Unlike Bourdain and Reichl, McGee is not a food professional, which makes him an even better example of the sea change on the publishing front. Most of the "new" authors are actually nobodies to the Food Mafia, as the tight circle of food writers and professionals in this country is mockingly known. Historian Ruth Brandon has written the just-issued biography of Alexis Soyer, "The People's Chef," while "Finding Betty Crocker" is by a video producer, Susan Marks. Kurlansky, who produced two hits with "Cod" and "Salt" that were written as history, calls himself a "reluctant food writer," according to Maya Baran, marketing director at his publisher on both books, Walker & Co.
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The hungry mind
With memoirs from food celebs selling like Big Macs, we've worked up a voracious appetite for the Next Big Thing: serious -- and seriously readable -- food literature.
MEDIA DISH
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Friday May 13, 2005 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 52 words Type of Material: Correction
Book title -- In Wednesday's Food section, an article on recent books about food said Michael Ruhlman's book "The Soul of a Chef" was about his experiences at the Culinary Institute of America. "The Soul of a Chef" profiles three chefs. Ruhlman's book "The Making of a Chef" is about culinary education.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Wednesday May 18, 2005 Home Edition Food Part F Page 3 Features Desk 1 inches; 52 words Type of Material: Correction
Book title -- In last week's section, an article on recent books about food said Michael Ruhlman's book, "The Soul of a Chef," was about his experiences at the Culinary Institute of America. "The Soul of a Chef" profiles three chefs. Ruhlman's book "The Making of a Chef" is about culinary education.
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Angela Miller, a literary agent in New York, sums up the shift by saying: "A lot of people who don't write recipe books have strong feelings about food. We're seeing more general nonfiction writers who want to write about food." She adds: "It's been accepted that food is part of culture," and, even better, "an intellectual part of culture."
"I was an editor at Simon & Schuster in the early '80s when food was looked down on; it was marginal," Miller says. But once Frances Mayes' "Under the Tuscan Sun" and Peter Mayle's "A Year in Provence" struck platinum, she says, editors became much more receptive to food narratives, as she calls them.
Rose recalls that when she opened her shop 15 years ago, the few serious food books being published were "really intellectual, reference books." Today, big publishers will put publicity muscle behind the right title, books such as Jeffrey Steingarten's "The Man Who Ate Everything" and Anne Mendelson's "Stand Facing the Stove," on the history of "Joy of Cooking." And the wave shows no sign of peaking.
"Somehow food is being brought into a broader context than what we eat for breakfast, lunch and dinner," Baran says. "There are undercurrents." She is busily acquiring biographies of celebrity chefs gone for centuries and "desperately hoping they sell so I can keep acquiring them."
Getting personal
Jane DYSTEL, another New York literary agent with a fat roster of cookbook authors, sees another phenomenon at work with recipe-free books. "Two or three years ago I was at an IACP [International Assn. of Culinary Professionals] conference where this was a very, very big subject," she says. "After that everyone goes back and does memoirs instead of cookbooks. I've been seeing that over the years: I think in general people like to read about people, so if that can be part of learning how to cook.... "
