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Someone
recently asked me why cookbooks go out of print. I was thinking about it
and when trying to find out how many cookbooks are introduced each year,
I couldn’t find any accurate statistics except for “hundreds.” In
publishing, cookbooks also have two seasons; fall and spring. Depending
on the subject, the publisher will decide when is best to release it. And
for a variety of reasons – publishers fold one book division into another
imprints, editors leave, etc. – or certain topics just fall out of favor.
At
the risk of dating this post, at the moment, current popular topics are
gluten-free, paleo diets, and slow cooker recipes. (If you write a book
that encompasses all three, you’ve hit the trifecta.) One trend that did
come along, and stayed with us for a while, was low-fat cooking and
baking. Then it kind of faded away as other topics grabbed the public’s
interest and that genre of book faded away.
(Recent
studies have shown that fat isn’t necessarily the demon that we once
thought it was and certain types of fat in your diet are fine.
While I like fat, I don’t need to eat an overload of it. Except when it
comes to cream cheese frosting. Then all bets are off.)
One
person that was ahead several curves is Alice Medrich.
Alice was one of the first people to introduce top-quality bittersweet
chocolate truffles, cakes, and other treat to Americans, with her
legendary bakery, Cocolat (which is now-closed), and a string of
spectacular cookbooks. So when Alice writes something, it’s worth taking
notice.
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