Cooking Without Recipes

The author of the new book Cooking Without Recipes wants you to be free from "the shackles of someone else's instructions."

Maya Angelou on Cooking

Maya Angelou on her new cookbook, Great Food, All Day Long: "Writing and cookery are just two different means of communication."

The Economist Reviews Gopnik's "The Table Comes First"

The Economist reviews Adam Gopnik's latest book, The Table Comes First, an expanded collection of his food writing for the New Yorker: "Like a béchamel sauce, the resulting book is sometimes smooth, but occasionally lumpy. In short, an uneven feast flavoured with tasty morsels."

Bourdain on Books

Anthony Bourdain talks books and his new publishing imprint for Ecco, part of Harper Collins.

Book Briefs: Odd Bits: How to Cook the Rest of the Animal

As a follow-up to her books Bones and Fat, chef and writer Jennifer Mclaghan is now getting into meatier territory, albeit from the perspective of preparing the "odd bits" (think snouts, feet, and organs). Her new book, Odd Bits: How to Cook the Rest of the Animal is aimed at the offal-curious home cook who may want to get into nose-to-tail cooking, but who may have some trepidation about getting their hands messy (or bloody) with organ meats. In addition to recipes, each chapter contains extensive notes aimed at demistifying everything from cockscomb to pig's ears. A recipe for barbecued corned beef is an intriguing and non-threatening entry point (who ever thought of grilling corned beef?), but before long you might find yourself whipping up some chocolate blood ice cream.

$21.28 at amazon.com.

Amazon Buys Rights to "The 4-Hour Chef"

Amazon has bought the rights to publish "The 4-Hour Chef," the next book from Timothy Ferriss, author of the New York Times bestsellers The 4-Hour Body and The 4-Hour Workweek. It's due out next April.

Food and Music: The Recipe Project

Is food the new rock? Maybe so, according to The Recipe Project, which sets recipes from celebrity chefs to music.

The new book and CD (due out October 15) by the band One Ring Zero features "song-recipes" from chefs Mario Batali, John Besh, David Chang, Tom Colicchio, and Michael Symon, among others. Each song is tailored to the musical sensibility of the chef and the dish: Chris Cosentino's recipe for 'Brains and Eggs" gets a Beastie Boys style treatment while Michael Symon's "Octopus Salad with Black-Eyed Peas" veers into heavy metal.

Coming Soon: "The Popeye Cookbook"

Due out in October, The Popeye Cookbook will feature plenty of spinach in recipes "meant to build you up, give you hair on your chest and immediate strength."

The Rise of the Jacketless Cookbook

Have you noticed that more and more cookbooks are being published without dust jackets these days?

From skinny volumes like the new Paletas to beefier tomes like Noma and The Silver Spoon, cookbooks seem to increasingly be going naked, shorn of their usual dust covers.

Aaron Wehner, publisher at Ten Speed Press, which recently released Paletas and quite a few other jacketless cookbooks, says, "It's mostly a subjective feel thing—a jacket can sometimes seem a little formal and traditional for a particular book. Whereas POB [paper over board] can feel more contemporary, and a little less fussy."

Food writer and author Amanda Hesser is not a fan of dust jackets: "For a cookbook, a dust jacket really doesn’t make that much sense because it can easily get soaked with whatever you're cooking with and get beat up," she told me.

Blogs to Books

Publishers are increasingly tapping bloggers for cookbooks and other print food books.