WELCOME TO OUR KITCHEN: Let's talk about fixing other people's cookbooks!

Hey, I'm Bruce Weinstein, and this is the podcast cooking with Bruce and Mark. And I'm Mark Scarborough. And together with Bruce, we have written three dozen cookbooks, including our latest, The Look and Cook Air Fryer Bible. You probably know about it if you've listened to this podcast. Over 700 photos. Every step of every recipe is photographed. You can't go wrong with your air fryer with this cookbook. We're not talking about air frying in this.

Episode of the podcast cooking with bruce and mark instead we've got a one minute cooking tip about serving food to company We're going to talk about fixing other people's cookbooks something we've done over the course of our career And we'll tell you what's making us happy in food this week. So let's get started

If you're having company for dinner, and you don't have time to make everything Don't. You know, it's perfectly okay to serve a bakery dessert, or get this, a restaurant soup. Yeah, in fact, I think sometimes, when I go to people's houses, a bakery dessert is more oud and odd over. I know people spend a lot of time making dessert, and I don't want to diss that, and you do too. Bruce makes crazy French patisserie desserts.

But at the same time, when I'm at other people's houses, I sometimes see a, I don't know, a tart come out that's come from a bakery and there's so many oohs and ahs around the table. Mm-Hmm. . There's something so romantic about a dessert from a bakery. It is. And it doesn't have to just be dessert. If you have a restaurant near you that makes a soup, you like, right. Think about going in ordering, you know, eight servings. That would be like a quarter two of the soup.

Yeah. And serve that as your first course. It will taste like it's homemade. No one has to know. And do you have to tell them? Nope. No. Uh, we have a business near us here in rural New England that makes a lot of soup in the freezer, and I've often thought about going and stocking up, but of course I can't because Bruce has got our freezers so full. It's ridiculous. But I've thought about stocking up with several soups just for me when he's away and having them in the fridge. And you know what?

It would be. great also to have those at a dinner party, right? Absolutely. No reason not to do that. It is better to serve your friends some delicious food, even if you didn't make it, then to make yourself crazy, trying to make everything. That's a crazy tip from two cookbook writers, but there you go. It kind of invalidates our entire career, but okay. Anyway, we're going to go on with it.

Friends say what we will before we get to that next part of our podcast, which is a large oh personal reflection from us, I wanna tell you that we do have a newsletter. You can find it on our website, Bruce and mark.com, or cooking with Bruce and mark.com. You can sign up for it. There it comes out, oh, I don't know, about once a month. I just, I don't know.

It's when I get to it and my life is kind of crazy with my own Dante podcast and with teaching, and we're writing a new book and yada, yada, yada. So it comes out to once, twice a month, but you can sign up there and we'd be delighted for you to have part of our journey with a newsletter, which is not necessarily connected to this podcast. Check it out and you can always unsubscribe at any time. Okay. On to the next segment of our podcast, which is what

we're going to talk about how we have been hired to fix other people's cookbooks. Oh, this is something that. Uh, happened more back in the day. Um, I think that, let me just say, that the business has changed a lot, the cookbook business, the publishing business has changed a lot, and cookbooks don't come in quite like this anymore.

I think a lot of influencers, and a lot of chefs, and etc., you know, people like that who write cookbooks and get published, they're expected to turn in a clean manuscript. Right. And they're expected to be pre edited. Right. Book doctoring happens all the time. And that's kind of what it's called in the industries.

Like in terms of novels and fiction, if somebody turns in a book and the publisher's not crazy about it, then they'll hire someone to work with the writer to fix it, to fix the plot, to fix the narrative. I mean, that, that happened with my memoir bookmarked that my agent hired a freelance. editor to work with me on that memoir to get it somewhere where she thought she could sell it.

But what I meant is, and just to say, I don't mean to push my point, but what I mean to say is now cookbook editing and fixing does happen, but it happens because the writer has paid for it on their end and they have sorted it out themselves. In the days when we did it, the publishers We're seeking out writers, ghost writers, people behind the scenes to create the books. It's a little different now. It now falls really hard on the writer. Yeah, it does. The writer has to do it.

