Uncovered with Rick Rodgers

Twenty-five years ago, I wrote one of my most popular books, Kaffeehaus: Exquisite Desserts from the Cafés of Vienna, Budapest, and Prague. How did a guy from Oakland, California end up knowing so much about Sachertorte? I’m Rick Rodgers, veteran cookbook author, and welcome to Uncovered.

While most of my book projects have been collaborations with celebrities or branded books with some respected corporate names, I have written over thirty books under my own name. And the one that I am most proud of is Kaffeehaus.

One sign of a book’s success is how long it stays in print. Especially in today’s marketplace, where hundreds of cookbooks are published each year on every edible subject under the sun, staying on a publisher’s backlist is not easy. While the publisher for Kaffeehaus changed, it has been in print for 25 years. But quite a few of my books have been tenacious. What is the secret formula to long-lasting success?

Well, of course, there isn’t really a secret formula, because if there were, every book would sell and none would be remaindered. But one of my most successful books, Kaffeehaus, was quite a journey, and it is still going on, as I am often asked to give presentations on Viennese coffee culture to historical societies and libraries.

But it wasn’t an easy sell. Then, as now, many name-brand baking cookbook authors were out there. I had worked in the test kitchen of Chocolatier Magazine (now Pastry Arts and Letters) where I had met a lot of them: Rose Levy Beranbaum, Flo Braker, Nick Malgieri. When I would bring up a book of Viennese desserts to editors, they would say “Let Dorie Greenspan write that book. Do you have any more Thanksgiving books in you?”

I was obsessed with Viennese baked goods because they were in my DNA. My maternal grandmother was from Liechtenstein, part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. I grew up with wonderful homemade desserts, and my aunties had a bit of a competitive streak about who could make the most beautiful cookie platters, the most gorgeous birthday cakes, and the lightest dinner rolls.

I wanted to make them. And I ended up at culinary schools in New York and Paris to learn how. But even though I had strong baking skills, I didn’t make it a specialty, so my credentials seemed lackluster.

But one editor at Clarkson Potter, Roy Finnamore, saw the value of what I wanted to do. He also, like me, saw a big hole in the market for Austrian cooking in general, and especially the desserts. There were a couple of paperbacks on the subject, but no one had done a big gorgeous color book about them. Most of the recipes out there were European. The measurements were metric, but more importantly, the pan sizes were too. Europe has no 9 x 13 baking dish. And not to mention the ingredient differences. The book would introduce home bakers to the world of Austro-Hungarian baking.

Sounds easy enough, right? Get the recipes, test them in the US with American ingredients and cooking tools, and go to Europe and take some photos. It wasn’t that easy.

First, outside of tourism, Central European countries at the time didn’t have many public relations teams I could call on for help and connections. There was no Austrian chocolate company, for example, that I could call on. Besides, promotion in the US would be worthless to them if they didn’t import here. The Austrian Tourism Board in New York existed to promote travel to and within the country, so commerce was outside of their balliwick...or so they said. The Hungarians were a bit more helpful because I had a Hungarian friend, Ella Szaabo, a member of a culinary group I belong to, who intervened. I did get a one plane ticket from Austrian Airlines. But that initial trip didn’t bode well. When I got to JFK early to check in, I found that I had grabbed my old, expired passport. By the time I returned to New Jersey to get my current one, I had missed the direct flight to Vienna and had to be rerouted.

This was another case of the author’s advance going entirely toward creating the book, since I was responsible for paying for the photos, too. These were to be a combination of location shots in Vienna, Budapest, and Prague, and food shots that we would take at home. My loft in Jersey City had lots of natural light, so that saved me the cost of a studio. These days, with the internet, it would be simple to find three local photographers, but not in the year 2000. Roy recommended a novice photographer willing to work for the price of a trip to Europe, plus a little extra.

Things were coming together, but I still saw many gaps. There is an organization called the International Association of Culinary Professionals (IACP). Desperate, I looked in the directory for an Austrian colleague. I found one, and her name was Karitas Mitropogos. She was the wife of a Greek diplomat stationed in Vienna, and she was the city’s culinary expert. She had a radio food show on American Forces Network, and she had many useful connections. She called the Sacher Hotel and got me in to see how the famous Sachertorte is made. She drove me out into the country to meet a delightful elderly baker whose inn made fantastic desserts. She introduced me to other Viennese, especially Irene Jenkins, a woman who had worked for the UN in New York, but was now at home. As a born Viennese, she taught me many details about the Austrian way of life. She made appointments at the prominent professional baker’s school. She taught me Austrian etiquette.

