¶ Intro / Opening
Hey, I am Bruce Weinstein, and this is the Podcast Cooking with Bruce and Mark.
And I'm Mark Scarbrough, and together with Bruce, my husband, we have written three dozen cookbooks. We're about to publish our 37th this summer, cold canning. We've been talking about that on the podcast, and we're gonna talk about cookbooks, but not about cold canning. In this episode, we're talking about the entire process of writing a cookbook. This came up a couple weeks ago in a previous episode, and a listener.
Contacted me and said, but you didn't make clear what the whole process is from developing the idea through finding it in a store. And I was like, okay. Well we can on your seat belts. Yeah, buckle up. 'cause this is a long process, but we're gonna detail what that process actually looks like in terms of writing a cookbook. Of course. We've got a one minute cooking tip and we'll tell you what's making us happy in food this week. So let's get started.
Our one minute cooking tip, it's not
¶ Our one-minute cooking tip: Freeze fresh ginger to keep it tasty!
me, mark did it. You go.
Yeah, it is me. So here's a one that you might not know, but it's kind of crazy. If you buy Fresh Ginger, it can go very. Boggy and a hydrator after a couple weeks. Or it can get very dried out and it can get very stringy. Mm. So here's a tip. Wrap it tightly in plastic wrap and freeze it because if you freeze it, it will retain more of it spiky flavor. It won't develop those mushy spots, it won't dry out. And here's a bonus.
You can use a grater, particularly the small little holes on your box grater to just grade it. Frozen.
Yep. Right from the freezer. Wrap it back up and put it back in. And you can peel it if you want, before you freeze it or not. I tend to not peel it. If it's very fresh ginger and I use the peel and you don't even know what's in there, or if it's not the freshest before you freeze it, peel it, and then freeze it. What he's
saying is if you buy ginger in an Asian market, you probably don't have to peel it. If you buy it in a. Standard North American, uk, or Canadian supermarket, you probably do have to peel it because it's dried out and gotten that husky outer skin to it, whatever that theme is. And if you grow it
yourself, then you don't need to grow. Oh, well, whatever. I mean,
if you grow it yourself, you're not listening to cooking with Bruce and Mark, so whatever you might be, doubt it. Okay. Let me say that we do have a newsletter. It comes out very sporadically at this point, about once a month because we're both so busy with everything else you related to do with work. But if you'd like to be a part of that newsletter, which is not necessarily connected to this podcast, you can sign up on our website, Bruce and mark.com, or cooking with Bruce and Mark dot.
Com, they both go to the same place. If you drop down the landing page, you'll see a place to sign up. Just to remind you, I don't capture your email and I do not capture your name, nor do I let the provider do that. So your name and email can't ever be sold and you won't be spammed out of existence. If you want that newsletter, that's the way to get it. Just go to our website if you're interested
¶ An insider look at the many steps to get to a cookbook: from proposal all the way to publication.
in that. Okay. Up next, the process of writing a cookbook.
It all starts with an idea. Doesn't everything start with an idea, I guess?
No, but Okay, go on.
But we have to develop the ideas, right? Yeah. So we have to come up with something that we like, right? Something that we think our agent will like. Yep. And something that we think our publisher would like. Yep. And something that we think our publisher's marketing team will like. Yes. And once we get an idea that we think they'll all like, we start putting it down on paper and pushing it through the system.
Okay, so let me back up and talk about this. Developing an idea. So basically what Bruce and I are talking about is how we, after 37 cookbooks, how we do it. And we do it in this way. If you are a brand new cookbook writer. You basically have to start with a written book, a written manuscript, unless you are an influencer with 50 billion followers. Mm-hmm. Or unless you're a celebrity, you have to start with the actual book itself. So we are actually,
I'm sorry for you if you to do that. I know. And
we're actually in the envious place of, we no longer start with a written manuscript, so we have to develop an idea, and this will take several months to do. In fact, we're currently working on this and we have multiple gate. Keepers to get through. As Bruce said, we have to get it through our agent and that's where we currently are in our new idea process. We're working with our agent to come up with an idea and she is our first gatekeeper.