In fact, one of the ones we did, the writer actually did contact us. Because her publisher told her to publish is like, okay, this book is a mess. She turned it was a Simon and Schuster book. It wasn't a nothing. No, this author was doing this sort of healthy book. She was sort of this healthy guru. It was a little bit before influencers were the rage, but she would have been considered an influencer in her day. We didn't use those terms then, but she had a huge, Oh, now we're going to go back.

She had a huge Facebook and YouTube following. Now we're going really back, um, to tell you everything. And, uh, you know, that following, we didn't say it was, she was an influencer, but that's what she was. She was a fitness guru. And all of her recipes, the whole book was full of smoothies and health. Full drinks and the publisher Didn't she live off the grid or something. I think so. I think she lived in Montana, Idaho, somewhere like off the grid.

I remember it was difficult for me to, this is how old it is for me to Skype with her. It took some doing for her to get to a Skype and she was very. Fragile. And every Skype meeting was more of a therapy session. She cried. She cried in every single Skype meeting. Anytime you told her she had to change something in a recipe, she'd cry and tell you what.

So my favorite one from this whole book, so it was a breakfast smoothie, and it was filled with kale, and oranges, and all those wonderful things. And a piece of raw chicken liver. Yes, it was true. There was raw chicken liver in a smoothie this wasn't the only problem. She had a lot of things like this. And I think this came from living off the grid. And I said to her, You cannot write a recipe with raw liver in it.

And she, you know, batted back at me and said, Well, I, I have it most mornings. And, you know, and she talked about raising her own chickens and organic feed and all this kind of stuff. And I said, That's great. Okay, if you want to put a raw chicken liver in your smoothie and drink it in the morning, That's your chickens. Those are your choices. Good for you. But you cannot ask the reader of your book to go out and buy supermarket chicken livers and drop them in a blender.

Supermarket chicken livers that may be full of all kinds of bad toxins. Livers are the filter of your body. They take out the drugs you take. They take out the Poisons they take out, so it's got to go somewhere and it stores in the liver. She didn't know what the liability issues would be if she told someone to eat a raw liver and they got sick. The publisher knew, which is why they asked us to jump in. Yeah, it was true. And a lot of her book was like this.

Um, you know, this is the problem and I, I'm going to stop here and say that I follow a lot. of, uh, vegan chefs on TikTok. And, uh, you probably know this. If you follow our TikTok channel, cooking with Bruce and Mark, if you've seen us on social media, you know that I'm cooking more vegan and somehow I've been following a ton of vegan UK chefs. Okay. Anyway, they're all 20 and, you know, and beautiful and all that stuff.

Anyway, the, my whole point about this is that whenever I find a recipe that I like, I have to rewrite it, even from their written recipe at the bottom, because they don't know how to write a recipe. They don't know how to put ingredients in the order that they're using the recipe. They don't know the difference between volumes and weights. Some things are in volumes, some things in weights.

They, they flip all around about this kind of stuff, and it's really We're told to have to rewrite the recipes and this is what we were doing for this book Yeah, she didn't know how to write a recipe which recipes to get really technical here recipes have to have a beginning a middle and an end Oh, we're at Aristotle.

They're they're like a story they have to have a beginning a middle and an end and you have to bring a reader of a recipe to an Endpoint to a conclusion and a lot of people don't know this skill and this particular health guru certainly didn't. So her recipe ingredients were all out of order. And they, you know, some of them just, I'm sorry, you cannot cook raw wheat berries for 10 minutes and have it done.

I mean, what, what I'm suggesting by that is that she just has a load of cooked wheat berries in her refrigerator. She's. Pouring them into smoothies and into salads and this kind of thing. I should have really think about how long it takes to cook them. Now, I want to go back to your thing about recipes as a story. Um, if you listen to a recent episode where I interviewed Kat Ashmore, who's a TikTok influencer, she actually got the idea of recipes as stories.

