On Monday, Eater at Home dropped its fall 2024 cookbook preview — at seven stories total, which encompass the best books of the season, it's our biggest fall preview ever.
For the main fall preview list, narrowing down the bumper crop of cookbooks published each season into 16 to 18 to highlight is no easy task — there is always, always the fear that we'll miss something. As the editor of Eater at Home, I lead the effort to curate our cookbook previews twice a year, for fall and spring, the two seasons when most publishers roll out the bulk of their titles. To plan for these, we maintain a Google sheet of titles that's continuously updated throughout the year. We start narrowing down the list about two months before the preview publish date, then put out an ask to our staffers to see which books they'd like to review. We always ask them to test at least one recipe from the book, since that's where the real proof of the pudding lives, so to speak. If a cookbook's recipes don't work, or are badly written, then I don't care how beautiful the rest of the book is.
Then reviews start rolling in. Sometimes, we wind up cutting a title or two that didn't quite meet expectations, which gives us the opportunity to pull from the list of titles we loved but didn't initially have room for. Part of determining our final list is looking at who is represented in it — in addition to quality, we look for diversity among both subject matter and authors. Cookbook publishing is still overwhelmingly white, so it's important to us to spotlight voices that have historically been ignored. Again, there are a lot of cookbooks published each year — this fall alone, there are around 100 — so coming up with our final list is far and away the most challenging part of this process.
Once we've picked the titles, I reach out to an illustrator to create the preview's lead art — our past few have been illustrated by Andrea D'Aquino, a terrific artist and graphic designer who is also a pleasure to work with (thanks, Andrea!).
It's a long and somewhat painstaking process, but also a very satisfying one. I love getting to tell readers what's worth buying, and love bringing attention to writers who deserve it. And, of course, I love the inspiration this gives me for my own cooking — there is no better way to get out of a cooking rut than reading through a bunch of cookbook galleys.
This fall, we were fortunate to be able to include some of our favorite books in themed round-ups, so even though they weren't in our main list, we could still give them much-deserved attention. And now that the fruits of this effort are live, the rest is up to you, the readers. So go buy a cookbook! Ideally from an independent bookseller! And read more from the fall cookbook preview below:
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