An example of Austrian manners is the importance of titles and the respect that the person expects. People who have attained PhDs are always called “Herr Doctor,” and his wife is referred to as “Frau Herr Doctor.” And don’t you forget it.

Karitas told me to pack a dozen or so of my cookbooks to spread around as gifts. They were very heavy calling cards.

I had a meeting at the professional chef’s school, and Karitas warned me that the dean would not show up. She explained: “His assistant will say there is some kind of mixup, and she will apologize. You and I will say it is OUR fault, and can we rebook? Now, she will have a second date ready, and you will accept it. When we return, you give him a signed book and another gift (a box of candy, bringing coals to Newcastle), and keep apologizing until you turn blue in the face. He will be satisfied, and the meeting will go on.”

And that’s exactly what happened.

There was so much to learn about Austrian desserts. Their categories are much more nuanced than American cakes, pies, and cookies. Desserts are broken down into Mehlspeisen (“flour” meals or baked goods) and Sussspeisen (“sugar” meals without flour, such as puddings and ice creams). From there, you have the Kalte (cold) or Warme (warm) desserts.

Within those, you have at least two branches that we do not have here: dumplings and pancakes (or crepes). There is a whole world of dumplings, many of which are sweet, especially in the summer when a delicacy is apricot- or plum-stuffed sweet dumplings, topped with buttered breadcrumbs. With the pancakes, outside of thin crepes, often filled with cheese or fruit preserves, and served with chocolate sauce, there is Kaiserschmarren, a thick stove-top pancake that has become viral in the last few years thanks to a Kaiserschmarren to-go stand that Demel (the premier bakery in Vienna, in operation for over two hundred years) has put up.

Speaking of Demel, I had a disaster there. We were doing an early morning photo shoot there. The photographer kept asking me to move back just a little more, just an inch, now...

CRASH.

I had backed into a sugar sculpture of a cat, which was now on the floor. Not just any cat, but a representation of Hundertwasser, a revered Viennese artist who is a kind of Warhol to them. This cat did not have nine lives.

One day, on my hundredth melange of the day (a melange is basically a Viennese cappuccino), I had an epiphany: COFFEE tied the desserts together. The desserts and the cafe culture were an important part of Viennese life, and many cultural movements were born there. It got to the point where many writers virtually lived in the warm cafes, where they could sit all day instead of freezing in their hovels. An American equivalent would be beatniks in their cafes and the literature and folk music that sprang from that era.

But this meant a new line of research. I explained my new approach to my editor, developed a new outline, and he agreed.

This helped the book to become more than just a collection of recipes. There was now a solid context and, more importantly, stories to be told. About how I narrowly missed having a chandelier fall on me (very Phantom of the Opera) Cafe Savoy. Or how Karitas and I ate over a dozen Mardi Gras doughnuts Faschingkrapfen) to find the best—no one won, as they were all good. And the many legends of how coffee came to Central Europe—it has to do with camels.

One other element contributed to Kaffeehaus’s longevity, The Good Cook book club. Pre-Amazon (or even Substack), this mail-order book club was where cookbook lovers went to get curated advice on the best cookbooks. Kaffeehaus was chosen as the Main Selection, which meant that it got its own special edition that was automatically sent to the subscribers. They could reject it, but 60,000 didn’t. Even now, that is a lot of books. And the book didn’t languish in the bookstores, either, because, as Roy and I had hoped, there were many Americans who wanted to learn how to make their family recipes, or had memories of trips abroad.

If you would like to see and hear an entire lecture on the subject of Austro-Hungarian desserts, you can watch it here.

So, if you are writing a cookbook, my takeaways are:

Tell stories

Teach people new things

Let local people help

Hire interpreters and guides

My people will call your people.

Rick

Today, we are accustomed to seeing women chefs not only in restaurants but all over the media, from TV to TikTok. But not long ago, a woman chef was a scandal and not to be tolerated. My late friend, Leslie Revsin, changed all that.

Leslie was born in Chicago but bounced around the country as a student, soaking up regional cooking along the way, ending up in Brooklyn. There, the international grocery stores and restaurants inspired her, and after self-educating her cooking at home, she signed up for professional courses at our mutual alma mater, New York Technical College. No rules prevented her from attending, but her presence was unusual. Even when I attended NYTC about twenty years after her, most of the women students were in class because they were lined up to inherit the family bakery or restaurant business and they wanted some outside training. Being a chef was not something most women aspired to.

