Are Cookbooks Books Cooked?

Are Cookbooks Books Cooked?

Inside Television 596
Publication Date: 3-23-12
By: Hubert O’Hearn


It was as tempting as a bowl of mussels served with a sumptuous sauce of white wine, cream and leeks to title this column Ghostwriters and the Spy, but I decided that would be a pun unfit for human consumption. So just skip to the next paragraph and ignore the previous sentence. If you read newspaper stories bottom to top, you shouldn’t have a problem.

The New York Times may have lost $42 million last year, has a pay wall business model for its on-line content that simply will not work, and as a brave disturber of powerful elites it’s not what it used to be; yet it can still rally now and then like Tom Watson or Greg Norman at recent British Opens and show us a glimpse of the Glory That Once Was. Sometimes the Times will run a leak from the Mossad that the Iranian nuclear program is a paper tiger. Other days the news that’s fit to print is...Rachel Ray is a fake.

Dear God. Is there nothing left in this world that one can trust (as he looks over at the fallen Hope poster of Barack Obama curled on the floor in a perfect metaphor)? Oh my there’s a scandal afoot that makes Robocall or Wikileaks seem as minor as a Hallowe’en night toilet papering of the neighbour’s tree. (Note to my neighbour: Can I stop sending the weekly flower bouquet and apology notes yet? No, huh?) You see it has been Revealed! that Rachel Ray, Gwyneth Paltrow and other chefs obviously too powerful and lawyered-up to be named hire - do hide the children’s eyes - ghostwriters for their cookbooks. 

Slaving over a hot stove? Work. Sunning over a hot lounge chair?
Priceless.

Yes, it has so been placed before the public in a March 13 copyright story by Julia Moskin that the TV chefs and their celebrity kin don’t actually do all the measuring, tasting and typing themselves. As the story notes, Ray has turned out thousands of recipes in her cookbooks and magazines since 2005. Who has time to do all that? Plus at a certain point, there are limits to how much the individual imagination can dream of doing with a duck breast. (Do get your mind out of the gutter.)

So how do Martha Stewart, Jamie Oliver, Bobby Flay, et al ad infinitum, eat all add endive (yum!) actually do it? Well, much as Henry Ford figured out when he noticed that selling a million cars a year is more profitable than selling one, you reach out to the economics concept of division of labour and Hire a Guy. Writers aren’t hard to find. Look around in any coffee shop or quiet bar in the middle of the afternoon and he’ll be the one sitting in a corner with a notepad, chewing on a pen. When the pen is transferred from mouth to hand, words come out of the hand, as does ink from the mouth when the pen has been bitten too hard. This is the main reason tablet computers are so popular these days.

The only real question I have is why this story continues to have legs. It only does because certain of the outed chefs have reacted with ridiculous claims. Gwyneth Paltrow has proclaimed that she wrote every word of My Father’s Daughter, to which I can only reply with two thoughts. One, I’m sure she has at one time or another in her life, just not perhaps in the consecutive order in which they appear in her cookbook. And second, there is this person named Julia Turshen who appears in the book’s dedication, saying Paltrow ‘could not have written this book without the tireless, artful assistance of Julia Turshen, who stood over my shoulder at the stove and chopping block for the better part of a year, bringing a ‘method to my freestyling madness.’ On Turshen’s website, My Father’s Daughter is listed as Work.

A cookbook as a work? Oh my yes, in the grand carny sense of the word. Be seeing you.