We have to get through, she has to like something in order to want to sell it. Then we have an additional gatekeeper who is our publisher. We are fortunate to have the same person is our editor and our publisher, and then he has gatekeepers. In our case it's a him. He has gatekeepers, which is the marketing team at the publishing house. This idea is gonna have to get through three different levels of gatekeepers. And uh, I think for us, the most fraught one is the agent.
But that's what I think because the agent is, um, she's just getting a bunch of random ideas. I mean, literally she's being bombarded with ideas via email and she's kind of, kind of sort through these and some I end up writing a couple pages on some, I just send her an email on, or Bruce will even call her about. She's just getting barraged by ideas and
it's hard because we're not necessarily giving her, you know, blown out thought through. Here it is. Here's how the whole book looks. We're just throwing a quick idea at her now. We've been with her for over 30 years, right? So she has been a long time relationship with us. We do kind of understand how we all think together, so it is, we do easier, we do than, you know, a lot of other agent client relationships.
Um, but it is frustrating 'cause there'll be times Mark and I think we have a brilliant idea and we'll run it by her. And then the words that come back is, I don't get it. And then we have a choice we could try and make her get it right. Or we can drop it.
Right? And just to say, uh, you know, you may think, uh, wow, you, so you're the creative and you have to pass this through an agent. But to be honest with you, she's got a lot of credits behind her. She's been in the business far longer than we have. She was the acquiring agent for the Color Purple. She was the acquiring agent at Simon Schuster for the world of. According to Garp. So let's just say that she's got a lot of traction behind her and she does understand what sells and what doesn't.
So it's not as if we're up against somebody who's kind of on our level. We're up against somebody who we are, who's slightly above us in terms of what can sell and what can't let,
let me say this about agents for a second, and that is they know what will sell, but they will know what will sell to their group of editors, right? Our agent doesn't have a relationship with every single editor in New York. She has a relationship with a lot and a big pool of editors at a big number of houses, but she doesn't know each and every one. Correct. So she knows when she says, I don't get it.
It may be in response to an initial, well, I probably can't sell that idea to the 15 editors I'm thinking about right off the top of my head. Right. But that doesn't mean that there aren't other editors out there who might buy it, but that's the deal. You sign, you work with an agent, and that agent, of course works with just a bunch of editors, right? And it doesn't work with everybody.
Ours has been in the business long enough that she has a relationship with lots of editors and publishers. And particularly with publishers. She is, but still, nonetheless, we have to get it through her. And so I wanna just say that this is the initial stage, and this takes multiple months. We've been working on this with our agent since the first of 2025. Right. So since I broke my leg months ago mm-hmm. We've been.
This process, and we're about to enter the second part of the process, which is presenting these ideas to our publisher. And once that happens, and once he, and we and the agent agree, then he has to sell it.
Now, let me say we are in a fortunate position that we can just bring ideas to our publisher, right? Many people don't have longstanding relationships with a publisher, so they're gonna sell an idea to their agent and then their agent is gonna run ideas by three or four different editors of publishers around town to find one interested enough to take a meeting to discuss it. We are very lucky. Our current publisher has published our last. Eight books.
And so we are looking to continue to work together and it's on both directions. He wants to work with us, we wanna work with him. So we are very fortunate that the next step for us is a meeting with him to discuss these ideas. Right.
So let's assume that's already happened and let's assume we've all agreed on an idea over
lunch. Usually Chinese food.
Yeah. That. Which our kosher agent can't eat, um, yet we keep doing it. Let's assume that the four of us have come to some kind of understanding. Now the question is selling the idea, and here's where it gets a little bit more fraught, and that is, it falls on me. I'm the writer in the team of the four of us. It falls on me to develop a proposal and it is a formal business proposal. I have to write a 40 to 55 page, somewhere in that range, 40 to 55 page business proposal of why this.
Title will sell and I come up, draft up that. I come up with that proposal, I draft it out. I of course work on it for a while. Then I give it to our agent. She sends it back to me with comments. Then finally, once she and I like it, then it goes off to the publisher. He sends it back to me with comments And finally, at the end of. All of that, he can take that giant business proposal to his sales meeting.