Restaurant work was physically demanding, and the men who ran the profession thought a woman wouldn’t have the stamina for the long hours and heavy lifting. There are even stupider ideas tossed around about the inferiority of a woman’s palate and other dumb comparisons.

They were wrong.

NYTC was a bland technical school that also taught other trades (cooking was a trade, not an art), but it had one huge advantage: It was in New York. You didn’t have to move to New Hyde Park (where CIA was gaining a reputation) or Ithaca (for Cornell’s Hotel School), or Paris (for Le Cordon Bleu, whose classes were taught in French anyway). Johnson and Wales’s culinary school in Rhode Island didn’t start until 1973, and this part of Leslie’s story is taking place in the late 60s. The enormous variety of cuisines that New York’s five boroughs had to offer was at her fingertips. Why leave?

Leslie got through NYTC’s courses and elbowed her way into the vast kitchens at the famous Waldorf-Astoria hotel. It was a lowly position, but Leslie (who was slim) proved herself by lugging enormous pots of stock around the stove and not slugging the guys who were stupid enough to try to pinch her. After this trial by fire, she bounced around at different restaurants, sometimes as her own boss, other times working as the chef. These were not storefront operations, but big places like One Fifth (where I dined often), The Rainbow Room (where I ate when I was being treated), and the Inn at Pound Ridge (where I would go if someone else drove or hired a limo, which was more typical as it was that kind of place.) Leslie did get a reputation as being “difficult,” as happens to many bold women whereas strong men are allowed free rein. The press noticed that there was (finally) a woman running New York’s kitchens. To be fair, there had been women chefs before, but their restaurants were more casual.

I am thinking of Dione Lucas and her omelet shop. She also had a very early TV cooking show, before James Beard, who is sometimes credited with being the first TV chef. Or Edna Lewis at Nicholson Café, a haunt of Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, and other fifties’ literati. Another trailblazer at the time was Abigail Kirsch, Queen of the Caterers, who challenged Martha Stewart for that crown. I do not include Madeleine Kamman, who was French, and had a reputation for being meaner than any male chef. But this was related to common sexism, where a woman is “difficult,” while a male can misbehave all he wants without criticism.

But Leslie was cheffing at the haute-cuisine level and creating her own recipes, too. Her signature dish was Roquefort Beignets with Apple Purée, a recipe with 70s excess written all over it. I remember how delicious they were, but they involve wrapping Roquefort in crêpes, then dipping them in batter before frying and serving them on applesauce. Oy. That’s why we eat out at restaurants, so someone else can make this kind of complex dish.

In 1985, a TV show, New York’s Master Chef, really increased her visibility in the media. Two friends of mine, Bruce Franchini and Richard Sax were involved (Bruce as director, Richard as recipe tester and writer), and they sang Leslie’s praises. In about ten years, she had gone from peeling potatoes in a basement to being one of New York’s “Master Chefs.”

Along the way, Leslie was asked to write cookbooks. But with a big difference. She was not repeating her complicated restaurant recipes for the home cook. Instead, she shared what she knew about cooking at the home cook’s level of comprehension, with titles like Great Fish, Quick and Come for Dinner. She was one of the few chefs willing to work this way, as most wanted to show off recipes that cost $20 at their establishments and took an entire kitchen crew to replicate. When I was asked to do a restaurant cookbook, I tried to use her as an example, but my client wanted to play it safe with their off-the-menu recipes. The expensive, coffee-table restaurant cookbook was a trend that crashed and turned when people got tired of sourcing fennel pollen and yuzu juice for their dinners.

In her late fifties, she and her husband Phillip moved near Seattle to be closer to her daughter and her family. But sadly, she developed ovarian cancer. She was writing two books in a series that she called The Simpler The Better: Sensational One-Dish Meals, and its companion, TSTB: Sensational Italian Meals.

Her treatment destroyed her appetite and senses, so she asked me to take over. We would chat on the phone about recipe ideas, and then I would work them out in my kitchen, then send them over for her approval. The great thing about this exercise was thinking about how we could wrest the most flavor from the food with the fewest ingredients and effort, since each recipe had a limit of three steps and fewer than ten ingredients. I still make many of these dishes myself in my dinner rotation.

This story doesn’t end with Leslie’s passing in 2004, but on April 19, 2005. Why do I remember that date?

I was scheduled to promote our books on The Today Show, one of the many times I’d appeared there over the years. Being on Today was the Holy Grail of TV cooking demos, but it was also a royal pain to get through them.

