18 PUBLISHERS WEEKLY ■ MARCH 8, 2021
Cookbooks
the book as a “remarkable” compendium of “purposefully
inexact methods for creating delicious meals.”
In the same vein as Sifton’s title is No Recipe? No Problem!
(Storey, May) by Phyllis Good, creator of the Fix-It and Forget-It
series. She applies a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants ethos to
cooking, helping readers to wing it in the kitchen sans recipe.
“I’m not here to tell you what do,” Good says. “I want us—
the reader and me—to discover a different way of thinking
about cooking for greater success.”
Like Sifton, Good encourages readers to follow their intu-
ition, including while shopping for groceries. “Start with some-
thing that looks delightful and that you know your family is
going to enjoy,” she notes. “You don’t have to know exactlywhat you’re going to do when you bring that ingredient home.”
The book, which PW called a “winning guide,” includes
workbooklike features, such as “Freestyle Cooking” charts
and “Kitchen Cheat” pages, that
help new and experienced home chefs
navigate the kitchen without
instructions.
With a wave of novice home chefs
firing up their burners, basics-
focused cookbooks have renewed
appeal. Cook This Book (Clarkson
Potter, Apr.) by Molly Baz, a recipe
developer who, until recently, was aHow did the idea for this book come to be?
Tara Duggan: You get so focused on the task of cooking,
but you don’t always stop and think about the action. It
sounds new agey, but it’s good to stop and think, “Can I get
more out of it than just this dinner?” It was a refreshing
way to approach a cookbook.
Rachel Levin: I hope readers will appreciate this approach—
the physicality and the emotion of making the food, not
just the taste and texture of the product.How did you curate the recipes?
TD: I’d been seeing biang biang noodles around on the
internet. I happened to read that the name comes from the
sound of banging the noodles, and thought, “Oh, that’s
perfect!” We have a mix of recipes—what’s percolating out
there in the food world, and what readers find comforting.
RL: Early in the pandemic, I was ordering CSA boxes andPW talks with Rachel Levin and Tara Duggan
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In their forthcoming book, Steamed (Running Press,
May), former Eater restaurant editor Rachel Levin
and San Francisco Chronicle deputy food editor Tara
Duggan encourage home chefs to put their feelings
on the table by pounding, pummeling, crushing,
and smashing their food.
“Cooking has always been thought of as thera-
peutic,” Levin says. “There’s humor that can be
explored in that. When Covid-19 hit, and as 2020
unfolded, the ideas behind the book just became
more pertinent.”
PW spoke with Levin and Duggan about devising funny
recipe names and tearing up in the kitchen.Rachel Levin Tara Duggangetting so much. I remember spending two hours shelling
fava beans one day. It was so freeing, so we included Drama-
Free Fava Toasts in the book.Why did you decide to write a funny book?
TD: I enjoyed getting to write the recipes in a slightly dif-
ferent way, because recipe writing tends to be pretty formu-
laic. I kept cracking up when I was reading the proof, even
though I’d read it three times.
RL: Chopping onions is underrated. There are reams of arti-
cles online on how to stop the tears. No one is explaining
that there’s an upside! The kitchen is a good place for crying.
I wanted to play that up. And coming up with the recipe names
was really fun. I’m quite proud of Self-Cured Gravlax. It’s
rare to find a funny cookbook. They tend to be really earnest.What do you hope readers take away from this book?
RL: Even when the pandemic ends, we’re going to need to
eat. We’re going to want to vent. We’re going to need an
outlet at the end of the day, no matter what that day brings.
—P.M.