So if developing the idea takes, mm, let's say three months, this is about a two to three month process as well. This idea of developing the formal proposal to get ready to sell the idea,
and lemme say what is. In that proposal is really interesting because it is a description of what the book will be, of course. Yeah. Yep. But it's also a description of the market. What other books have ever been written that are kind of like this, if any? Maybe we're lucky enough to come with a brand new idea. Rarely. Um, rarely. So we have to do a history of what are the books have been written, how did they sell, and how were they marketed and who were their audiences?
And then we had to talk about. Our audience. So who do we think is the audience for our book? And we need research for this. And also if the book is related to an appliance, like we wrote all these instant pop books and air fryer books. In those cases we had to look at trends, projections and sales projections of those appliances too. 'cause they directly related to our book. And,
uh, part of the proposal too, and I should add this part of the proposal is coming up with a recipe list for the book. Mm-hmm. And so it, part of this proposal is what our recipes are gonna be included in the book. And I wanna say. Um, and this seems really crass, but the recipe list that appears in the proposal is, uh, shall we say, tangential to what will become the final recipe book in list. In the book itself. I mean, it's a idea. I use it as a guide, right?
It's an idea to beginning, but it bare rarely bears very close proximity. What to what actually gets published on the line.
Let me say that the new book called Canning, that proposal had about 200 recipe names in the. In the recipe list, in the proposal, the final book had 425 recipes. I mean, most of the recipes that are in our list tend to make it into the book, but
yeah, it, it's funny, it depends on the books. Uh, we, if you look back at a book ALA mode, uh, which we wrote years ago at when we were at St. Martin's, uh, that's a book with desserts and ice creams to go with those desserts. Mm-hmm. The recipe list bears no resemblance to the final book at all. So it's weird. Um, so, okay, so now we've got a few months developing the idea, a two to three months selling the idea, writing the proposal, and let's assume it sells.
Let's assume that our publisher goes off, do a sales meeting. It sells. They make offers. The offers go back and forth between our agent. You know, it's the whole negotiation thing, which is why you have an agent once you sign the contract, you actually have to write the thing itself and set about making that proposal good as a book. And that takes. What, nine
months? 10. And it depends. Your contract will tell you how long you have to write the book. It does. I mean, our contract will tell us how big the book is gonna be. It'll tell us how many recipes have to be in that book. Right. It will not describe the table of contents. It will not tell us how many chapters we will work. On that as we create the book, but it will tell us how many words the manuscript can be,
right?
And how many pictures will be in the book. Right? And most important, it'll tell us when that is due to the publisher.
Okay, let me explain how the due date works. Basically, they take Google keyword searches and they try to figure out when is a particular topic popular. In the course of a year, they find out, let's say. For example, our co upcoming book, cold Canning, they discovered that canning searches happen the most amount of time in late June through early August. So therefore, they set the publication of the book in July of 2025, and generally they set the due date. A year before that.
So they work backwards a year from when they think they wanna put it on sale. That doesn't always hold out, but that's how it is. Now, I should tell you that we've crashed books and in publishing, crashing means you're, you're writing it with absolutely no time. What so. Ever. Yeah.
Where usually publishers give themselves a year from when you turn it into publishing. When it's crashed, you might turn it in and they'll publish it within six months. That is really fast for them,
they used to, in the old days, called them blue files back when manuscripts came in as, as, uh, actually print offs and people would work on them and blue, they would be put into blue files. And a blue file meant when it hits your desk, you can't work on anything else. You must only work on this book in the publishing house because they're trying to push it out.
When we wrote the Great American Slow Cooker book, we had, I don't even remember, five or six months to create 500 recipes for this book. It was a. Unbelievable. I, we had basically had to put our lives on hold to create this book.
On any given day. I had 10 to 12 slow cookers going insane all day, all day in
the kitchen. Insane. You've never seen electric bills like these. And um, and uh, just to add to the misery here, my laptop crashed halfway through writing this book. Well, more than halfway, we were about done. It crashed because the. Book crashed it because it was too big for the ram to hold, and so I had a print off of it and I had to retype an a thousand page manuscript back into my laptop. It was before you could digitize pages. It was. Insane the amount of work that was.