First, they made you come into the studio the afternoon before at 4 PM for a rehearsal. But when the show ran live the next morning, nothing went according to plan. Of course, with the show starting at 7 AM in New York, I had to show up at the studio around 5:30. This meant I had to stay in the city the night before, sleeping in a strange hotel bed…Although I got to know the beds at the Hotel Warwick intimately, a short walk from Rockefeller Center and NBC Studios. NBC would sometimes send a car to my loft in Jersey City, but then I had to rise even earlier. But not as early as the food stylist my publisher hired to prepare all of the food for the segment. We usually hired my friend Marie Haycox, who would simply stay up all night to pull up at the loading dock around 4:30 AM. No matter how you cut it, it was not fun, and I had to donate about 24 hours of my life for a 3-minute spot.

The worst was the timing. Cooking demos were officially allotted 5½ minutes, but that never happened. Cookbooks got the last spot before sign-off, and every time a previous segment ran a few seconds over, the producers shaved time off the cookbook demo. Meaning, I ended up with a minute or two. This was a joke, and I grew sick of it. I did finally rebel, but that’s another story. (Contrary to the rumors, Ann Curry’s involvement in my retaliation did not play a part in her firing. And Matt Lauer never touched me.)

At this appearance, as sad an occasion as it was, everything went as well as could be expected. I’ve had some crazy things happen on set, but this time no one cut themselves and no one spit out the food. Somehow, I got through the demo in record time.

Today had a delayed feed to the West Coast that started three hours later at 10 AM Eastern Time for 7 AM Pacific. My family, who by now was used to seeing me on the small screen, was nonetheless huddled around the TV to see my segment. “And next, when we come back, Rick Rodgers is going to cook some fast and simple recipes from the book he wrote with chef Leslie Revsin.”

At 12:45 PM ET/9:45 PT, the screen went blank.

A voice said, “Breaking news from Vatican City. White smoke has just risen from the chimney in the Sistine Chapel, indicating that the cardinals have elected a new pope. We interrupt this programming to go to…”

I was bumped by the Pope!

I did my best to honor Leslie by swearing in both English and Italian.

My people will call your people.

Rick

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The weather is turning chilly again. Meaning—it is macaroni and cheese time! And when I think of macaroni and cheese, I think of Patti LaBelle. (Doesn’t everyone?) I first worked with her on “LaBelle Cuisine” (where she first published her infamous recipe), and later on “LaBelle Desserts.”Describing how those books were written is a good way of explaining what goes into a celebrity cookbook. But before I get into that, I have backstory on Patti and her group, Patti LaBelle and the BlueBelles, a.k.a. LaBelle.

Patti LaBelle and the BlueBelles were originally a “girl group” of the sixties. They had some mild hits in the Shirelles vein, but they really took off when they rebranded as a glitzy female rock-and-roll group called LaBelle, with Patti as the frontwoman. Their costumes became wild, three-dimensional disco-dream sculptures, usually designed by Larry LeGaspi in the style he called “Space Deco.” “Lady Marmalade” was their breakout mega-hit. Hardly a day goes by without me hearing that song somewhere. After ten years together, Patti decided to go solo, and the group split up.

Ironically, I knew another LaBelle member, Sarah Dash, before I met Patti. Sarah, for all her posing as a flashy space vixen in LaBelle, was a quiet sweetheart, a reverend’s daughter through and through. She was a regular customer at the restaurant I managed in New York, Teacher’s. When I knew her, Sarah was performing in both the disco and jazz worlds. Her solo hit was “Sinner Man.”Because of her religious upbringing, she was uncomfortable with the loose morality that disco represented. I remember her being asked to do a lucrative show at the Limelight, a dance palace that used to be a church. She and I had a long conversation about her turning the gig down because if The Reverend Dash found out she was working in a deconsecrated house of the Lord, he would disown her—and she didn’t mean it figuratively. Whenever my now-husband Patrick and I would see her cabaret act at a dad-approved dinner club like The Grand Finale, she would single us out of the audience and tell the crowd how well I kept her fed. She was a terrific person and left us too soon a few years ago.

My friend and editor, Harriet Bell, acquired Patti’s upcoming cookbook for publisher William Morrow, and I was asked to help Patti shape the recipes into a manuscript. Since I had been a LaBelle fan since the time I saw them at Oakland’s Paramount Theater during my college days, I was floored.

Patti has natural cooking talent, and her dad ran a restaurant in the Philadelphia area. Her aunties were excellent cooks, too. So, the recipes flowed like butter on a hot biscuit. Our process was simple. She would send me a stack of recipe drafts. I rewrote them (since home recipes often leave out things like can sizes, number of servings, pan sizes, and cooking times), and sent them over for her approval. We got together every Sunday night at 7 PM to discuss the recipes and clarify anything. Sometimes, she was getting ready to go onstage at 8 PM, but she made time for the cookbook and me. I think she enjoyed it. This is a woman who travels with her own pots and pans so she can cook in hotel rooms.

