Food books expand their market

WASHINGTON, Nov. 25 (UPI) -- If it weren't for the fact that Americans are on holiday, Thanksgiving Day would be yet another occasion for global sales of cookbooks on a single day to exceed 3 million.

Every year, 1 billion of more than 20,000 new titles worldwide of books on food and wine are sold, according to the felicitously named Edouard Cointreau, organizer of the World Cookbook Fair Awards. The greatest number of these -- 530 million in 2000 -- in the U.S.

For the most part these are recipe collections upon which the domestic cook can build a several-course meal. Some are by television chefs -- Britain's homely TV cook Delia Smith, previously housekeeper to a then-leading politician, has sold more than 10 million in that country alone. Others are by famous restaurant chefs, the closest most readers can come to experiencing their food.

The most popular tend to cover the cuisines of attainable or fantasy holiday destinations -- a new kind of travel guide, with broad-brush titles like "The Book of French (or Mediterranean or German or Peruvian, etc.) Cooking." Also in favor are ones that focus on narrower locations from New Orleans to Corfu, such as "Tuscany: The Beautiful Cookbook" by Lorenza De'Medici.

But there is a growing interest in food as a subject of a broader and more general concern, which has produced a flurry of general books about food, like Eric Schlosser's bestselling "Fast Food Nation" and the home economics-style scientific "What Einstein Told His Cook" by Robert Wolfe; to books centered on a sole ingredient, like the truffle or tomato or asparagus. The respected British cookery writer Margaret Patten's "Spam: The Cookbook" is not a tongue-in-cheek book, nor is "Spam: A Biography," by Carolyn Wyman. Some single ingredient books, like "Salt: A World History," and "Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World," both huge bestsellers by Mark Kurlansky, have no recipes at all.

Gastronomica, the quarterly magazine edited by cookery writer Darra Goldstein that publishes writings by food luminaries like Alan Davidson, compiler of the seminal "Oxford Companion to Food," has nurtured another new aspect of writings on cooking: the culinary history. With its human interest element, this has developed into a new cookbook publishing niche, broadening still further the scope of the cookbook market.

One of the latest examples comes from WW Norton, Laura Schenone's "A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove," which is less a recipe book -- containing only 50 of them -- than a history of early American immigrant women, native American women, and more recent European and Asian immigrant women, told through their remembrances and recipes, and filled with images and photographs. Culinary histories are unlikely to get splattered with sauce.

"When we sit at their tables," Schenone writes, "look at their recipes, and consider how they cooked, we get a chance to ask larger questions about who American women were, how they felt about their lives, and what their place has been in society."

One of these is Abby Fisher, a former slave and the first known to have written a cookbook. "Considering," says Laura Schenone, "the legacy of blacks and southern cooking in this country, her book is nothing short of a momentous work of American literature, women's history, and the African-American experience."

Here, for Thanksgiving, in Abby's own words, with some updating pointers from Laura Schenone, is her recipe for Sweet Potato Pie.

"Two pounds of potatoes will make two pies. Boil the potatoes soft; peel and mash fine through a colander while hot, one tablespoonful of butter to be mashed in with the potato. Take five eggs and beat the yelks (yolks) and whites separate and add one gill (one half cup) of milk; sweeten to taste, squeeze the juice of one orange, and grate one half of the peel into the liquid. One half teaspoonful of salt in the potatoes. Have only one crust and that at the bottom of the plate. Bake quickly."

According to Schenone, that means at 400F for 45 minutes, checking after 40. She also finds the filling barely fills two pie shells, so either increases the quantities or freezes left-overs. Abby's general pastry pointer she says is "revelatory." Abby's recommendation is to "roll pastry out to the thickness of an egg-shell for the top of fruit, and that for the bottom of fruit must be thin as paper."

(A Thousand Years Over A Hot Stove: A History of Women Told Through Food Recipes and Remembrances, WW Norton $35.)