Okay, so you have a few months to develop the idea. You have two to three months to sell the idea. Then you get, let's say nine months to a year to write the book, and now you enter the dreaded editing process. You turn the book in
and my job is done. I'm out of the kitchen and Mark goes into hell time, and I get to spend time doing other
things. Yes. If your publisher or editor accepts the book, now you enter the editing process. Oh, if. If that's an, if they have, that's
right. They can look at it and say, Nope, you need to fix it. We've had books sent back to us. Of course, everybody has early on in our career where they didn't, the editor didn't like the way recipes are formatted. They didn't like the way we worded certain things. And rather than make that change in every recipe as they edited. They just sent the whole thing back and said, no, restructure this. And
Let me say that when you sign a contract to publish a book, you get a chunk of money right at that moment of signing, and then you get another chunk of money at what in publishing is called DNA, which means delivery and acceptance.
It's that acceptance part that's key. It's the acceptance because
uh, if they kick it back in any way from editing, they have not yet accepted it. So your payment is being delayed in this process, which makes it very frustrating. So you go into the editing process and editors, of course, my editor has a lot to say about the book. He goes through it very carefully. He looks at it all. Say very carefully. Sometimes he tells me I'm sitting in the parking lot of Home Depot editing your book. I'll get a text like that.
But he's going through the book on, um, his laptop. He's looking through it. He's Or his phone. Or his phone. He is making all kinds of changes to it. But I, you should know. Here's one of the things that's interesting is editors don't copy. Edit. And I think that people still think that editors sit there and say, this verb does not go with this subject, or whatever, you know? Okay. Well
now you have to explain in more detail. Okay. What's the difference between editing and copying it?
Copy editing is the granular bit, like, uh, you've used the present tense and now you suddenly. Switch to the past tense in this ha head note or, um, you've used this word too many times or this old editing thing of, I'm not quite sure this sentence makes sense because you've got your clauses in different orders. That doesn't happen with editors anymore. Editors are looking at the macro of it. So they, what they're asking you at this point mostly is, are the. Order of the recipes, right?
Do the headnote actually, does it introduce the recipe despite the granular grammatical problems? Does the headnote set up and make me wanna make this recipe? Are you selling each recipe in the headnote? These are all the questions that editors ask. Does the introduction to a chapter actually set up the chapter? Do you need to refocus this chapter? Do you need to put more information in the introduction to open the book? Basically, they're making all kinds of changes in.
Focus and even recipe layout, the order of the recipes. They might
say let's pull these recipes outta this chapter and make it its own separate chapter. Yes, they might. That's something that can happen.
We wrote sheet cakes and slab pies. We were still at St. Martin's at that point. Our editor took my recipe list and the way I set up the chapters, and she completely rearranged the book and kicked it back, and I had to write new introductions for the chapters she had created. Out of our recipes. So my chapter introductions didn't really fit anymore because she rearranged the book.
Now you have the right to fight back against that a little. You can say, I don't agree with you. You can have a discussion about it. You don't have to. You can't to just lie down and let them walk all over you.
You can, but you're also trying, you know, you're trying to be a compliant. Uh, writer, you're trying to get another book down the line and you don't wanna be a problem. So they expect pushback, but not dramatic pushback. So that's gonna take three to four months to get it through editing, and after that. Now they've accepted it. Now you get your next payment of money and then you, the book goes into copy editing, which is where it all hits that granular level.
And I will say that I have a copy editor who we've worked with for almost a dozen books now, and I. Love her so much that I essentially require her to be a named commodity in the contract. I mean, I want her to work on our books. I trust her. But you have a
volatile relationship with her too. Very volatile, has relationship, has strong opinions, and sometimes. We agree with them and sometimes we
don't. I, that's why I like her. Uh, I always say about my copy editor, and she may be listening to this episode, and I always say about her that she's not for the thin skinned, but that's okay. I'm not thin skinned. And, uh, she can come at me with, uh, what she's got and I am more than willing to say no or to push back and say, no, that's really the way I want it. I want it to read like that. Uh, so we have a, we don't have a combative relationship.