After a few months, the book was ready, and it promised to be a hit. It was. The publishers planned an intimate launch party for the book at Patti’s home in LA.

Well, it wasn’t quite intimate, and it wasn’t quite her home.

Patti is very private and wasn’t thrilled about a crowd in her gorgeous apartment in a large building on the edge of Century City. Although spacious, it was still too small for the invitation list—I mean, who would decline?

However, an appropriate empty apartment was available for short-term rental in the building: a garden apartment that the owner, a Shah somewhere, would rent to her for the event. This was before AirB&B—this problem easy to solve today. They said the Shah kept the accommodations for his wives when they came to LA to shop on Rodeo Drive every year or so. I gathered a kitchen crew with friends that included two LA culinary stars, Mani Niall and Akasha Richmond, former chefs for Michael Jackson, who took time off from their busy restaurants to help me. The publisher hired a top-notch party planner. He filled the space with rented furniture and other accouterments to make it look lived-in. I spent my first couple of days in LA buying the housewares that were missing from the kitchen, sourcing groceries, and buying an new designer shirt (JHane Barnes) for photo opportunities. First things first!

When the party night came, the guest list was A-List: Carol Burnett, Halle Berry, RuPaul (out of drag), and other names you might know. This group was fed Patti’s mac and cheese, potato salad, and her friend and hairdresser Norma’s sweet potato pie. (The pie went viral when it became a blockbuster product at Walmart one Thanksgiving. Even Patti will tell you it is Norma’s recipe, but the commercial version is not an exact replica, of course.)

The menu might have had one or two things that weren’t carbs, but I can’t be sure. The press came, and there was a nice story in PEOPLE (or was it US?) with a photo of Patti feeding me. I’m glad I bought the shirt! And I wish I kept the clipping.

Patti is famous for her macaroni and cheese. She’s made it on just about every TV show. The seasoned salt gives it a little extra oomph, and the eggs make the sauce even creamier. It gets its flavor from four kinds of cheese, plus Velveeta. No shade on Velveeta—my dad worked for Kraft all his life, and we had Velveeta by the case at our house, although Mom used Cracker Barrel cheddar much more often. Velveeta really does give the dish a smoothness that you can’t get from other ingredients, and I have worked with chefs who consider it a secret ingredient in their cheese sauces. That being said, I rarely have all four cheeses and the pricey Velveeta on hand, so I usually make my version, which has its own legion of fans. It is from my book for Williams-Sonoma, Comfort Food, which has sold many thousands of copies in its three editions over the past fifteen or so years. You can find Patti’s version easily online [click here].

Patti cooks with a lot of love, calories be damned. I remember when I first saw her recipe, my eyebrows shot up in shock. I repeated the ingredients to her to be sure I had them right: “One-and-a-half pounds of cheese, two eggs, a stick of butter, and two cups of half-and-half?”

She replied, “Oh, Sugar. You don’t have to use all that. Sometimes I make it low-fat and just use milk instead of the half-and-half.” She may not be a nutritionist, but that woman can cook.

One thing that I have learned in this business is that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. We all love innovative cookbooks, or those that take deep dives into a subject. But I bet “macaroni and cheese” is Googled more than “matcha miso cheesecake.” So when I am asked to do a version of an old chestnut, my goal is to make the best recipe you’ve ever had. And that’s what I did with my own macaroni and cheese recipe.

What do you put in your mac & cheese?

My people will call your people.

Rick

P.S. Want more of the good stuff? Paid subscribers get access to The Recipe Box, where I keep the best recipes I’ve collected over a lifetime in food and publishing. Pull up a chair, because there’s plenty more to dish.

No doubt about it: Everyone loves a beautiful cookbook. But photography’s importance has developed to a point where it is on a par with the recipes themselves.

The average cookbook lover probably doesn’t understand the wholesale cost of photos and how they have skewed costs, especially for the author. I am not advocating lower fees from the talented people who make the beautiful photos! Professional photography is what makes the difference between a good cookbook and a great one. But like many financial realities today, the question is sustainability. How long can this go on?

How Many Photos?

Readers have come to prefer (if not expect) a photo for every recipe, but this is impractical for many reasons. Regardless, it is becoming common practice.

