Worldbuilding and the Future of Cookbooks

The future of cookbooks asks this of us, too.

Our ability to record and share information is unmatched in history: Today, you might write down a recipe right when inspiration strikes: on your laptop or in a notebook for personal use, or maybe record it in a more public way on social media. We no longer need to self-censor what we record and share due to expense, audience, or a lack of materials.

So what influence has this glut had on the world of cookbooks? Rather than simply presenting information in an organized format, like Mrs. Beeton’s, cookbook designers are increasingly engaged in worldbuilding. And in building that world, we draw upon expected elements within the design language that readers and writers associate with cookbooks , food journalism, and food blogs.

Carolyn Eckert, executive art director for Storey Publishing, an imprint of Hachette that publishes practical books for creative self‑reliance, covering subjects from homesteading to natural health, says “I’ve always been a big fan of the books that create whole new worlds for the reader—I feel that sensory experience starts from the first impression of the cover to how the book feels when you touch and pick it up (the feel of the paper, the weight of the book), to what happens when you open the cover—is it a quiet moment? Or do you get a sense of the look of the book here on the endpapers? I love when books start to tell a story right away. The story can be simple and spare as plain white or gray endpapers to give you that minimal feel, some obscure detail or inspiration for the recipes, or a location to set the stage for the whole book to fully immerse you into the world.” The trends shift every few years: styles rooted in celebrity, color, minimalism, studio, and lifestyle will cycle to the top, “with new twists to freshen up that style every few years.” But for every rule there’s an exception, with cookbooks like Noma (2010) by celebrity chef Rene Redzepi with its stark, boldly editorial, visual showcase of highly stylized dishes, and the whimsical and instructive illustrations of Wendy MacNaughton for Salt, Fat, Heat, Acid (2017) by Samin Nosrat setting trends, showing a new way of thinking about and presenting food visually.

For Eckert, distilling the desired sensory experience of the reader is the first stop on the path to cookbook design. “When I start thinking about the art direction for the book, I usually try to come up with a three-word mantra that I want to follow for the look of the photography in the book. I also try to find one image that captures a feeling we want the whole book to feel like… These words and images keeps us on the right path as we shoot the images for the book and try to create a new world.”

The rise of recipe blogs, TikTok, and other digital platforms has shaped the world of cookbooks, but perhaps not in the way we’d think. Rather than a death knell for paper-based media, our constant reliance on devices, and constant navigation of digital landscapes, has pushed Gen Z in particular back towards reading print books. 

There have been some casualties in the world of food writing, though: Community cookbooks, for example, once a mainstay in small-scale, localized fundraising, have largely gone away or gone online. And recipe boxes? Most people have moved their recipe gathering online, too.

Perhaps a confluence of data mining, combined with the constant, and constantly performative, task of showing up online, lies at the root of this as we crave something slower, quieter, more private. A print book isn’t going to steal your data or barrage you with banner ads. A print book doesn’t need you to present or perform in a certain way in order to access what it has to offer.

Modern technology is partially responsible for this shift in our internal compass, from internal to external wayfinding in cooking: With a little pocket computer, both a ball and chain and a trail map on my journey, I can teach anyone, anywhere, who also has their own device. I can assist their wayfinding, and can evoke their senses with visual media in a way unique to this moment and the generations alive in it.

What happens to the public and private sphere of cooking when the Venn diagram that holds the two apart generally is, essentially, a circle? When we constantly perform, and as food writers are expected to format recipes in a certain way, but perhaps, sometimes, want to experience food writing, and food making, in a different way.

To librarian Juli McLoone, curator in the Special Collections Research Center at the University of Michigan Library (with an emphasis on the Janice Bluestein Longone Culinary Archive), today’s public and private spaces are “a jigsaw”: locked together in undulating patterns with many points of connection. “In some ways that creates flexibility in our public and private lives, but it also creates complexity.” Wayfinding through how we consume and share information, then, becomes more complex too: Weaving between the shifting lines of public and private, managing how we present and consume in both spaces, and how and where we can really be ourselves.

With the rise of cooking shows with famous hosts like the United States’ Julia Child or Taiwan’s Fu Pei-mei, then blogs, then social platforms, we see a return to a practice that we began to set aside with the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the Fannie Farmer-style recipe formatting: Learning by cooking alongside someone, rather than reading step-by-step directions that tried to infill what you might intuit from learning by doing. 

In cooking videos, we’re invited along into the host’s kitchen to engage with the steps of food preparation in real time. Whether its a professional kitchen gleaming in stainless steel or cooking over open fire in a rural village, streaming content on social media and platforms like YouTube are an invitation into an intimate space. In cookbooks and on cooking blogs, too, the public and private begin to blur: Rather than a distant, highly credentialed and objective authority, we want the person behind the words. And for modern cookbook authors, that means first-person storytelling and connection building, not just displaying expertise.

Perhaps this is part of why we are slowly returning to the paragraph-style recipe, or to less strict formatting: Because this design and editing choice allows for a style of cooking that’s less prescriptive. It encourages us to take a technique, learn it, and make it our own.

Perhaps we’re writing about food the ways we used to because we can emulate the experience of being in the kitchen with someone: Perhaps the steps and lists mean less when I have access to the person who wrote them. When I can watch and learn from their work by hand, I’m returning to the ways people used to learn to cook. But there is still a divide; unlike generations before us I, like my mom, am not in the kitchen beside the person I’m learning from. And neither are most of us.

There’s another collective issue, as we wayfind through a landscape that’s both digital and tangible: When everything is online, how do we know what to preserve? And how do we go about preserving it? Digital records are the ultimate ephemera: Having never existed in a tangible, physical form, and on media that degrades in ways we are still learning: The digital is more impermanent than we like to believe.

“People think online is forever but it’s not forever,” says McLoone: Unlike with physical records, which can be stored and pulled out when needed, storing digital files is harder. It’s resource and energy intensive, and providing access to and maintaining files over time presents unique challenges related to everything from format obsolescence to bit rot. McLoon says when dealing with a new level of ephemerality, and with a flood of information, collection decisions are “interesting.”

We’re not only dealing with hard-to-preserve files, but new kinds of information (think of how many videos, just made by everyday folks rather than TV shows, are on social platforms alone): And we aren’t sure what future researchers, and future library users, will need most. “In 20 years or so when archives have more experience, what we wish we would have saved? We’ll have a lot of lessons and fine tuning, and then how would future researchers access that archive? We aren’t just bringing a box to the reading room.” 

So what is the future of the cookbook? Is it one where worldbuilding tries to emulate readers’ online landscapes, with a glut of often-overstimulating sensory experiences, or where the design paths of online and in print intentionally diverge? Eckert says, “I’m not sure what is next, but in this time of global warming and unrest in the world, the trends might be getting back to a simpler world: nostalgia, retro, simplicity with a focus on sustainable, culturally diverse books, combining cultures.”

It goes back to the sensory experience we want to give readers, and to the worlds we’re creating through the symbiosis of design and text: “the imagery is the lure to bring the reader in, but it’s the content and ease of use that will keep the reader coming back to the book over and over again,” Eckert says. 

And each of us, as readers as well as creators, are co-participants in this worldbuilding: Our choices in where we spend attention and money as we wayfind through the world of cookbooks actively informs the terrain, and the paths available in our cookbook future.