henry Fox Talbot’s ‘The Pencil of Nature’ (see above) is a good example (and coincidentally, one of the first examples of this medium). It shows two full fruit baskets on top of a checkered tablecloth, the composition meant to look just like a still life painting of fruit on a table.
All this said, the photograph wasn’t advertising a meal necessarily. Like still life paintings, your stomach may rumble, but the work isn’t meant to make you rush to the supermarket and create a lavish meal. It’s just food, plain and simple.
What followed this were illustrations of food (usually completed meals or lavish desserts) published in cookbooks. Jules Gouffe’s The Royal Cookery Book, published in 1867, famously showcased color illustrations of expertly crafted recipes from the book, a testament to the abundance one could find in the book, but also the first example of food art aimed at making one’s mouth water.
Photography in the latter half of the 19th century was still mostly in black and white, and whatever cookbooks used food photography used black and white images to depict a meal. This wasn’t always unsuccessful (in fact, some food photographers use black and white today). But color obviously makes a difference in viewer’s opinion of food. Colored food photographs began in the 1930’s with the adoption of what’s called the three-color carbro process. This allowed for images to be put into color, better advertising food and its delicious properties. By the 1950’s, magazines used colored photographs all the time as a means of advertising new recipes.
Nowadays, food photography is its own career. Over time, it’s become an expectation that food be photographed and photographed well. Without this, readers (or should I say, viewers) will quickly lose interest. Food magazines particularly count on this. Much of food photography is vibrancy and multicolored meals that stand out in the check-out lane at the grocery store. It’s meant to look and feel vibrant and tasty when you view the pictures. And naturally, these same rules also apply to cookbooks.
An image of the inside of Julia Child’s The Art of French Cooking.
Old Cookbooks vs. New
If you crack open Julia Child’s Art of French Cooking, the pages are chock full of words. There are a select few pages with black and white illustrations, but they are few and far between. The book was meant to be read (and read thoroughly, I might add). Child did this purposefully. Her goal was to make French cooking accessible to the average American cook, and for that she had to explain their methods in detail. Each chapter is an exegesis of sorts detailing the methodologies and key ingredients needed to make French cooking successful.
Many older cookbooks were largely the same. Reading cookbooks was a necessity, a way of fully understanding food and what one needed to do to prepare a dish. Illustrations and/or photography were secondary in importance.
A modern cookbook almost feels empty without an accompanying picture. Most recipes are lumped side by side with a feature photo of either the final product, a step in the curation of the meal, or an artistic representation of the recipe’s featured ingredient(s). Without it, the recipe feels almost naked. There will surely be pages of just photos themselves, designed in such a way as to make the process and consumption of the recipes beautiful and inviting.
Many of these photos can be useful. It’s helpful, for instance, to see pictures of someone making homemade pasta, or how a dough should look after rising. The color of your soup may look different from that in the cookbook, making you re-read the recipe and find a part that you missed.
But by and large, the point of food photography isn’t to help you understand a difficult cooking step. It’s there to sell food. Flip through the pages and the more your mouth waters, the more likely you’ll be to purchase the book. This flip in what drives sales has sometimes seemingly led to a change in tactic for some cookbook authors. You may have cooking talent, and you may have a few recipes up your sleeve, sure. But what you really need, if you hope to make any living off your cookbook, is a solid food photographer.
Cookbooks as Art
Are cookbooks just simply out of vogue now? I’d like to think not. Occasionally I’ll find examples of modern cookbook treasures that prove one can have good recipes, good writing, and wonderful food photography all in one. Some still offer illustrations even (Samin Nosrat’s Sat Fat Acid Heat comes to mind here).
But all too often, I’ve encountered a cookbook that’s decidedly not selling cooking. It’s a visual representation of the Italian countryside with some bread and wine on a table. It’s a highlight of someone tossing pizza dough in the air. It’s a highly personal journal that discusses what food means to them. There’s nothing wrong with these types of books; they just aren’t cookbooks. Nor should they be sold as such.
It goes without saying that food has meaning in various other aspects of life. It brings people together. Holiday gatherings center around food and traditional meals. And perhaps in the modern world of DoorDash, Grubhub, and meal planning kits, it’s nice to remember that food doesn’t always mean take-out, that the finer things in life are prepared with love and look far different from food in a plastic container.
But cookbooks are worth something too, and by this I mean cooking is worth something. It’s not meant to always look beautiful, perfect, or perfectly lighted. The beauty is in the process, the final product (however it looks), and the delight one finds in enjoying something made from scratch. How can any of this be achieved unless a cookbook is written well? Ultimately, will a photo really make much of a difference?