The expected number of photos in a book has changed radically over the years, as have the number of recipes and pages. Most cookbooks today average seventy to ninety recipes. Not long ago, that number was a hundred or more. But there is rarely room for that many recipes and their photos unless the page count increases, and pages cost money.

In the recent past, the page math was still an issue, but the paper was matte, which is much less costly than the glossy surface needed for photos. Most cookbooks had a photo insert of sixteen images, and two inserts for a total of thirty-two pictures was considered extravagant.

Now, the four-color cookbook rules the roost. Note that some of the biggest perennial best sellers, such as Joy of Cooking, and the first books of Julia and Marcella (the Cher and Beyoncé of cookbooks) were black-and-white text with few photos. Only towards the end of Marcella’s career did photos come into play. (I will be posting about my take on the history of illustrated cookbooks soon. It all started in my hometown, San Francisco.)

Cookbooks (and books in general) are printed onto “brochures” of paper called standards, which hold sixteen pages each. These are then bound together to make a book. (The main difference is glued versus stitched.) Therefore, the total number of pages is a multiple of sixteen, so 256 or 272 pages per book are common, which hopefully keeps the retail cost at $35 to $ 40 per book.

Why these particular page counts? Paper and ink are not free, and their costs affect the book’s final price. When writing a cookbook, very few authors consider the final page count, which creates a big problem. I admit it: Even I have overwritten, which only leads to grief—cutting favorite recipes and photos to fit the allotted page count.

Not every photo is a “hero” shot, which is what professionals call that a mouthwatering photo of the recipe at hand. There are also “lifestyle” photos, especially for influencer books where the brand may be based as much on lifestyle as on cooking prowess. Someone has to take those images of the author chopping an onion, rolling out dough, or playing with their dog. Chapter opener shots also have to be budgeted. And the cover shot, which can sometimes be pulled from an interior photo but usually needs its own session because the title text has to be carefully placed. These additions can be included in the original seventy-five photos or budgeted beyond the base price.

All of this leaves fewer pages for the actual recipes. And you must also allow for the front and back matter. Front matter is everything from the first blank page in the book (the back of the front piece), title page, copyright page, dedication page, table of contents, foreword (optional), introduction, and first chapter with basic info like equipment, glossary, and so on. Back matter will include acknowledgments and the index (which usually require a separate professional who, of course, is paid, sometimes by the author). These too eat up page count like a pig at a trough.

For a book with 75 recipes, if each photo takes up a page, you are down 75 pages from the final page count at the outset. If a recipe is on the long side, it can take up two pages. So, that is three pages times 75 recipes for 225 pages before any other text is written. If it sounds complicated, it is.

Who Pays?

It may surprise you to learn that the author pays for cookbook photos. This is not the way it always was.

Until about fifteen years ago, publishers commonly absorbed the photo budget. But as consumers demanded more photos and budgets changed, publishers decided to pass the entire cost to the author. Not a portion—the entire amount. Now a generous publisher might tack an extra $25,000 onto the author advance to cover photos, but the average photo budget can run two or three (or more) times that amount, even back in the day. But usually, it falls entirely on the author to produce the photos. How they get them is their business. Many authors, especially bloggers, are now qualified to do their own photos, and while that saves them some money, it is a time suck.

It is the rare cookbook author who does not dig into their own pocket to cover the various costs for the entire book, as the photo budget can easily eat up the book’s entire advance or close to it. Branded books (an influencer is a brand) garner higher advances, so they can afford the high cost of outsourced photos. But if you are a first-time author with a $60,000 advance, the photo budget will take it all, leaving you nothing for living expenses, much less research and testing costs. You will end up losing money before the book is published, especially as you will be paying your agent, taxes on new income, and groceries for testing recipes.

The average cost of a single photo in a fully outsourced cookbook is anywhere from $600 to $900 or more. I have worked up many photo budgets for my books and clients. Prices do change by location (LA is more expensive than St. Louis), and the author can sometimes negotiate lower prices on a few line items.

The main way for an author to save on photo costs is to be their own food and/or prop stylist. As I mentioned, authors are increasingly their own photographers. But shooting your own book can add weeks or months to your deadline. Some authors I know shoot as they go along with development. However, if at the end of the process, you need to change ingredients or some other elements, you have to backtrack with a new photo.

Bottom Line

To me, the ideal is a fully outsourced shoot because I like the ideas that other team members bring to the food. But I rarely had the budget, which called for creativity.

The best way to save money on a shoot is for the author to provide some of the services that s/he would normally outsource. For me, these are food and prop styling. However, the cost trade-off takes its toll on the amount of work required of the author. Even something seemingly innocuous, like collecting props, takes time.

