Is This the World's Most Difficult Cookbook?

Sponsored by

Howdy cookbook fans!

And hello from my parents’ house in Wisconsin. It’s been a minute for some of you! Apologies for the long delay, but part of it is because I was looking for a new home for this newsletter! And so without further ado, let me introduce the first issue of SPN on Beehiiv. I’m very excited to be here, and hopefully it won’t cause too many change on your end while making my life a lot easier.

PAID SUBSCRIBERS! The links section at the very bottom of this issue (which starts with the new Ottolenghi cover reveal) is a paid subscriber-only section. This is mostly a test to make sure your subscription migrated correctly. If you DO NOT SEE THAT SECTION, it means part of the migration didn’t work. Please respond to this email and we’ll sort it out!

Some non-cookbook news: my partner Raphael Brion has been named Restaurant Editor for Food & Wine magazine! Gonna mean a lot of changes at SPN HQ—he will travel quite a bit for the job, scouting restaurants for the magazine’s Best New Chef program. And today’s Best New Chefs are possibly tomorrow’s brilliant cookbook authors! I’m so excited for him to learn about the emerging culinary talent across the country. Round of applause for RB.

Now, cookbook news!

RECIPE CRIME I keep seeing headlines about Martha Stewart stealing an employee recipe, as revealed in a new CNN documentary and… I dunno y’all. First, as the Washington Post notes, recipes are notoriously difficult to protect. Second, Sarah Gross, the woman who created the recipe in question, a cranberry torte, even says “she wasn’t certain that Stewart had deliberately failed to credit her.” Third, I feel like this happens all the time? Employees share their recipes with the restaurants and, yes, caterers that employ them all the time, and these then become part of the venue’s repertoire. And fourth and finally, Martha has had her fair share of recipes stolen from her, so what goes around comes around? [WaPo]

Cookbook Aims to Help Doctors Practice Surgical Dexterity

Normally I don’t cover digital cookbooks like this (nor do I typically use their suggested tagline as an SPN subject line), but I thought the concept here was too fascinating not to include. A marketing tool for medical/biotech company Getinge, The Heart Surgeon’s Cookbook is a collaboration between Dr. Nirav C. Patel, a cardiovascular surgeon at Lenox Hill Hospital, and chef Fredrik Berselius of Aska, both based in New York City.

The book is comprised of a mere nine recipes, but the duo takes 181 pages to get there. Each recipe uses skills that seek to improve manual dexterity, using kitchen tools and surgical tools alike. There are practice exercises (they do surgery on…a blueberry!) before getting to recipes like Roasted Quail with Truffles and Ramps, Langoustine Tail and Claw with Black Currant, and a Kingfish Rose with Green Gooseberries. Everything is very pretty and very, very, very (predictably?) fussy, using syringes to insert sauces with precision and surgical thread to tie up stuffed meats.

The book is available for web browsing here and download here, for free! Any surgeons in the audience want to try the recipes and report back?

Uncork Exclusive Rare Wines, Remote Vineyards Revealed!

Elevate your wine experience with grapes grown up to 9,000 ft in the Andes Mountains. 

Some of the rarest, and finest: Yet most won’t make it to the US. But wine lover and adventurer Will Bonner has made it his mission to import unique, small-batch wines that other importers overlook. 

And he’s sharing them through the Bonner Private Wine Partnership, where you'll get these exclusive wines delivered right to your door. 

Coming Attractions: Ina Garten Memoir! Grossy Pelosi! Vinnie Paul Abbott! Turkey Hunting! Ci Siamo! Let’s Make Cocktails! More!!!

• Ina Garten added “Memoir coming out October 1st 2024” to her Instagram bio and that is all we have on that! [Insta via Salon]

• In this house WE LOVE TWO BOOK DEALS: and Dan Pelosi AKA @grossypelosi (170k followers) just got one two: Union Square & Co., pub date TBA.

• Pantera drummer Vinnie Paul Abbott died in 2018, and his girlfriend announced in 2020 that his “long-awaited cookbook” would be published posthumously. And now the project seems to be seeing the light of day: Drumming Up an Appetite with Vinnie Paul will be published by 72 Comics this summer, and will feature illustrations by Danny Hellman, Steve Chanks, and Rob Schwager.

  

• Heyyyyy here’s a book I worked on! Austin chef/hunter Jesse Griffiths is back with his third cookbook, The Turkey Book: A Chef’s Journal of Hunting and Cooking America’s Bird, a lovely meditation on hunting and cooking wild turkey that I had the honor of helping edit. Even if you’re not a hunter—but especially if you are—the recipes in this book are worth your time. Pre-order here, out soon! [The Wild Books]

• New York chef Hillary Sterling of Ci Siamo to write Ammazza! Culinary Adventures from New York to Italy and Back Again, a seasonal Italian cookbook cowritten with Theresa Gambacorta. Scribner, pub night TBA.

• Sarah Becan of the Let’s Make! illustrated cookbook series to write Let’s Make Cocktails! More here (as an aside, I can’t figure out how to get Beehiiv to do Instagram previews, or maybe it’s just broken RN?), but it will be “100 cocktail recipes organized by spirit, with historical context and stories for each.” Ten Speed Graphic, pub date tba.

• Yoko Kumano and Kayoko Akabori, the founders of Oakland Japanese imports store Umami Mart, to write Every Day Sake, a book that will serve as an introduction to sake, which frankly I could use. Clarkson Potter, pub date TBA.

• Nina Paletta and Meghan Shaw, the chefs behind Detroit vegan pop-up Street Beet, have written a cookbook that will be available online towards the end of the month. According to the MetroTimes, Nostalgic Vegan: The Street Beet Cookbook features the duo’s riffs on fun vegan treats like “Taco Hell” Crunchywraps, a chickpea tuna salad, broccoli cheddar soup, mac and cheese, and an orange cardamom chocolate chip cookie. Watch their Instagram for pre-order info.

• And last but not least, in Pittsburgh, a commissary cookbook for prisoners called Not Your Average Noodle by Jon “D-Boi” Brown, R. Ya’iyr Carter, and Pierre “Polo” Pinson. You can buy a copy for yourself and have one sent to a prisoner, at a discount for the second copy!, here. [PGH City Paper]

As usual, all book deals are via Publishers Marketplace unless otherwise specified.

Subscribe to Premium to read the rest.