Awards Season! Blind Items! Cookbook Nepo Babies!

Howdy cookbook fans!

And hello from beautiful sunny springy Austin! Sorry for silence last week, it was BOOK RELEASE WEEK and time got away from me. Anyway, if you haven’t yet, you can order CURED: COOKING WITH FERMENTS PICKLES PRESERVES & MORE by San Antonio chef Steve McHugh and ME! now. (Here’s a reminder of why I think you will love this book so so much.)

Additionally, if you are in the greater San Antonio area and are free next Saturday, we’re having a party!!! You can get tickets here. It comes with a copy of the book and snacks and drinks and whatnot. You know, like a party.

And if you AREN’T in SATX (or you are but can’t get enough Cured), on June 6th Steve and I will be teaching a virtual cooking class with Milk Street! The topic at hand? PICKLE HAPPY HOUR. C’mon. C’MON. Doesn’t that sound fun?! We’re gonna make martinis and pimento cheese and fried pickles! AND YOU CAN TOO. Tickets are $29.95 BUT they’re 25% off with the code SPNCURED. Just for you! Amazing. Get your tickets here.

Okay enough of that. This week we have an award announcement, a blind item, a fancy cookbook author house, Jeremiah Tower, and, frankly, more influencer cookbooks than I am actually interested in writing about. Oh well, on to the news!

First Annual Nach Waxman Prize Finalists Announced

The shortlist for the first ever Nach Waxman Prize for Food and Beverage Scholarship has been announced! The prize, named after the founder of New York culinary bookstore Kitchen Arts & Letters, “invites the general public to seriously consider issues in culinary and beverage history, anthropology, sociology, linguistics, geography, and other fields of study.” The winner, who will be announced on May 7, will receive $5,500. Congratulations to the finalists:

• Invitation to a Banquet by Fuchsia Dunlop

• Wild, Tamed, Lost, Revived by Diane Flynt

• Small Fires by Rebecca May Johson

• Staging the Table edited by Deborah L. Krohn

• Endangered Eating by Sarah Lohman

BLIND ITEM Who is the anonymous cookbook author in this story? Clues: 500k Instagram followers (no mention of other platforms), three books published in the past seven years, most recently in 2023. Any guesses? To the comments! [HuffPo]

Coming Attractions: B. Dylan Hollis! Buddy Oliver! Cooking With Darryl! Outdoor Chef Life! More!

• TikTok guy B. Dylan Hollis (258.1 million followers, yow) will follow up his 2023 super-ultra-mega bestseller Baking Yesteryear with Baking Across America, “a vintage recipe road trip to discover the best baked goods across every region of the United States.” DK, May 2025.

• Another TikTok guy Darryl Postelnick (@cookingwithdarryl, 2.9m) to write R.U. Kidding Me (good title). Per a press release, Postelnick is “one of the most trusted voices in food creation on any social platform” and is called the "dad of social cooking." He is famous for flat top fried rice, I guess! 83 Press, October 2024.

• Cookbook nepo baby alert! Buddy Oliver, the 13 year old son of Jamie Oliver, to publish Cooking Buddies in addition to hosting a cooking show by the same name on CBBC. Both are based on his YouTube channel, also called Cooking Buddies (134K). The elder Oliver tells the Bookseller, Buddy has “always enjoyed sharing how easy it is to give simple, tasty recipes a go, which is why his Cooking Buddies YouTube channel has been a success.” Penguin Michael Joseph, July 2024.

• Youtuber Taku Kondo of the Outdoor Chef Life channel (717k) to write The Coastal Harvest, which is all about cooking wild ingredients “from the ocean to the forest.” DK, March 2025.

• Thalia Ho, author of 2021’s Wild Sweetness, to write Six Sense of Dessert, “a cookbook exploring five elements of taste as well as a sixth component—transformation.” Harvest, winter 2026.

• Jessica Merchant, blogger at How Sweet Eats, to write her third cookbook, Easy Everyday [sic]. Rodale, pub date TBD.

• I have a whole essay in me called something like You Need to Calm Down: Volume Measurements Are Fine, Actually, but until then, here’s the British perspective on weights vs volume. [Guardian]

• Oh you know just Chez Panisse/Stars legend Jeremiah Tower talking French cookbooks. Would take this college course.[Jeremiah Tower]

• Inside Recipe Tin Eats author Nagi Maehashi’s new $7million (AUD) Sydney Victorian home. [MSN]

• Justine Doiron on…well, a lot of things, but mostly on waiting until you have a great cookbook in you to actually write one (instead of hiring a bunch of people to do it for you as a cynical money grab). [Justine Snacks]

• Jeremiah Brent, the new interior designer on Queer Eye, explains how he styles bookshelves. [NYT]

• A look back at Martha Stewart’s 1982 classic, Entertaining. [CNN]

• A new cookbook explores the pre-Khmer Rouge traditions of Cambodian cuisine. [BBC]

• A lengthy profile of Jacques Pépin at 88. [Bostonia]

• Book review: Seasoning by Angela Clutton. [The Caterer]

• Book review: Tiffy Cooks by Tiffy Chen. [Straits Times]

• On funerals and cookbooks. [MintLounge]

• 3 new cookbooks explore foraging. (I always kind of wonder about foraging books because they never seem to be regionally specific, and yet…anyway I will be doing zero foraging until I get my hands on Texas-specific foraging book.) [Eater]

Okay that’s all for today! This weekend’s mission: find something cute to wear to the book party! Wish me luck I need it! See ya soon.