Big cities like LA and New York have prop rental businesses for the media trade, so you can rent tableware and other items. (Again, this is a cost that adds up quickly when you are renting each fork or napkin.) To save money, you must be creative with what may seem dishonest but is a necessary evil.

The most common solution is to buy a few hundred dollars’ worth of tableware at the local Home Goods or Home Sense, then return it after the shoot. Keep that receipt safe! You (or whoever you hire to clean up and wash dishes) must wash everything carefully and keep the sales tags intact. I do keep some stuff. But I now have a basement full of plates, napkins, glasses, and other retained housewares that I’ll sell for pennies on the dollar at my next garage sale.

Here is a sample photo budget for a current cookbook. The average schedule is eight shots per workday, with a setup every forty-five minutes. This means everyone on the team must be ready to go at 8 AM sharp and adjust to the loss of natural light by mid-afternoon in the winter months. So, if you are the food stylist, you are usually not just working that 8-to-6 shift—there is a lot of prep to do for the next day, and you can hope to freeze or otherwise store some items ahead of time. Experienced assistants are a must—and for a complicated shoot (if, for example, the recipes have a lot of sides or sauces), the stylist might require two helpers.

The next time you buy a beautiful cookbook, keep the bottom line in mind.

Cookbook Photography Costs Per Day (10-hour day; overtime X 1½)

Photographer per day (average 1500.00) 1250.00-2000.00

(Add 1 day if needed for prep and wrap)

Photo assistant 450.00

*Food Stylist 800.00

*Assistant 400.00

*Prop Stylist 800.00

*Assistant 400.00

*Add 2 prep and 1 wrap days.

Studio Rental and overhead (average cost) 1,600.00

Photography Equipment Rentals TBD

(some photographers include in their fee)

Meals (per person, per day: 75.00) Breakfast, lunch, and snacks

6-7 crew, 1 author 600.00

Add coffee and serving items to grocery list if studio does not provide

Grocery and Prop Costs Per Photo

Groceries 50.00 per setup X 8 per day 400.00

Props (rental) 50.00 per setup X 8 per day 400.00

Daily Total 5,850.00

X 10 Days 58,500.00

80 photos for the book, per photo: 731.25

Additional:

Parking, makeup, hair, and fashion stylists for lifestyle, as needed

No Authors Allowed

It may surprise you to know that authors are often not allowed on the photo set, giving the photography team free rein. Yeah, there are exceptions, but most of my publishers had a “no authors allowed” rule in stone.

In one of my bestselling books, where I was the recipe developer for a brand, I saw the daily photos in the digital community lightbox and questioned the practicality of serving a Caesar salad on a slate blackboard. Who does that? And how does one serve the slippery salad from a flat surface? This book was not about aspirational entertaining, but everyday food. The photo team loved the contrast of green on black. They won. It certainly soured my client relationship. I loved my editor, but she had a lot of people on the team that she would have had to engage with to make the change, and she was forced to pick her battles and choose sides. And keep her job!

It also shows how you can be in business for decades, but unpleasant surprises can still be in store despite one’s experience.

Cookbooks that tell stories are in demand. Words still are important to most editors and readers. However, I recently researched the sales of food books with and without illustrations. Many well-reviewed non-illustrated books tanked in sales.

Influencers whose books are simply a collection of recipes without a point of view may sell well their first week of publication and garner the coveted “New York Times Best Seller” stamp, but then they drop off the sales charts. That’s because if an influencer has five million followers, and a small amount buy the book after being prompted to do so through their posts, you can still sell a lot of books on that publication day. But, for a book to resonate, readers need to relate to the words, the photos, and the recipes. Caroline Chambers is one influencer whose books seem to have made a lasting impression.

No matter what, we all love those photos, and the talented folks who create them deserve to be paid. The question is: how do we make it all work? Many good cookbooks never see the light of day because of economics. Consumers just want pretty pictures and don’t care how much they cost the author. That isn’t going to change any time soon, but I hope this podcast helped you understand how photos get between the covers.

If you are a cookbook creator, what are your best practices for saving some money on photo budgets? Let us know in the comments.

Below is a great reel from the young authors of The Diaspora Co. Spice Cookbook, with more real-life lessons about book budgets.

My people will call your people.

Rick

P.S. Want more of the good stuff? Paid subscribers get access to The Recipe Box, where I keep the best recipes I’ve collected over a lifetime in food and publishing. Pull up a chair, because there’s plenty more to dish.

I am often asked about my culinary influences, and there were many. I have the usual suspects—my European family members, of course, and Julia Child and other TV chefs. But one was surprising:

Gypsy Rose Lee.

