WELCOME TO OUR KITCHEN: We're talking about photography in cookbooks!

Hey, I'm Bruce Weinstein, and this is the podcast Cooking with Bruce and Mark. And I'm Mark Scarbrough, and together with Bruce, we have written 36 cookbooks, are currently writing number 37. We'll tell you much more about that as we go along. We are in the middle of a huge gigantic Gantic photo shoot for that book. And then we're in the middle of it. We're on a break from it.

It happened last week before we recorded this and it's about to happen in front of us again so that we can produce 125 shots for that book. It's unbelievable. The amount of work that goes on a shout out to the greatest photographer ever. Eric Medsker. You can look him up online. He shoots gorgeous food. This is the 13th, 13th book he shot with us, but we're not gonna talk about that kind of a little. Actually, in this podcast, we've got a one minute cooking tip coming up.

We want to talk about the state of food photography and the state of cooking. Books and food photography and what has happened to it over the 25 years that we have been doing this and we'll tell you what's making us happy in food this week. So let's get started.

Our one minute cooking tip, pick the smallest chicken when you laugh out loud, when you were shopping, my grandmother would be nightmared over this is actually something that Ina Garten is always telling people. Pick the smallest chicken bigger does not always mean better with chickens. A five pound chicken won't roast as easily or evenly as a three pound chicken. Yes. And it won't be as tender either. Remember?

So, okay, I'm old and as we all know, and back in the day when you bought chickens, they were two and a half to three pounds. The, and that was, those were the roasters and now the roasters are five and six pound behemoths. It's not seven and eight. They're like small turkeys at this point. Yeah, they're these giant things. And I remember, this is a decade ago, but I remember getting so shocked when I saw these behemoths. big chickens in the meat counter. I thought, wait a minute.

What happened to those little chickens? I used to buy those things that now look like Cornish game in roasted chicken is supposed to be an easy dinner, right? You salt it, you shove it in the oven and potentially my favorite dinner. And in an hour you have dinner. Now it's going to take two hours, two and a half hours for a chicken. It's not going to cook evenly by the time that big oversized chicken breast is done. The legs are overcooked. It's really. Not so good to get a big chicken.

And just to say before we pass off this one final thing, Bruce is the only human I ever met who roasts a turkey off the holidays. Bruce, when I met him, we're on birds and roasting birds. Bruce would just roast a turkey midweek. I learned that from my mom. That's what she did. And I learned to like it. And so he would just randomly roast turkeys when he found them on sale at the supermarket. And so we'd have turkey soup and turkey sandwiches and roast turkey one night.

Like I said, I'd never met anybody who roasted a turkey off a holiday until I met Bruce. So maybe I'll roast a turkey this week. There you go. Before we get to the next segment of this podcast, it would be great if you could rate this podcast and even write a review. As you know, we Unsupported and have chosen to remain that way. So that is the way you could help us out. If you just give us a rating, dare I ask for five stars?

And if you just write a review on whatever platform you're on, even good podcast, that is fantastic. I know you can't write a review on Spotify and some platforms, but Apple still lets you do it. Google's gone away, I guess at this point, but Apple lets you still do it. And it would be terrific for us.

All right. Up next in the podcast itself, we want to talk about food photography and cookbooks and what has happened over the 25 years we have been doing this. What did cookbooks look like before the internet? And I think you say the internet, like, can I just halt and say, what I think you mean is before social media, because there were cookbooks after the, I mean, listen, I was writing for this podcast.

Start of AOL in 1991, there was the internet, but what there wasn't was the just absolute dump of photographs off social media. That's true. I mean, really, it was the digital revolution and social media. Right. So cookbooks Okay, so go on, please. Cookbooks often had No photos whatsoever.

And if you think about the New York Times cookbook, the joy of cooking, they had no photos or Julia Child mastering the art of French cooking, no photos, Marcella Hassan's books and our Big, big, big, early book, The Ultimate Cookbook, 900 recipes, no photos, not even on the cover.