And in our interview, she talked about how. Every ingredient in a recipe is a character. I know. And I love that because some characters are funny, some are sad, some are depressive, and the same thing with ingredients. Some are sweet, some are bitter, some are sour. And they all add, like Mia Farrow in a Woody Allen movie, they all add. It's something to the dinner party, and I love that idea. Mia Farrow adds nothing, but that's a whole nother matter entirely. I love Mia Farrow. Don't write in.

I love her. I mean, it's just that blank. Geraldine Page in interiors, filling her pockets with rocks and walking into the sea. Yes, but that's so Virginia Woolf. I don't care. It was cribbed out of Woolf. Come on. It was a fabulous movie. Um, maybe. Just don't crib Virginia like that. Um, anyway, uh, so we're way off the subject. So yes, we fixed that cookbook. Here's another example of a cookbook we were asked to fix, and actually this is kind of a brilliant idea. This was a restaurant.

It may still exist in Staten Island. It was. And, uh, this guy had a really brilliant idea. He had a standard North American Italian restaurant. You know, it had meatballs and spaghetti and ravioli and all the stuff you would expect in a North American Italian restaurant. A kind of Sicilian, Calabrian based, but tweaked to North America. So, you know, you do get crab ravioli and with cheese on top of it. But a lot of eggplant parmesan and salted bokeh. Okay, so, you know.

This restaurant ran, and his idea was that there were all these old nanas in Staten Island. And every night, there were eight or nine of them, and every night one of the nanas came in, and, in the kitchen, and she made whatever she was famous for making. And that was the special of the night.

Right, and that would be on the special, maybe she'd make one or two dishes, and that was the nana dish of the night, and You know, it's kind of a cool idea because a lot of these old Calabrian and Sicilian recipes are kind of being forgotten, even in Calabria and Sicily of today. So these old Nonna's were recreating these dishes, but the cookbook was a bit of a mess. And you want to tell about why it was a mess? Yeah. The publisher came to us and said.

This is such a mess that we can't deal with it and their editor didn't want to deal with it. They knew we had the expertise in dealing with sensitive authors and sensitive people. And before this career, I was a creative director around the creative department and editing. So I was used to temperamental art directors and people who cried every time you correct them. did them. Sometimes Bruce will tell you about the art director who every day threatened to blow his brains out on the job.

Every single day, really, you know, I don't know what, uh, go get some help. Go get therapy. Once again, I was more therapist than I was creative director, but okay. So we get the, this book, the manuscript is overnighted to us and we open up to the very first recipe and it says stuffed. Yeah, it did. And it was the opening recipe.

And if you know anything about writing cookbooks and how cookbooks are crafted, you try to open with a really accessible recipe or a really inviting recipe because you can get to the crazy stuff down the line. Okay, so for example, we're writing a weird tweak on canning and preserving right now as a book.

And. You know, we could start with celeriac marmalade, or we could, which is in the book, which is in the book, or we could start with fig cardamom jam, but that's not necessarily where you want to start. You want to start with Concord grape jelly or Concord grape jam. You want to start at a place that's like accessible and people know what you're talking about, so you can kind of get the wheels rolling before you get to kimchi jam, which is delicious, stuffed spleen, or stuffed slump.

So if they started out that way, and then they, these nonas, they, first of all, they didn't speak hardly any English, so you can only imagine what the phone calls and the, the video conferences were like, because these women needed translators, they were all 70, 80, 90, I may also add that they all hated each other, they all believed that each of the others were terrible cook. This should have been the reality show. And why wasn't it? And they each had a pasta recipe for basic pasta.

And each one, and it honestly, it was like the difference in half a tablespoon of water or not, or something like that. But each one thought the other's pasta recipe was crap and that that wasn't even worth publishing. So that was another thing. The book had. Eight basic pasta or nine basic pasta recipes in line. And we kept saying, No, you got to pick one. Really, honestly, the reader doesn't need this whole course.

