Why we need cookbooks more than ever

Tangible objects, full of pages that inspire, transport, connect, resist and bring joy, we need and want cookbooks in our lives.

I was originally drafting this piece as “Why We Still Need Cookbooks” and thinking about how our way of life, and things like style, taste, culture, diet and what is available and affordable, have all evolved over the decades. One day maybe it will still make a good article and it will be a great excuse to talk about salmon mousse in aspic and cottage cheese cake. Then I realised that the conversation I really wanted to have is why we need cookbooks more than ever.

Cookbooks can teach and inspire you to cook, to feed yourself and your family or community, to encourage you to find joy and connection and learn about other cultures by putting yourself in someone else’s shoes (or in this case, their kitchen).

Despite the fact that we live in a world where people read less and less and that the internet is full of free recipes, cookbooks are still appealing. Sales are actually pretty good. As Allen & Unwin NZ publishing director Michelle Hurley says, "There is always going to be a place for cookbooks, they are embedded in our lives, they are a different form of story-telling. They remain profitable, and anyone who tells you that cookbooks are dead is wrong.”

We need and want cookbooks in our lives.

Back in 2012, the height of food blog popularity, LV Anderson, writing for Slate, wrote this piece predicting the death of cookbooks (“They’ll go Extinct. And that’s Ok.”). Waxing lyrical about the latest ipad holder for your kitchen and apps that can respond to voice command, he adds that, “For people who are interested primarily in cooking recipes that taste good, the Internet is a better resource than any cookbook ever was.” This piece did not age well, and for that I am grateful. He continues:

“Will some cookbook lovers resist these improvements? Yes, but eventually they will all be dead. Will some rich people always seek out obscure memorabilia to display as status symbols or art objects? Yes, but in the future, cookbooks will be quirky art objects in the same sense that typewriters are today. Their value will be in their history, and the rest of us will wonder how anyone ever cooked from them in the first place.”

But what Anderson did not predict was how quickly the internet itself changed. It changed what is available to us and how it is presented. Artificial Intelligence is becoming integrated into everything we own, everything we use to navigate the web, and the mishmash of recipes and suggestions churned out by AI now produces nonsense that cannot be trusted.

Newsletter platforms like Substack are becoming a better place where we can make sure we get what we want to see – no longer are the people I want to hear from getting lost behind maddening algorithms. Newsletters land right into my inbox, along with the recipes or the conversations I want to read. But I subscribe to about eighty different newsletters. Is it just me or does anyone else find that searching for these fleeting recipes buried under a mountain of emails is frustrating and that cooking from an inbox is deeply unsatisfying? (I realise the irony that this is coming from me, on my newsletter! Trust me, I am frustrated with myself about this).

Perhaps it is just that the internet is no longer a place where we can easily find what we are looking for, when it comes to recipes. Or anything else, for that matter.

Laurie Ochoa from the LA Times (If the world has gone digital, why do so many of us still want cookbooks? 2024) has another good point:

“Even though I have hundreds of cookbooks — so many that I have stacks on every step up the staircase in my front hall — I frequently find myself online looking for recipe ideas or basic cooking information.

But the experience often leaves me unsatisfied. I might get the basic information I was seeking, but it’s only when I slow down and page through an actual cookbook — lingering over the photos or line drawings, taking in the stories behind the pictures and recipes, absorbing whether the author is a forgiving or strict teacher — that I fully immerse myself in a cook’s world and discover new ideas and old traditions about how we eat. It’s also how I come across recipes I wouldn’t have thought to put into a search field.”

A cookbook, on the other hand, a real object that you own, that lives in your bookshelf, is something that you can pick up anytime and can bookmark and feel with your very fingers. You can open it to a splattered page of familiarity and nostalgia, or flip through to discover something new — either way, it is yours to learn from and pass on.

Whether casually looking for inspiration, or scanning the index at the back of the book for a specific ingredient, a cookbook, in your hands, is an experience that a screen can never replace. I personally find it hard to cook from a screen, especially after spending a day between my laptop and my phone. I want to switch off and just cook mindfully, leaving my oily fingerprint on a page like a bookmark that will always say to me, remember that meal?