We have actually a very friendly relationship, but we're very. Blunt about what the book should have in it. And this is all of this granular, grammatical stuff. She's catching problems. Like, you said a teaspoon of, or a tablespoon of ketchup was 15 grams a hundred pages ago, and now you're saying it's 13 grams in this recipe she's keeping track of. All of those crazy details in order to make the book consistent.
Somebody has to, 'cause the last thing I want is a book that's messed up and confusing. Yeah, it's, and not consistent. It's
insane. Like, uh, like she'll say, you know, you said a large Cleve of garlic minced up was a tablespoon and this recipe, but, uh, 200 pages ago you said it was two teaspoons. So which is it? And make it consistent throughout your book. And it's that, make it consistent throughout your book. That is not for the thin skin. No.
And while the copy editing is going on, the designer is working on the layout of the book. The designer is choosing the font, the colors, the designer is deciding how the recipe title goes, how the head note goes, what the ingredient list looks like. Is it in a column, is it straight across? And all that's being designed as the book is being copy edited.
Right? And I think a lot of people don't know this, but. All books are designed, I mean even novels, history books, narrative nonfiction, anything you read, it's designed. Somebody chose the font, somebody chose what the titles of the chapters look like. Mm-hmm. Somebody laid out the table of contents. All of that is part of the design. Somebody decided, oh, I how big the margins are. These were all decisions that are being made around the copy editing of the book and cookbooks are.
Just, what do I wanna say? Heavily designed, uniquely designed objects. They're very
heavily designed. If you open a cookbook, there are so many elements there, right? There's every step in the recipe. There's the ingredient list, there's a headnote, there's the title, right? There's tips and tricks. All of those pieces have to be put together on a page in a beautiful, artistic and pleasing way.
Right? And I see a lot of cook. Books out there. And we don't let this happen to our books. And fortunately we work with really good designers from the publishing house. We don't hire them, but we have good designers because I see cook books where it's basically thrown on the page mm-hmm. Where somebody chose a font and then, you know, recipes end, um, I don't know, you know, two inches down the second page and then there's just all this blank page below it. There's nothing
worse than blank page. No,
I'm not. Totally afraid of white space, but at the same time, I do wanna look like the book is full. Mm-hmm. And it doesn't just have big gaps in it anywhere. 'cause I feel like that's almost a, I don't know what a cheated project.
Right. And that's part of fitting the copy edited manuscript into the design. Yeah. Which is the next. Step, and it takes about a month for Mark to go through with the designer and make sure that it fits and it looks right, and that the designer might say to Mark, you know, I need you to cut two sentences out of this to make this all fit. Mm-hmm. Or Can you write me another two sentences so this looks better on the page? Mm-hmm. So that's making good design choices.
Based on how the recipe is written.
And let me also say that publishers cost out books by the number of pages in a book, and I, this is gonna be really esoteric for you, but they cost that out in intervals of 16 and 32. That's basically the giant sheet of paper where a book gets printed on it printed on both sides and then it gets cut down and folded and turned into the book that you hold in your hands. So it comes in 16 or 32 page increments and they worry about how many, here's the big word signatures.
That is pa stacks of pages occur in a book, and once we published a book in which the designer, uh, laid it out and the publisher decided it ran one signature. Over. So I had to sit in a Vancouver, British Columbia hotel room for three days and cut 32 pages out of that book in order to, for it to fit the signatures. But it's not uncommon.
No. And it wasn't necess for me to cut stuff
out of a book.
But it wasn't necessary that you be in Vancouver to do the book. No, we just happened to be waiting for. A cruise to Alaska with your parents. And so we have to be in Vancouver. So cutting signatures out of a book does not require that you be in Vancouver. No,
but at least I got a really good dinner each night at the end of a hard day working in Vancouver. But it was ridiculous having to do all of this for the book. But it's not uncommon for me once the recipe hits the page and it's designed for the designer to say, um, cut four lines from this recipe. Mm-hmm. And I've gotta cut them from the headnote or from a back. Part of the recipe somewhere to make it fit on that page. Or the designer will say to me, this recipe is running short.
