Posts in Behind the Cookbook
Behind The Cookbook – Amber & Rye: A Baltic Food Journey

Polish-born author Zuza Zak was partly inspired to write Amber & Rye: A Baltic Food Journey by her Lithuanian grandmother, and the stories she told about her idyllic childhood spent in and around Vilnius. Find out how Zuza researched the book – and about the evolving cooking of the Baltic states – in her Behind the Cookbook feature.

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Behind The Cookbook – Virsa: A Culinary Journey from Agra to Karachi

Shehar Bano Rizvi’s debut cookbook, Virsa: A Culinary Journey from Agra to Karachi, is a collection of family recipes and memories that she has dedicated to her parents. By turning her family recipes into a full-color, beautifully photographed book, Shehar has saved heirloom dishes for posterity – while giving readers an insight into her family’s food traditions.

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Behind The Cookbook: My Big Fat Greek Cookbook

The idea for My Big Fat Greek Cookbook was born when filmmaker, actor, innovator, and author Christos Sourligas learned of his mother’s terminal illness. Determined to document his mother’s recipes, he spent a year working alongside her, learning to cook her dishes. This book, co-authored by mother and son, is the result. Christos describes it as “our family’s gift to the world.”

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Behind the Cookbook: The Sainsbury’s cookbook series

In the 1970s and 1980s, Sainsbury’s published a groundbreaking series of cookbooks written by top authors. The books have become classics, and ckbk is working with the authors to make many of these much-loved titles available once more online.

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Behind the Cookbook: Pied à Terre – Celebrating 30 years

For more than 30 years, David Moore’s Michelin-starred restaurant Pied à Terre has served some of the best food in London. Pied à Terre: Celebrating 30 years tells the story of the restaurant through the decades and includes recipes for many of its best-loved dishes. To mark the book’s arrival on ckbk, we spoke to restaurateur David Moore, who looks back on the restaurant’s history and the making of the book.

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Behind the Cookbook: 50 Years of Poor Cook

In 1971, half a century ago, two young mothers wrote a book that captured the spirit of the time, and still has strong resonance to this day. Poor Cook focuses on good simple cooking from scratch. Its “do what you can with what’s available” ethos is very much in keeping with today’s imperative to reduce food waste. We spoke to the two co-authors who told us how they came to write the book….

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Behind the Cookbook: Recipes from Paradise

Fred Plotkin’s Recipes From Paradise: Life and Food on the Italian Riviera is a love letter to Liguria, which he says “may be as close to paradise as one can find on this earth”. Plotkin tells ckbk why Liguria is the part of Italy that will always hold the most fascination for him.

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Behind the Cookbook: The Auberge of the Flowering Hearth

Almost 50 years ago, Roy Andries de Groot, an aristocratic, eccentric, and profoundly blind British American food writer took a trip to France that would, indirectly, change the course of American cooking. The book that resulted captures a moment in culinary time and place like perhaps no other, and its influence has been profound.

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Behind the Cookbook: Great Chefs of France

Candida Crewe, daughter of food critic Quentin Crewe, reflects on the life of her father and how he came to pen what many chefs regard as one of the best books on French cuisine ever written, Great Chefs of France.

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Author Profile: Marlena Spieler – The Complete Guide to Traditional Jewish Cooking

In the monumental tome, The Complete Guide to Traditional Jewish Cooking (2006), food writer Marlena turns historian and storyteller to explore “a cuisine that is as diverse as it is delicious.” We spoke to Marlena about Jewish traditions that matter most to her personally and how she has had to start from scratch again in her understanding of flavor.

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When made from scratch is better than store-bought

Many cookbooks kick off with an introductory chapter, running through the kitchen basics and store cupboard essentials which will be among the building blocks to let you create the dishes within.

But what about the basics themselves. Should you be happy with finding the best quality you can from a reliable producer? Might there not be benefits to making these basics own from scratch, too?

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