Unless you're going to go into, you know, Nonna Lydia hates this other Nonna because she does. Unless you're going to go into that, you can't do this. So our job was to come up with one pasta recipe that sort of incorporated all of their belief systems in how you make pasta. And while that's sounds really great. I was afraid of getting a horse head in my bed by the time we were done with that. They were very serious about their father. This is not going to happen.

And then there's this wonderful rest in the book. Oh my goodness. I'm sorry that I never went down to Staten Island to eat it, but it was a pasta with sea urchin and I've made sea urchin on the past and I made it. It is delicious. It is beyond yum. If you know anything about the sea urchin, you know that what you eat is the roe or the egg sacs. And you buy it, you buy the roe. They are really delicious. But this recipe called for eight sea urchins cleaned, the roe sacs removed.

And, you know, I was like, okay, come on. I was the writer. I was like, come on. What, what is this? So I. Wrote an entire long description of how to clean a sea urchin, you know, I thought well if we're gonna do this Let's do it, right We wanted to honor this woman rather than just say get 12 ounces of sea urchin roe Which you can go to a Japanese market and buy. We told how to do it.

Okay, so I wrote this entire big discussion about using kitchen shears and making sure you don't get stabbed by the poisonous spines and how to deal with that and how to have the fishmonger take those spines off at first and then get it home and you clean, blah, blah, blah. So I read this whole thing and it took me, you know, a couple of hours to really condense it and figure out how to write it and then this Nana absolutely lost it.

She got so mad at me that in a phone call through the translator, she was screaming at me that Everyone knows how to clean a sea urchin. And I was like, I don't think everyone knows how to I, you know, call me crazy, but, but I don't think it's a skill that most North Americans understand. No, but in her little Calabrian village, every old lady knows how to do it. So that's why she's like, but that's, who's going to cook.

You know, this is a woman who's not necessarily thinking that millennials and that 20 year olds are going to be buying this and cooking. She imagines. in her own little mind that this book is going to be for people like her. Yes, and I think that this gets to the difference in cookbooks and in what she was doing, and even what TikTok influences her doing.

And that is when I watch these UK vegan chefs, what they're trying to say to me is, look, not only look how cute I am, but also look at this beautiful food I make. And that's the end of it.

I, I was on a phone call with my publisher, our publisher yesterday, and we were both laughing that, you know, they get like 50, 000 likes on TikTok, but I'm probably the only guy actually making the recipe, because I was telling him how I was having to rewrite these recipes from the online platforms and they weren't in any kind of order and blah, blah, blah.

And he's like, you're probably the only guy making these because everybody else is just swiping and looking at it and liking it and swiping on and saying, Oh, that looks delicious. Here's the thing. And then, as he said, DoorDash for dinner. Exactly.

But if enough people like them, then they actually get to sell a book contract and publish a book with those recipes, which Hopefully they will hire someone like us to really make perfect for a book because they don't know how to write a recipe in the old days. Again, when we used to do this, we don't really do this anymore. When we used to do this, the publishers would hire us. But now, of course, as Bruce has pointed out, the authors would need iris. OK, so those are a couple of examples.

But here's another example of food doctoring and food writing. And behind the scenes is we have. ghosted a couple, several cookbooks and some of them involve confidentiality agreements and some of them involve, um, missed confidentiality agreements. I'll tell you about that in a minute, but we have crafted entire books in the voice of someone else and these books have. All tended to be in the health and diet. This is because for years we were the longest serving columnist on WeightWatchers. com.

And we wrote a book called Real Food Has Curves, which was our seven step plan to get all the processed food out of your life. And so we had this expertise and these TV diet gurus. Yeah, this is how old it is. They're not, uh, social media influencers. No, it's NBC and CBS. TV doctors, right. And they came to us and had them write their books.

And it's fascinating because now we are creating 75 100 recipes for each of them that follow their diet plan, which doesn't necessarily fit into the way of cooking or thinking that Mark and I generally do. I have to tell you the story. So it was since the podcast is we're droning on about ourselves. I've seen the story. So we wrote what else is the podcast?