Whereas a lot of books Wait, wait, wait, I have to say, we were in San Antonio, you're right, what you can say, we were in San Antonio once on a food tour, cooking school tour, and that book, The Ultimate Cookbook, actually hit the bestseller list as an instant hit.

ebook and it has no photos in it and I think part of the hitting the best seller list as an ebook had to do with the lack of photos because photos are weird in e cookbooks they bunch toward the end or toward the beginning they're not necessarily laid out in design but you're right cookbooks before the internet like I think about uh Jane Buttel's Tex Mex or revolutionary Tex Mex Book from what like the 80s that I don't think there's any photography in that book

It's true some had the Martha Stewart books early on had gorgeous photography There were some books that were lifestyle coffee table books But those ended up being as we saw them coffee table books They were they weren't like the books you use for dinner every night and one of the things that Martha Stewart did did is she crossed the line between lifestyle and cookbook. She did. And she made this kind of crossover that very few people were making happen back in the day.

And you know, when we first were shooting cookbooks, and when we were first writing cookbooks, none of our cookbooks from the late 90s and the early 2000s have anything Any pictures in them except the cover, and we should just say that, uh, we're in the middle, as I say, of a photo shoot for a book right now, and it was going to go on later. We're shooting a lot, 125 photos. Yep. Back in the day, we shot one photo and it was the cover. It was the cover.

And we spent all day, that's right, we'd spend an entire day shooting one shot for a cover shot and the photographer would be paid a fortune. I have to tell the story. So we were shooting the cover for our book, Cooking for Two, in which we had this theory that it was kind of actually before it's time. We had this theory that every recipe made for two and there was never any waste. Right. cut an onion or opened a can. You used all of it. Yep. I still love that. I know.

It's kind of now the point, but at the time it was ahead of its time. So we were shooting the cover and we went to this big loft in Manhattan before Martha Stewart moved into this Chelsea neighborhood. These were still kind of just big open lofts and we went to this loft and um, the photographer was there and there were, I don't know, five or six, 20 year old young women running around, setting the place settings, doing everything. And this is the days before smartphones.

So let's say this is about 2001, maybe 2000. And the photographer was. in the corner sitting on a stool on a flip phone talking while these women were setting up the shoot, setting up the props, setting up the table, getting the camera angle, and then they would call him over and he would look through the lens of the camera and he would literally say, uh uh, and walk back and sit on his stool. And so then they would race around and reset the table and reset the angle. This went on All day.

All day for one shot. And the same thing happened when we wrote our very first book, The Ultimate Ice Cream Book. And the cover of that book is beautiful. It's a little frosted pewter bowl of two scoops of chocolate ice cream. It's true. And I went to that shoot and there was the photographer and her assistant and a food stylist. And probably the food stylist's assistant. And they had scooped out, oh, a hundred scoops of chocolate ice cream to get the most perfect scoop.

It took us all day to get the perfect scoop in the perfect bowl with the perfect light. And it was, that was it. It was all day for that one shot. Yeah. And I think this, this is what's really interesting is that, uh, one of the things that happened back then, back in the day before social media is that everything had to be perfect. And there were very few ways.

to fake it other than either to make completely fake food, which I should just add, Bruce and I have always had a dictum about our books that the food cannot be faked. Now a lot of food stylists will like take Crisco and they'll color Crisco and they'll, you know, ice it a little, there's some tricks you can get a glistening surface on it. And then they'll scoop that up and it's totally fake and they'll call it ice cream. But we have always in every single one of our 36 books insisted that.

Everything is real to the recipe, and I have to say, we go so far, it's so obsessive, we go so far that, let's say we're making a big beef stew for a photograph, and it calls for a half a teaspoon of dried thyme, we will actually put the dried thyme in the, in the stew, even though we know that will never show up in the shot, we are insistent that it be Actually, the dish from the recipe also, we all want to eat it when we're, when we break the set, but the

fake ice cream kills me when the ice cream book first came out, I went on QVC with it and the book premiered on the 4th of July in 1999 and we were in outdoors in Philadelphia. It was 150. 5, 000 degrees out and we were selling this ice cream book. So we had all these bowls of ice cream coming out of the machine that was soup. And then we had all these bowls of food styled ice cream to show them that weren't melting. Yeah. It was like 8, 000 degrees. They were all the fake ice cream.

Yeah. And back in the day. So this is pre social media and pre the internet. When we started out, basically there were prop houses, houses that. Uh, have cooking props, dishes, cookware, glassware, napkins, tablescapes, all that kind of stuff. They have all that stuff, these prop houses. For rent. And, yes, and you rent them. And mostly, they're only accessible by prop stylists back in the day.

