Will Marilyn Monroe's Cookbooks Become the Most Expensive Ever Sold?
Plus a cookbook with images you can feel!
Howdy cookbook fans!
Hope your Tuesday is going well. Lots to get to today, including a couple cookbooks owned by Marilyn Monroe, the Julia Child Award, a “sensory cookbook” for people with vision loss, and much more! Let’s get to it.
Elizabeth David’s French Country Cooking. I got it in my early 20s, shortly after I came back from studying in France in 1965. When I returned home to Berkeley all I wanted to do was live like the French. Elizabeth David had also gone to France, and also fallen in love with the markets and the way that the French lived to eat. It’s a big cultural picture that Elizabeth David presents in her books; it’s not simply about food. Food is culture, and she revealed that. She also influenced me aesthetically — I loved the gracefulness and simplicity of her recipes and her cooking.
—Alice Waters on the book that most influenced how she thinks about food. [NYT]
Marilyn Monroe’s Own Cookbooks Go to Auction
On June 22, two cookbooks confirmed to have been owned by Marilyn Monroe will go to auction. The books are The New Fanny Farmer Boston Cooking-School Cook Book (1951) and The New Joy of Cooking (1953). According to the auction listing, both books show signs the actress used them frequently: dinner party menus and grocery lists she wrote, food stains, and bookmarks. The books were last purchased at auction in 1999 for $45,000 and are expected to sell as a pair for between $50,000 and $75,000.
This got me started thinking about how much the most expensive cookbook ever sold might be. The rare Warhol book that went to auction earlier this spring ended up selling for $35,000, a number that seems to be Monroe’s to beat. (The sum paid recently by Yale's Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library for Georgia O’Keeffe’s recipe cards was undisclosed.) If you’ve heard cookbooks that sold for more at auction, to the comments! And if you’ve got $60,000 burning a hole in your pocket, I know of a couple famous cookbooks up for sale.
DIGITAL COOKBOOKS Nashville chef Sean Brock has partnered with drugmaker Argenx on a digital cookbook featuring recipes suited for people with myasthenia gravis, an autoimmune disease that impacts chewing and swallowing. Brock himself has MG, and developed three recipes for the cookbook, which you can download here. [Fierce Pharma]
Toni Tipton-Martin to Receive the Julia Child Award
Historian, cookbook author, and EIC of Cook’s Country magazine Toni Tipton-Martin will receive the prestigious Julia Child Award from The Julia Child Foundation for Gastronomy and the Culinary Arts in November. Per a press release, Foundation chairman Eric W. Spivey on why she was selected:
Toni Tipton-Martin is a transformative leader in the culinary world. Her commitment to highlighting the depth and importance of African American cuisine and of making the industry more inclusive through research and education led the jury to select her as this year’s Julia Child Award recipient…Toni also shares many qualities and accomplishments with Julia, including a pioneering spirit—best reflected in her groundbreaking cookbook—and a belief in the power of food to bring people together.
The award comes with a $50,000 grant, which Tipton-Martin plans to fund her SANDE Youth Project in order “to focus its mentoring and training activities on next generation food writers.” Congratulations!
Maggi Launches “Sensory Cookbook” for Blind Cooks
While cookbooks have obviously been printed in Braille editions before, this new cookbook from food company Maggi takes the idea of a cookbook for those with near or complete loss of sight a step further. Called Cooking Blindly, the book was developed in partnership with Brazil’s Dorina Nowill Foundation for the Blind and features illustrations printed in high relief so readers can feel them, aroma patches that smell like the flavors being discussed, and available audio transcription for the entire book. It is currently only available in Brazil/in Portuguese but there seem to be plans to expand to other languages, more information is available here. [Cooking Blindly via AFP Relaxnews]
THE FACEBOOK FILES Facebook pages continue to prove fertile ground for launching cookbooks: Alabama’s Brenda Gantt runs a page called Cooking With Brenda Gannt that boasts a whopping 2.3 million followers, and has netted her appearances on TV shows like The Kelly Clarkson Show. And now her first cookbook, called It’s Gonna Be Good, Y’all, will be published in November. Recipes include Buttermilk Biscuits, Tomato Gravy, Fried Okra, Chicken & Dumplings, Orange Slice Cake, and Chocolate Fudge Pie. [The Alabama Baptist]
Manhattan cookbook shop Kitchen Arts & Letters reports that, thanks to a mid-pandemic GoFundMe that raised over $100,000, they’re now doing better than ever: “We feel that we are now on our feet and, with great pleasure, can report seeing our best period of growth in several years.” [GoFundMe]
Fortnum & Mason has announced the books on the shortlist for the 2021 Food and Drink Awards. [Bookseller]
A new book by author Jess McHugh looks at the history of the US through 13 bestselling books, one of which is The Betty Crocker Picture Cookbook. She discusses her book, Americanon, over on Detroit’s NPR station. [WDET]
UK publisher Bloomsbury predicts the high cookbook sales brought about by the pandemic will continue going forward. Chief executive Nigel Newton tells Reuters, “I think that it is the (reading) habit itself which may have become permanent as people have rediscovered the role of books in their lives.” [Reuters]
TikTokkers are raiding their grandparents’ recipe boxes for stunt dishes like jello salad. [CBC]
Inside a growing sub-sub-genre of novel: the punny, food-themed cozy mystery novel. [Pennsylvania News Today]
An online course will teach you how to cook just like the court of King Richard II ate: a restaurant in Newcastle, England is putting on a digital cooking course featuring recipes from the Forme of Cury, the first known cookbook written in English. £125.00 gets you access to the course, where you’ll learn “medieval pancakes, Egarduce (sweet and sour fish), Flaumpeyns (Pork Pies) and Comadore (apple turnover).” [Eat Medieval via Chronicle Live]
Cookbook review: Rodney Scott's World of BBQ by Rodney Scott and Lolis Eric Elie. [Wired]
Cookbook review: Tables and Spreads by Shelly Westerhausen Worcel with Wyatt Worcel
Community cookbooks and the women who wrote them. (See also SPN’s recent look at the community cookbooks of Japanese Americans!) [JSTOR]
That’s all for today! See you Friday, have a great week.