I’ve been to many a conference in my day, but until this weekend I’ve never attended one that was devoted entirely to cookbooks: how to create them, how to market them, how to publicize them and how to understand them.
Many of the people in attendance at the Roger Smith Cookbook Conference, which was held in midtown Manhattan, had, in fact, successfully published, marketed, and distributed a cookbook. Other members of the audience were eager to learn how to go about publishing, marketing and distributing one. And still others, like me, were on hand to talk about its history.
Perched rather precariously on a narrow platform that barely contained four panelists, four chairs, three microphones, four glass bottles of water, and an assorted array of show & tell, Gil Marks, Joan Nathan, Mitchell Davis and yours truly talked about Jewish cookbooks: how and why they came into being, their impact on Jewish food practices and what they tell us about the Jewish encounter with modernity.
We had a lot to say. So did the audience, which peppered the panel with questions, most of them on the order of ‘When did the first recipe for bagels appear’, or ‘Could you, would you, explain why wine needs to be kosher?
Informational rather than evaluative, focused on a detail rather than on a concept, the questions were of an entirely different order than those customarily encountered at an academic conference. I can’t speak for my fellow panelists but I, for one, confess to having been taken aback, even a tad disappointed, at first by the audience’s collective response. We had showered them with so much and here all they wanted to know were the basics.
But after mulling things over (and over and over), I’ve come to the conclusion that the kinds of questions the audience posed were entirely appropriate to the occasion. As any good cookbook author knows, what really counts are the ingredients.