So the prop stylists are the only people who can get into these places and choose the props for the shoot. That is so not the case anymore. Now, you don't have to get a prop stylist. I can get online and I can order a hundred different single plates. Whether it be from eBay or Etsy or even from Macy's and Crate and Barrel, they get delivered to the house or the studio, wherever we're shooting. And there they are. And I don't need to pay a prop stylist to be an intermediary for me.

When doing that, you, you, as the writer here, you broke the narrative divide. I jumped to cookbooks after the internet. You went to cookbooks after the internet. So before the internet. Not many photos. You had to have a prop stylist. They were the only way you could access props. Really. The photographer took all day. It was a very expensive thing to do even one shoot.

And just to say back in the day, Everything was shot on film, so they would set up a shot if you weren't this fancy photographer who sat on a stool with flip phone, as I told you, but most photographers would set up a shot, and then they would take a Polaroid of it to catch the light, and then you would wait for the Polaroid to develop. I'm not kidding.

This is like 2001. You'd wait for the Polaroid to develop, and you would look at it and see what you thought the light was doing in it before they started shooting. And then when they shot the actual final shot, they would take. I don't know, three, four hundred shots just to make sure that they had it somewhere in there because this was all on film. And you couldn't see what you were going to get until it was developed. Just like in the old days.

So then the social media revolution happened and smartphones came along. Everything changed, and I think now, in today's world, people expect photographs to be highly prominent in cookbooks. Yep. In fact, our last book that came out last year, the Look and Cook Air Fryer Bible, we photographed every step in every recipe and turned in a book with seven photographs.

It was insane, an insane amount of work with our photographer Eric, and we wanted this book to be as heavily photographed as we could get it. The current book is not quite that photographed to say the least, but still, nonetheless, we were doing it because I think people expected it. and in fact complain when cookbooks don't have pictures.

Now, here's what is interesting to me, because I read a lot of reviews, not just of our cookbooks, but other cookbooks online, and people will say, Oh, this cookbook doesn't have enough photographs, or they'll buy an old book from like the 90s, and they'll say, I bought it, and it didn't have any photographs in it. And I always want to say to them, Okay, you do know that most People, most cookbooks, the food in it is faked. And when they say, well, I can't tell what the dish looks like.

And I think, well, you're still not really seeing what the dish looks like because the prop stylists are using and the food stylists are using all kinds of tricks with paint, with latex paint. They're using all kinds of ways to get shimmer on things and shine. Bowl of cereal often has gold. Glue as the milk. Yes. Elmer's white glue as the milk. I mean there are all kinds of fakes going on. Mm-Hmm.

. Again, Bruce and I just have this absolute, I don't know what creed that we refuse for anything to be fake in any photograph. Refuse it down to the level of Bruce adds, I don't know, salt to a cake, which you would never see in a slice of cake. No, you would never see it, but, but you make it exactly as the recipe lies on the page. And the other thing that happened. Post internet is that we photograph a lot. We're not using film. We see exactly what we're getting right away.

So rather than spend a whole day on one photo, we now spend a day and get anywhere from 15 to 30 shots in a single day. And there's two reasons for that. And two reasons we're able to move at a quicker speed. One is that we've shot the, with, uh, Eric, our photographer, Eric Metzger. Um, Now this is our 13th book, so, uh, we have a kind of honed, what do I say, rhythm with Eric that we can get into and we can just blow through the shoots. But there are two other things.

One is that the cameras are just so much better and the cameras are digital and we're looking at digital shots on a screen so everything can be immediately adjusted from what the camera takes. And two, um, this may sound funny, but it's the truth. Two, once the photograph is taken, the AI takes over and the AI can adjust the lights. The AI can adjust and make sure that every photograph has the same quality of light in it.

Maybe not the same directionality, but the same intensity of the light, the same warmth of the browns and the yellows can appear across photographs. This is all what AI brings to the game. So, what it has done is it has permitted us to speed up and produce better results. More photographs, which is what people want in cookbooks. And we talked about props and how I can get all these props delivered to the house now. But there's something else you have to think about with photographs.

And that is, what is the surface you're putting the food on? I don't think that a lot of people who are not in the industry know that that's even an issue. Right.