Much could be said about many other aspects of our lives, where tangible objects have taken a digital form and disappeared behind a screen, our lives less cluttered, more “convenient.” Books, music, film, photography and more. It is said that we no longer own anything anymore, that everything is now a temporary service that we rent. Even some favourite food blogs can disappear offline or go behind a paywall suddenly. There is something to be said about being able to own your own things and having a home filled with well-loved books lining shelves and stacked up on desks, CDs and vinyls spilling out of boxes, printed photographs adorning walls.

Long before AI and the internet began to get weird, I had reservations about the permanence of what was online (oddly, not what would be online forever but what might disappear). Before becoming a cookbook author, I was an art restorer. My specialty was works on paper, which included photographs and books. I have always been interested in preserving and conserving and I don’t just mean food, but preserving recipes, preserving stories, preserving books and paper and photographs, preserving history. Documenting, capturing a time and place, a memory.

When I discovered blogging back in 2010, I realised it was a way I could document and preserve old books, old recipes for modern readers. But I was worried about the permanence of online recipes. I had just left a job in one of the biggest photography archives in Europe, Florence’s Fratelli Alinari archives. They have some of the word’s oldest photographs. I had seen enough in there to help me understand what would last another 200 years and what wouldn’t. But I was thinking of corrupted hard drives versus film negatives and I didn’t know everything we had would become a service we had to pay for, even the cloud space where our precious photos were kept. I just knew that when my first book deal came along, in 2014, I lept at the chance to create a permanent place for those stories and histories, those recipes — something I could hold in my hands.

And then came AI.

In 2023, Six of my cookbooks were stolen by Meta to use in its training of AI. It is really the worst kind of spine-tingling feeling to find out that one of the most wealthy people on the planet has stolen a decade of my work, all that sacrifice and blood and sweat while raising a small family. And for what — so that AI can write sloppy, pointless cookbooks for us and attempt to put already poorly paid creators out of work?

Have you seen an AI cookbook? It is one of the most hideous, nonsensical, useless things I have ever seen. The recipes obviously aren’t tested — they’re not even real recipes. No one has edited them, let alone tasted them. They aren’t things anyone wants to eat (Bratwurst ice cream, anyone?). It is total slop. AI-generated photographs of unrecognisable items that don’t match the description of the so-called recipe. A fish skewer recipe accompanied by a photograph of what appears to be a smoothie. Directions that make no sense. Ingredients that make even less sense, like garlic bread calling for 5 cups of French bread. Why would anyone want this?

Cookbooks written by humans take months, years of trial and error to make, while recipes are tested and tasted, with human traits such as passion and nostalgia. There is an entire team involved to make sure that they not only make sense and are practical but that they look good too.

Asking AI for recipes is like asking it for travel tips. The same “hallucinations” that cause AI to make up disgusting, inedible recipes is the same reason it will suggested permanently closed restaurants or invent totally non-existent sights to visit in utterly impractical itineraries. ChatGPT has never cooked a meal or traveled the world. It has no eyes to marvel, no taste buds that explode at new flavours, no heartbeat that pounds upon seeing Michelangelo’s David for the first time. When I hear people are using AI to plan their meals or trips, I feel like Robin Williams in that scene in Good Will Hunting where he says to the young prodigy played by Matt Damon, “If I asked you about art, you’d probably give me the skinny on every art book ever written. Michelango, you know a lot about him… But I bet you can’t tell me what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel. You’ve never actually stood there and looked up at that beautiful ceiling.”

AI searches now condense a recipe at the top of the page, leading to people no longer visiting the recipe blogs written by actual people who have actually cooked and prepared the recipe, but instead making do with the “Frankensteined” answer that AI has synthesised. There are some choice AI responses summed up in this BBC article here, which include AI suggesting humans eat one rock a day and using glue to better hold cheese to pizza, or “gasoline to make a spicy spaghetti dish.”

