Diana Henry on how to write and publish a cook book
The multi-award winning author explains why aspiring cook book writers need vision, not just recipes. And why you'll no longer find her measuring beans at 2am.
Diana Henry is a bestselling writer and journalist, and author of twelve books. She’s won countless plaudits for her work, including awards from the Andre Simon Memorial Fund, the James Beard Foundation, Fortnum & Mason and the Guild of Food Writers.
Her first book, Crazy Water, Pickled Lemons, was published in 2002 to great critical acclaim. Her other books include Cook Simple, The Gastropub Cookbook, Roast Figs Sugar Snow, Food from Plenty, Salt, Sugar, Smoke,A Change of Appetite, A Bird in the Hand, Simple, How to Eat a Peach and From the Oven to the Table. She has had a weekly column in The Sunday Telegraph for 18 years and writes for various magazines in the UK, the United States and Ireland.
Here she talks to me about how she writes her extraordinary books, from conceiving the ideas to shooting the images. She also shares advice on what aspiring cook book authors should include in a pitch. The full interview is available to paid subscribers only (just £4 per month for weekly newsletters, recipes and other benefits).
How did your first cookbook get commissioned?
It was something I didn't really think would ever happen. I’d had the idea for what turned out to be my first book, Crazy Water, Pickled Lemons, in my head for a few years. But I didn't think I would ever stop working in television [as a producer]. Then when my first child, Ted, was eight months old, I tried to go back to work and I just cried all the time. The hours were terrible and I was away from him too much. I thought I was going to have a nervous breakdown if I continued. I just didn't feel OK about being away from him. I suddenly had to find something to do from home.
So, I resigned on a Monday from my TV job and on the Friday literary agent Heather Holden Brown got in touch with me about whether I could help Antonio Carluccio write a big book on vegetables. Oh my god, that was just such a stroke of luck. When I started doing it I was reading about Italian vegetables all day long and spending time with Antonio every week. I just couldn't believe people were paying me for this, it was bliss.
When the publisher Mitchell Beazley approached me to have a meeting I assumed they wanted me to write more books for other people. But I told them about my idea for Crazy Water, Pickled Lemons at the end of that meeting. It was about the ingredients, foods and dishes that I'd grown up dreaming about in Northern Ireland. At that time, I'd never visited places like Morocco, and the idea was about looking at food that was enchanting from a grey place. Dishes like a cake made with boiled oranges and allioli made with quinces were quite magical.
The commissioning editor commissioned it on the spot, she loved it. It was all still just in my head, so I went home and went overboard with the ‘treatment’ which is what they call a pitch in television. I made a mood board, and designed what the title page of each chapter would look like. Because I'd worked in television these visuals seemed an obvious thing to do.
You’ve now written 12 cookbooks, with the 13th on the way. How do you come up with your ideas? Do you ever sit down and think, what’s my next cookbook going to be?
I’ve never thought of them like that. My preserving book, Salt, Sugar, Smoke, came about because it was something I wanted to understand more about. Writing the book was the journey that I made to get to be able to do it better. I'm quite obsessive about things in that way.
Even my books that seem very commercial and don't involve masses of research come from what's happening in my own life. Cook Simple, an early one, was about trying to cook while carrying my baby, Ted – things that could be cooked with one hand (Ted was always crying!). There were also dishes that I could manage when he was a bit older, slightly more complicated stuff (not every dish went into the oven). I thought the recipes would be really helpful for anybody who had small children, or who was at work every day and just had picked things up quickly on the way home to cook that night. It completely came out of real life.
Simple, which came out more recently, was the block buster version of that approach. And From the Oven to the Table was even more of that type of thing: sticking food in the oven. The first dish of this type I cooked was from an Antonio Carluccio book. You just put chicken thighs, potatoes, wedges of onion, whole cloves of garlic, rosemary, seasoning and olive oil into a roasting tin, stick it in the oven and get on with the rest of your life until it’s ready. It's what Americans refer to as a ‘sheet pan’ dish. I have worked up many dishes like this over the past twenty-five years because, during the week, that is how I cook.