I know we wrote this this cookbook for this one of these guys on one of these shows and he was called the doctors and I won't name him, but he was a health guru and maybe a gastroenterologist or something and he had a gut friendly supposedly gut friendly cookbook. Okay, fine, but we wrote that book for him, but we wrote The thing that killed me was cookbooks and books in general run on really razor thin margins.

I mean, really, the profit margins on books are super slim and this is part of why the industry is always constantly in such trouble. But they knew because he was a TV doctor that they were going to sell millions of copies. So we actually not only wrote the book, but we produced all the photos and produced the whole shoot. And when it came time to producing the shoot, we Ask the publisher what the budget was and we were essentially told there isn't one.

I mean, essentially we could spend as much money as we want. So we had this photo shoot in New York City. It involved boatloads of people, of prop stylists and assistants. We shot in a loft in Soho. We stayed at the Soho Grand. And not only that, we exp Expensed tickets for Broadway shows in the evening because there was no budget limit on this thing because they knew they were going to sell a billion copies of it. It was just so wild.

Hey, Mike, our publisher, if you're listening to this, we'd like an unlimited budget on a photo shoot for the upcoming book. Can we have that please and go to the Broadway shows? Yeah, it was crazy. We actually, Bruce was so embarrassed about the Broadway show that he actually said to the publisher, Can we put in for this? And they not only let us put in for it, they let us put in for the cabs back and forth to Broadway from Seville.

She said, whatever you spend when you're on this shoot, we pay for it. Oh, it's so insane. Anyway, that's one of them. And then let me tell you another story. So while I'm sitting here and telling you, there is a really famous doctor who's probably still on TV, one of Oprah's protégés, but we shan't name him. And we, uh, wrote the recipes for one of his diet books. And he, uh, had a writer who was already working on the book, but we wrote the recipes and we did all this bit in 30 days.

The diet was still being developed and they were, as the industry calls it, crashing the book, which means it has to be published right now, or they're going to miss the window of popularity. So we crashed this thing without even a full diet. We had to come up with all the recipes in 30 days. As the diet was being created around us, it was really insane. And at the end of it all, I mean, we killed ourselves. We still lived in New York City at the time and killed ourselves and got the recipes in.

Got them in, you know, decent formatting. Sent them in. Got paid. Cashed the check. Cashed the check. Came to our agent. We got our bit from our agent. She cashed the check. She sent our 85%. You know, the whole bit went down. And then a couple weeks later, what happened? Well, we got a call from our agent, and she was both laughing and not laughing.

And she said, Okay, so we have an issue from this doctor's lawyers, and they have sent us some paperwork that they forgot to send us two months ago when we started this project, and it was a confidentiality agreement, basically saying that we're not allowed to say that we did this for. Dr. Phil. So you said it. And we said, wow, that's really interesting that they want us to sign a non disclosure thing after we've turned it in and gotten paid. And she said, well, will you do it?

And we said, for a fee, of course they could buy our silence. And we didn't ask for a huge amount. It was a small percentage of what we had been paid to do the whole thing. And they were like, no. So we're like, well, then they know we could talk about this and they didn't care. So we just said, no way. And that was the end of it. But so that's why we're allowed to say who we did it for. I know. I always am careful because I am too afraid of a defamation suit or a liability suit in some way.

So I won't do it. But Bruce, I guess he's just jumped out and said who it was. But it was really funny. It was a fun book, actually. And it was. It was so wild that they missed. They were trying to crash it so hard and so fast that they missed the confidentiality agreements to keep the writers silent that, in fact, they were working behind the scenes to create this product that Dr. Phil was going to put his name on. Okay, but who doesn't know that these things happen behind the scenes?