Getting back to actual books written by humans who eat and care has never been more needed.

Have you heard of friction-maxxing? Kathryn Jezer-Morton describes it in this piece for The Cut, “In 2026, We Are Friction-Maxxing” as “the process of building up tolerance for ‘inconvenience’” to combat tech company-induced escapism (“Uber-ing dinner five nights a week or using AI to reply to texts”) and, instead, reaching for enjoyment. Jezer-Morton continues:

“Stop using ChatGPT completely. No, it does not have good ideas for meal planning. Buy a cookbook. Text your friends for advice. Go to Trader Joe’s. Come on.”

I would add as an aside, you don’t even need to necessarily go out and spend money on books – borrow them from a library. The library is the most revolutionary place we have in our community (to quote Justin Pot in Wired, “If libraries didn’t already exist, our current political system would never allow us to build them. The concept it too revolutionary: All of the knowledge and entertainment of humanity made available, to everyone”). Borrow for free. Learn for free. Authors even receive kickbacks from library books too (or they should – I am only just discovering this myself).

But there is something else. Reading cookbooks, the act of cooking, can be an antidote to the rising Fascism that we are seeing all over the world right now. If you are feeling it too, and feeling powerless, then start small. Make some pickles. Ferment something.

Pickling and preserving is the ultimate antidote to uncertainty, if you ask me. The Japanese proverb, “Everything will be all right as long as there is miso,” is a great example of how fermenting protected generations of Japanese farmers from poverty, natural disasters and uncertainty.

Making food – like anything creative, be it art, music, gardening, knitting – is resistance. It is resistance to AI and it is resistance to the Fascist microagressions that are trying to divide and demoralise us.

Take note of how Italians resisted in the early 1940s in the middle of the Second World War. Food was scarce, especially in cities. Small acts of resistance became literally life-sustaining. People made makeshift gardens in piazzas. They foraged food like chestnuts and made “coffee” from acorns. Many sent what little food they had to Partisans fighting for freedom against Fascists in the mountains. Farmers saved what little flour they could to share with their community to make what is now called antifascist pasta – a plate of pasta with cheese and butter that became a symbol of freedom and resistance.

“The boiling sounded like a symphony. I heard many conversations on the end of Fascism but the most beautiful speech was that of the pasta boiling,” recalls Alcide in I miei sette figli (1955).

MFK Fisher’s How to Cook a Wolf also dates to the Second World War; it was published in 1942. Providing sustenance is more than just putting food on the table; life is to be celebrated, even when there is not much and life is messy — this was Fisher’s message at the time. But I also think it can be applied to any time we are faced with something painful, stressful, or when there are negative things happening that we don’t have complete control over.

“I believe that one of the most dignified ways we are capable of, to assert and then reassert our dignity in the face of poverty and war’s fears and pains, is to nourish ourselves with all possible skill, delicacy, and ever increasing enjoyment. And with our gastronomical growth will come, inevitably, knowledge and perception of a hundred other things, but mainly of ourselves. Then Fate, even tangled as it is with cold wars as well as hot, cannot harm us.” — MFK Fisher in How to Cook a Wolf

This book was a great read during the uncertainty of the pandemic, for example, and I feel that books written during this time period will be good references whenever we need some perspective when the world feels a bit shaky.

We need cookbooks more than ever, like anything that helps us learn skills, gain cultural knowledge, be self-sustainable, open-minded, be transported and find joy (Fisher reminds us of this, the necessity of pleasure). Cookbooks, pages that you can leaf through, full of stories and recipes that are culturally invaluable, that nurture, that connect you to another time and place.

As Alex O’Neill says in this piece, The Great Cookbook Revival: Why our Appetite for Recipe Books Never Wanes (Image, 2024), “Sometimes, we’re just searching for something to cook, but more often we’re looking to feel connected: to ourselves, others, our past, or a memory.”

