It Seems Everyone’s Writing Cookbooks
Doctors do it. Chefs do it. Dietitians and professors do it. Self-professed weight-loss experts do it a lot. Even guys getting over heart attacks do it, and so do their wives.
In the last few years, cookbooks on low-fat or otherwise healthful eating have been generated by almost anybody with taste buds and a computer nutrition program. A few seem to be written by people with neither.
How many diet books can you have?
“Well, they’re exploding over my desk, over my floor, off my shelf,” says Patricia Adrian, who selects cookbooks for the Book-Of-The-Month Club. “I am almost sick to death of health-oriented cookbooks.”
About 90 percent of the cookbooks being published at least pay lip service to health, estimates Nachs Waxman, owner of Kitchen Arts and Letters, a New York City bookstore.
“Any book that doesn’t acknowledge a lower-fat, light-eating lifestyle is doing so at its own hazard,” Waxman says.
Lisa Ekus, owner of a public relations firm that caters exclusively to cookbooks and food, concurs.
“Overall, what I think I’m seeing in the industry is not so much diet books but an obsession with low-fat, low-cholesterol, healthy food,” she says.
It’s a recent phenomenon. Even five years ago, only a few cookbooks computed the calories, fat, cholesterol and sodium in recipes. Now nutritionals are almost de rigueur for any cookbook worth its salt (excuse the pun).
Lorna Sass, a New York food historian and cookbook author, thinks the recent spate of health-oriented books is temporary.
“For a long time the medical profession refused to link diet and disease,” Sass says. “Now that they do recognize it, the pendulum has swung completely to the other side. Sooner or later it will balance somewhere in the middle.”
People obviously are interested in how food influences their health, Sass says, whether they follow the nutrition advice or not.
And they are buying cookbooks.
“Cookbook sales are up whether people are cooking from them or not,” Ekus says. “In last decade we saw recipe books with few head notes and background, but now people want more than cooking instructions; they want to know some history, the setting, the cultural influence. They also want to know about health.”
Heart disease researcher Dr. Dean Ornish has a cookbook exploring low-fat cooking. So does French chef Jacques Pepin and Cajun cook Paul Prudhomme.
Oprah Winfrey’s personal cook Rosie Daley has sold millions of copies of her spa food cookbook, while Joseph C. Piscatella recently revised his 10-year-old “Don’t Eat Your Heart Out Cookbook” (Workman), which he wrote after he had bypass surgery.
There are many more, some with titles more clever than their contents are unique and some that just aren’t too good, Adrian says.
“One thing that bothers me is that they treat food as an enemy,” she says. “Food should be enjoyed.”
Nobody subscribes to that notion more than Joyce Goldstein, chef and author of several cookbooks.
“There is only one way to deep fry,” she says. “Oven baking doesn’t do it. And I hate fat substitutes and substitute ingredients.
“On the other hand, I’m not going to intentionally seek out the recipes heaviest in fat. We all write books with a contemporary eye.”
An outgrowth of America’s obsession with healthful food is the rise in vegetarian-style eating.
“Vegetarian cookbooks are the hottest item for 1995,” says Ekus.
Waxman says two vegetarian cookbooks that first came out in the 1970s illustrate the evolution of healthful cooking: “The Moosewood Cookbook” and “Laurel’s Kitchen.”
“Both of them emphasized full nutrition without meat,” Waxman says. “Then about four years ago, those books were revised, not toward putting more stuff in, but to taking out bad stuff such as salt, fats and oils.”
There are “some very exciting vegetarian cookbooks coming,” Adrian says, “not for strict vegetarians who have really given up fish and poultry, but for the part-timers.”
Those include “The Almost Vegetarian” (Crown) by Diana Shaw, and “The Occasional Vegetarian” (Warner) by Karen Lee.
Though health is hot, cookbook watchers see everything as temporary.
“I think we’ll see meat coming back with gusto,” Adrian says. “(Trendy food writer) Barbara Kafka is writing a book on roasting.”