David Hagedorn: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah. I have a writing question because I write cookbooks for other chefs. You’ve updated this cookbook. I like to explain to people that there’s fashion in cooking, just like there’s fashion in anything else, and they age and they grow and they reference the past. But also in writing styles, too, there’s a fashion. How has the writing world and the writing style changed now compared to when you set out to write this? Well, I think there’s a huge appetite for detailed cultural information about food. When I sent a proposal for my first Sichuan cookbook in the late ’90s, it was rejected by all six publishers. They all said that, well, British readers would not be interested in a regional Chinese cookbook because it was too niche and too narrow. I think you can see how ridiculous that statement sounds now, because I think there’s a real hunger for specific and specialized cookbooks. So that’s completely changed. It’s not an outlying thing to want to do a very local and regional cookbook. And I think there’s been an explosion in food writing as a genre, not just in books, but on the internet and all kinds of new, indie food magazines, and an appetite for more stories about food. So that’s just become very mainstream. But I would say that the main difference that . . . Well, one is the greater availability of ingredients and the hunger for authentic information. But also, just in design and people wanting lots of photographs and visual information as well.…

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