Even simply leafing through the recipe for, say, salmon mousse in aspic can spark a moment, a memory of your grandmother’s fish-shaped tin that came out only for special occasions, a reflection of another time and place, of what nurturing meant and means, a lesson that reminds us of our humanity and our need for pleasure. Nothing on a screen can replace this.

Cookbooks that transport

Here are some cookbooks that I love having at arm’s reach, by the bedside table as much as in the kitchen. There are many, many more I would put in here, obviously, but this is a start. Please feel free to share your favourites that transport or inspire you in the comments below too — the more the merrier. No links to Amazon or Google, please look them up at your nearest library or your local independent bookstore.

How to Cook a Wolf by MFK Fisher

Fisher's wartime memoir/cookbook inspires us to cook, nourish ourselves and seek pleasure, even in the face of fear. As her biographer Joan Reardon wrote, the theme of the book is "the will to survive, whether in wartime or in battle with old age or in a crise de nerfs.”

Honey from a Weed by Patience Gray

From 1986, more than just a cookbook, it’s a a foraging handbook, a guide to a way of life that has vanished and a memoir that follows Gray to the places she called home — Spain, France, Italy and Greece. From fox cooked by an anarchist in the marble quarries of Carrara to grinding coffee beans in an off-grid cottage on windblown Naxos, Gray has stories to tell.

The Alice B Toklas Cookbook by Alice B Toklas

Another brilliant WW2-era cookbook/memoir by Gertrude Stein’s life partner about their life between France and the US during tumultuous times. This is the book that inspired me to start writing about food.

Home Cooking by Laurie Colwin

A forever favourite old cookbook. I to go back to this book, time and time again, and just read her wise and comforting words, which I'll nod along to: “No one who cooks, cooks alone. Even at her most solitary, a cook in the kitchen is surrounded by generations of cooks past, the advice and menus of cooks present, the wisdom of cookbook writers”

Taste of Country Cooking by Edna Lewis

Published in 1976, this is exactly what I love most in a cookbook – part memoir, a celebration of an upbringing in a farming community in Virginia, where family recipes of simple, good food are inspired by the land and the seasons. Her recipes are written with love, care and life experience.

To Asia with Love by Hetty McKinnon

I love this book, along with Crying in H Mart, it inspired me to have the courage to own my own Asian heritage and write Gohan. As Hetty says, “To Asia, With Love is my homecoming, a joyous return to the humble, yet deeply nurturing flavours and meals of my childhood as a Chinese girl born in Australia.” It is a collection of doable, modern, delicious recipes, allowing you to customise, explore and be inspired.

Pomegranates and Artichokes by Saghar Setareh

This book so beautifully tells the story of Saghar’s journey from Iran to Italy and “in Between”. She writes, “Over and over again the question of borders and freedom of movement is raised throughout the book, for in fact, more than anything Pomegranates & Artichokes is about migrations. And consequently it’s also a book about identity.”

Taboon by Hisham Assaad

One of those “culturally invaluable” works that document recipes that you might otherwise see disappear, Taboon is a precious work full of stories of Hisham’s Palestinian and Lebanese heritage and absolutely delicious food. As he says in this interview with me, “The will, in both books [Bayrut is the other], to document the reality, as a time capsule, and preserve some recipes that are fading in popularity but once were a monumental part of the culinary culture in both Lebanon and whatever pieces I could hold on to from Palestine.”

Love Crumbs by Nadine Ingram

Love Crumbs, from Flour and Stone’s Nadine Ingram is a cake book like no other that I know. Part poetry, part memoir, part practical baking book, all love and heart. The wonderful Annie Smithers writes so perfectly in the foreword: “I cannot remember if I have ever sat and felt the tears run down my face while reading a cookbook. Tears of loss, tears of joy. Of longing, of lessons learnt. Of realising there is someone else out there who has seen the beauty of the ordinary, felt similar anguishes and slights, to know that through her eyes and words, we are not alone. Baking is not a ritual that exists to appease oneself. Its nature is to create something that is to be shared, something that represents love, care and solidarity.”

What else would you add?