Can you fill this space in some way? So I'll have to come up with an end note, or I'll have to add more material to the head note to make it fill out, to actually fit the page. And that process takes about another month. So just think where we are, a few months into developing the ideas, a couple months to selling it, nine months to writing it. Three to four months to. Editing it two to three months to copy editing it while it's being designed.
About a month to fitting the copy of Edit manuscript into design. And then you get this bevy of final questions and queries. This is all before they hit the word print. And believe it or not, this is the point where a manuscript goes to a proof. Reader. Mm-hmm.
And a proof reader proofs the text But once your book is edited and before it goes to copy editing your editor, let's go of your book and it turn is turned over to a managing editor who sees it through production, which is the copy editing, designing. All of that stuff is happening through a managing editor. And that last month with the managing editor and the proofreader, I basically can't move from my desk because they need my answers.
Uh, that day when they query something and say, uh, you say table salt in every recipe, but in this one recipe you just say salt. Can you fix that? Or should that be fixed? Basically they give me, you know, 20 minutes to answer that question so that they can get it. 'cause they're just racing. Mm-hmm. To hold their finger over the print button. Mm-hmm.
and it's during that point that we'll start to see cover designs as well. And we'll see the front cover and the back cover. Yeah. They both have to be designed. Yeah. Um, we will probably earlier on have been sending out, um, PDFs. Of what the book is gonna look like with content to people, we hope will give us quotes for the book. And so then at that point, those quotes will be incorporated into the front cover, right? Or the back cover of the book. And then finally they hit print.
And guess what? It's gonna take up to six months because usually it's printed. In China. And it'll be interesting to see what happens now with tariffs that are in place about the printing in China. Yeah. 'cause usually books are all printed in China. Yeah. 'cause it's so much cheaper. Yep. I don't know that it'll be cheaper anymore and perhaps books will start being printed here where it's more expensive, but it may be cheaper than paying the duty on it. It may be. I
know that the, some publishers are looking at. Finland where the tariffs are lower and there are so many paper and pulp factories in Finland, but it's still more expensive than China, no doubt.
Because wherever it's printed, it has to come on container ship.
Yeah, and just to say the, that the container ship is the important part of this because Really the print button, pressing print, and it prints in China. I don't, that does not take much time. A few days for your book to be printed and collated and put together and bound and put in a box.
Even 10,000 copies. It just takes a few days. Yeah, it is that container ship problem. There's the problem getting it. Into the us getting it into the publisher's warehouse, getting it distributed to its distributors, getting it to the retailers who had asked for it, getting it to places like Amazon, and then in the end, getting it into your hands.
And the question is always,
how many books to print, Yeah, the first printing they go at is a huge decision and a very, very fraught one for the publisher. Yeah, because they want to make sure they have enough. Books in print to meet the demand. Yep. The last thing you want is to run outta books, and it has happened to us with the Instant Pop Bible.
We actually ran out of, the instant Pop Bible as Bruce says. On Black Friday? Yeah, the day, like two days before Black Friday sales, they ran out of this book that they expected to sell thousands and thousands of copies of through Christmas. And our book, which was designated to go through the Christmas sales season, was not available until what? Christmas Eve or something. Yeah, it was,
it was nightmarish. I believe they printed them in the US to get them in really quickly and yes, you, they were shipped, I think on the day after Christmas if you bought them. But people were unable to get them for Christmas day. It was a
stabbing problem. Mm-hmm. And to be not for sale and being told it's back ordered on Black Friday was terrible. So this is. All of that fraught process of getting a book out. And if you listen to everything we've said, you should realize that what we've been talking about is about a two and a half year span from developing the idea all the way from to the book, appearing on Amazon for sale, or being in a store somewhere. We're talking in normal production about. Two and a half years.
And there's a true problem with that, right? It's trying to guess when you sell a book. Yeah. What will sell two and a half years from now.