Well, I don't know. A lot of people. I think a lot of people don't know that Patti LaBelle doesn't write Patti LaBelle's cookbooks. People don't know these things. I think Patti LaBelle is one of the ones who was more involved, as I recall, in her cookbook. We know the person who wrote them and she worked with him very closely. I think so. But others like the doctor on the show, the doctors who we were going for, he was completely removed from the process. He had no say in that cookbook.

It didn't, it didn't even connect to him. But it was funny because when they. Premiered that book on his show. He was going to make a recipe and because he didn't really know, they had us come into New York and sort of help him at the beginning of the show. We were backstage. Yeah. We were talking to him. That's right. And telling him what to do and how to do it. That's right. And he was very thankful and glad that we did this for him. He was, he, he wasn't a jerk at all. Oh, not at all.

But it was a product that had his name and his big face on the cover and big body on the cover. And you know, I mean. It was, it was something that he was putting out and he was, he wasn't a, he was very nice guy actually backstage, but we were kind of walking him through it. Okay. So we've banged on for forever about this. So let's, let's call it quits for the moment, but this is kind of part of the behind the scenes work that we've done on cookbooks over our 30 year career across 36 cookbooks.

It's kind of an astounding thing to think about how cookbooks actually make it into print and the modern world is very different and someday let's. Let's talk about that. Let's talk about what happens in modern cookbook publishing, which is so different than when we started out 30 years ago. And if you invite us to a dinner party, we will entertain you with these stories for hours on end. All right. What's up next?

What's making us happy in food this week? For me, it's food. It's a Torone, a nougat that we brought back from our trip to Spain in this last December. It's still around. We still have Torone around from that. I bought like 12 pounds of it, but there was one that I had never tried. And it looks like Halva. It doesn't even look like Halva for those not in the know. Halva is a sesame seed paste candy. It's a sweet sesame candy.

And when I opened this package, I swear it tasted like almond halva, and it was a little crispy, it was made with these fried rice crispy bits in it and I had never tasted a torrone that tasted like almond halva, and it was made by a company called Vincennes, V I C E N N S, they're in Spain, they have multiple stores in Madrid and I brought home tons of it. They are, they are super aggressive out on the sidewalk to get you inside their stores, but the Toronto is delicious.

Okay. What's making me happy in food this week is a dish Bruce may just recently, and that is goat meatballs and they were so delicious. And let me tell you about this. So we had all this goat in the freezer. If you don't know, we wrote the first. ever cookbook for goat, meat, milk, and cheese. And we had a bunch of goat in the freezer from a local farmer. Bruce ground some of the goat himself and then turned it into meatballs with artichokes and tomato sauce and onions and beans and fennel.

It was. Yeah, lots of fennel and artichokes. And cinnamon and dill. It was so good that I have not been going back for seconds, but I went back for seconds of this because it just was absolutely irresistible. I mostly, as I call it in total culinary lingo, I mostly wanted the goop, as I call it. There's my culinary term for you. And that is all the artichoke, fennel, tomato stuff around the meatballs.

That's really what I went back for is to drag bread through the goop because it was just So delicious. Uh, I couldn't believe it. Well, tonight you're getting more goat. You're getting, you're going to have your choice. You can either have goat curry or you can have goat mole. So I'll get an answer. I'll think about that. Okay. So that's the podcast for this week. Thanks so much for joining us. By the way, if you don't know, we would love it.

If you could subscribe to this podcast, if you could rate it and if you could write a review, somebody just wrote a really nice, sweet. Quiet review. My name was five stars. It was nice, but it was just, you know, listen to it every week and learn something new when I'm in the kitchen. And it really, that's, that's the nicest thing I could ever imagine. Thank you for doing that for the podcast. I really appreciate your support because we were otherwise unsupported.

So that is the way you can support us is to give us a rating and give us a comment and then we can stay current in the analytics. I know that's not your problem, but it is a way to help support what we're doing. Also every week. We tell you what's making us happy in food. Please go to our Facebook group Cooking with Bruce and Mark and tell us what's making you happy in food this week. And if it's really fun and interesting, we'll probably talk about it here on Cooking with Bruce and Mark.