Publishing a Cookbook
A Long but Delicious Journey
Thirteen years ago, I decided to publish a cookbook. I mainly just wanted to have all my favorite recipes — whether my own or those handed down to me — in one place. Imagine my surprise when, year after year, it outsold all of my novels merely based on word of mouth.
As the years passed, though, I created new recipes or modified those of others until they were my own. I scribbled them in shorthand in the margins of the old cookbook, which gradually got more and more bedraggled as I used it nearly every day. Finally, a couple of years ago, I decided I should write a new cookbook — a sequel to the first.
But I ultimately didn’t do that. For one thing, a lot of my original recipes had changed, and I wanted to update them. But the deciding factor was the title. Try as I might, I could never come up with a title as good as the first one: Comfortably Yum. (All credit for that goes to my friend Jana Winters Parkin, an amazing artist and great cook in her own right.)
So a second edition was born…but it was a long time coming. The first had nearly 100 recipes; this one has almost 200. Generous friends and readers volunteered to be my testers, which I greatly appreciated. But I also did a ton of testing myself — confirming quantities and temperatures, tweaking and adjusting to see if I could get things just a…