So in the past, we would have, you know, butcher block slabs and marble slabs and Tiled slabs and heavy, heavy slabs that have to be changed out to put the stuff under, let's just say, because, you know, let's say you're, you're shooting a plate, let's say you're shooting a burger and a beer on a plate, but that plate and that glass of beer have to go on something. They have to go on something. They can't just be floating in the middle of the air.

And so we would get these heavy, heavy slabs of surfaces and we'd have to change them out. And then we decided we would do a few shoots with fabrics. And so I would buy hundreds of beautiful fabrics, but. Between each shot, Mark had to iron them and make sure they were flat. Yep, yep. And we had to clip the fabrics to the board so that they were completely flat even after ironing. And what are we doing now? Now, we are using, believe it or not, linoleum. Not linoleum. Vinyl. Vinyl.

Um, there are prop places and surface places like poppy B P O P P Y B E E that the kids are using like crazy for internet social media influencers and feeds. These are large pieces of vinyl that are made to look like wood, leather. They're printed with various surfaces on them, and we're using poppy be like crazy for our shoots because we can get so many brilliant and beautiful surfaces out of this. And because they have this map.

Finish that slightly reflects the light that it does look like marble on camera and like some wood on camera and faux painting And it's just it's weather. It's weird. We don't insist on real food But the wood now underneath the shot is mostly fake.

We are still shooting a little bit on butcher block Yeah, we did shoot Eric brought a piece of travertine and he bought a piece of marble to the slash that's still sitting upstairs in our house, but he brought those surfaces, but mostly we're shooting on these vinyl surfaces that are printed to look like certain things. And I was gorgeous. I was resistant to this. If I brought up the idea to Bruce first, I said, Oh, look at these, these weird new surfaces.

And then I started seeing them in people's feeds, influencers, food influencers feeds. I was like, well, let's try it. And so Eric. The photographer ordered one and shot it in his studio in York. And he's like, no, this is perfectly fine. So we ordered, I ordered 16 different surfaces that they're expensive. They're much more expensive than buying fabric, but it allows us to go so much faster And we will have these surfaces for future shoots.

Yeah, it's really crazy how it's all changed and how photography itself has changed and how in fact photography itself is now so crucial to the success of a cookbook. Before we get to the art, Last segment of our podcast, the traditional what's making us happy in food this week. Let me say that we do have a newsletter. It comes out about twice a month and it's going to be once a month this month because we are in cookbook production, but about twice a month.

You can find it on our website, cookingwithbruceandmark. com or just bruceandmark. com. It's right there on the opening page. You can sign up for the newsletter there. I do not allow your email to be collected in any way. In fact, I don't even see it. So you can sign up and you can unsubscribe at any time and get our newsletter, which is sometimes connected to recipes on this podcast, but sometimes it's totally disconnected and it's about, I don't know, our life in extremely rural New England.

All right, up next, the final segment of the podcast, what's making us happy in food this week. What's making me happy is kina kina now, you might think it's China China if you look at the bottle But Eric our photographer who shoots a lot of bar stuff says it's kina kina. So I'll trust him. It's an amaro That is spiced with with gentian and chinkona bark So it's bitter but it also has cinnamon and it has warm spices in it and it's It is so delicious. So that's what's making me happy.

What's making me happy in Food This Week is a little hint for what's ahead in the next book. But I just want to tell you that I have discovered that one of the best things to put on hummus is Very spicy tomato conserve or chutney and a very spicy tomato conserve on hummus is a delicious lunch on purchased hummus. Explain what a conserve is. A conserve is a lower sugar jam on Often with nuts or other aromatics like ginger in the mix, uh, lower sugar, bigger flavor profile, in this case, spicy.

So you're adding chilies or red pepper flakes or something to make it hot. And that hot red. tomato chutney or conserve. It's so tasty on a wholeness. I just eat it like that with wasa crackers. Spectacular lunch. It makes me very happy. All right, that's our podcast for this week. Thanks for being on the journey with us. We very much appreciate your being here. And we very much appreciate your spending time with us. Every week we tell you what's making us happy and fun.

So tell us what is making you happy in food this week. Go to our Facebook group, Cooking with Bruce and Mark. There will be a place there where you can post and tell us what's making you happy in food. And the really fun ones we will talk about here on Cooking with Bruce and Mark.