It is hard. Which is why you want ideas that are not necessarily stuck onto trends you want ideas that have a long life that can, that will be. Exciting to people now, but exciting to people in two years and hopefully exciting to people in 10 and 15 years as well. Yeah,
and this is what they're finding with the big influencers. They're finding that the books sell really big when they first come out, and then they just fall off a cliff because everybody who wants the book buys it and then nothing else happens. And if even they crash an influencer's book, it's still gonna take 'em nine months to a year to get it out. And is the influencer still gonna be an influencer in.
A year, and this is also part of the problem and I should just say is that if the books don't sell and that initial print run doesn't sell out, your editor and or publisher may very well be fired.
And the odds of you getting another book are nil.
Yes, it's, it's an extraordinarily fraught process. I should just tell you before we end this, I should just tell you for that, for example, when. Lange came out with his books and they were such huge hits. There were a billion OT Lange copycats. Mm-hmm. That came out.
There were people trying to be like Otto Lange, and they were crashing those books out so fast that now if you even mention OT Lange in publishing, they all back away from you because it's not that his books aren't still great, it's that all the copycats didn't sell as well as his book, but they were crashing them out to try to catch a trend, and they really can't. It's never a good idea.
Publishing moves at a geological pace, a glacial pace, and it's very hard for them to be up on current trends. Okay, well, there's the whole story, the two and a half years of how you develop an idea and get a. Cookbook published. It's a long process to say the least. It's been a long process for cold canning to finally end up this summer in stores. We've been working at it for a long time and are very excited about it, so we just wanted to let you in on what that full process looks like.
Before we move to the last part of this podcast, let me say that there is a Facebook group cooking with Bruce and Mark. You can find us there there's also an. Instagram channel. And we're delighted to interact with you there. Okay. Speaking of that, let's move on to the last segment of the podcast.
¶ What's making us happy in food this week? Citarella for gefilte fish and goose eggs!
What's making us happy in food this week?
Cinderella Fish Store on the Upper West side of Manhattan. Now they also have other stores in the Hamptons and everywhere else, but they were the only people. The only people, not even the kosher market that I often go to in West Hartford, Connecticut, but they were the only people that were able to get me a whole. Pike at Passover so I could grind it up and make afil fish.
Yes, Bruce made his own gefilte fish as is common around here. And uh, I won't eat gefilte fish in any other form. I will not eat it in jarred form no matter what. You doctor, that goopy crap whip, what
is that thing people think? You take it out and you reboil it and suddenly it's better.
Sweet fish cello. Mm. Gross. No, Bruce makes his own Gefilte fish. He's even made his own homemade jalapenos sauerkraut to go with that gefilte fish. Mm-hmm. A recipe from cold canning did it. It was delicious. Um, so he thinks all of that is exactly part of what's making Bruce happy in the food this weekend. What it's. Making me happy is, uh, we have, again, I'm gonna bow back some I've already said, which is all about eggs.
And we have a friend who lives very close to us, who has a ton of ducks and a couple geese. And I have to say, goose eggs make me very happy. Mm. If you would've had a goose egg. Well, you haven't had a meal because a goose egg is giant
size of a salad plate. You fry it up and it overlapped the edges of our salad plates. It
did. It filled the plate. There was no room for my toast on the plate. And because they're so big, you have to fry them for a long time to get the yolks to set, which means the bottom of the whites get a little crunchy because they're so long. I don't like my egg flipped over. So there you go. So you have to fry a long time to get that yolk to set and it's so delicious and there is so much yolk in a goose egg. Oh my
god, so much yolk. So bitch, so much yoke
in a goose egg. There's just a ton of yolk for dip toast in which makes it absolutely perfect. Okay, that's the podcast for this week. That's what's making us happy and food this week. That's how cookbooks happen. And that's our one minute cooking tip about ginger.
And please Mark told you about our Facebook group. But what I really hope you will do is go to TikTok and check out our channel cooking with Bruce and Mark on TikTok, where we make videos of cooking all sorts of fun stuff and about what it is like to write cookbooks and go to our Instagram group cooking with Bruce and Mark. You can follow us there and you could see everything that's happening, what we eat and what we are doing, and see more about us on cooking with Bruce and Mark.