Yes, the stripper. She’s been dead for 56 years, but her name still resonates, mainly to show biz buffs who remember the musical based on her best-selling memoirs, Gypsy. In our current sexually charged era, strippers are downright quaint, and we might see a few bumps and grinds in old movies. But strippers were a lightning rod for moralist groups. In fact, most people would be surprised to know that Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia won his campaign to shut down New York’s burlesque houses as early as 1937. This meant that Gypsy and her curvy colleagues had to find other ways to pay the rent. Today, perhaps she would have migrated to OnlyFans, but back then her options were squeaky clean and limited. She ended up in Broadway musicals and revues (once replacing Ethel Merman in a Cole Porter show!), and even writing a mystery novel that was turned into a movie for Barbara Stanwyck.

There’s your background about Gypsy and stripping. There is a line, spoken by a stripper, in Gypsy: “You’ll pardon me, but to have no talent is not enough. What you need to have is an idea that makes your strip special.” And Gypsy’s secret to success was her mind, which she put to good use. Her body was, to tell the truth, average, and her bust was certainly not her best feature (although she was statuesque). She was a top-notch conversationalist, and for a few years, she hosted a talk show on a local TV station in San Francisco. It aired every afternoon as I came home from school. I pulled up a chair in front of the miniature TV in the kitchen. I was spellbound as Gypsy interviewed all sorts of people, but especially the musical stars coming through the city with touring shows or at the big nightclubs like the Venetian Room, the Hungry I, and El Matador. I would end up cooking for a few of them.

But what really drew me in were her live cooking demonstrations. Once, before signing off for a commercial, she told the viewers to gather eggs, salt, pepper, butter, a bowl, a fork, and a medium skillet, because when she returned, she was going to make a French omelet and we should cook along. I quickly gathered the ingredients. I was just old enough (around 12) to reach the range, and I had plenty of confidence because my parents had taught their three boys how to really cook—beyond cold cereal and sandwiches. Mom said it was for selfish reasons so she could stay in bed longer. But when she went back to work when I entered junior high, my brother Greg and I took responsibility for making the family dinner. (Doug was still too young.) My brothers are great cooks, but not professionally.

Gypsy was a good teacher, and I managed to make a very respectable omelet. One of the things she emphasized is that a French omelet is delicate and fluffy, with a -ale yellow exterior, and is cooked in a pan over low heat. It is not like the American diner version, which ends up golden brown from cooking on a griddle.

I kept developing my omelet skills, which culminated when I took a job at a busy restaurant where I had to cook a couple hundred of them every weekend brunch—and lived to tell the tale. Barely. But when I worked on a cookbook with Sarabeth Levine, the Queen of New York Brunch, I picked up even more tips.

Just don’t strip while you are cooking, as those butter burns can be hell.

But Gypsy wasn’t the only stripper in my life. Many years later, my husband Patrick and I lived in a big loft apartment in Jersey City overlooking the World Trade Center. We had the top floor with a private roof garden, which sounds really cool, but it sadly gave us a front-row seat to the tragedy of 9/11. We never had contact with the owner, who was rumored to be a Russian businessman.

Our contact was our building manager, a terrific, vibrant businesswoman, realtor Leona Beldini. Other tenants who grew up in Hoboken spread the rumor that she was the former star stripper, Hope Diamond, The Jewel of Exotic Dancers. (When New York outlawed burlesque, nearby New Jersey towns happily picked up the slack.) We blew this off as hearsay, but then three things happened.

First, we were the only tenants in the building for about a year because gentrification in the Palisades neighborhood was just beginning. Two of the most popular restaurants in New Jersey are now in our local bodega and laundromat, to give you an idea of the current hip factor.

One morning, Leona called us and asked: “Did you hear any strange noises last night?”

No, it was quiet.

“Well, someone broke into the apartments below you and stole all the appliances. A neighbor says they saw a moving van in front of the building, but that’s all we know.” That was chilling. We felt lucky no one came up to our floor.

Then, a couple of years later, we were watching the news on TV when a story about fake antiques came on. We recognized the owner of our building as the protagonist: a Russian with an antiques shop in New York City. It turned out that he had a record in antique trafficking! Had he upset someone, and they decided to take payment in the form of dishwashers and washing machines? I never found out.

Lastly, Leona had a run-in with the law over allegations in a political scandal concerning her role as our town’s Deputy Mayor. There is an entire book on the subject, The Jersey Sting. I am not going to comment on that point in her life. All I can say is that our dealings with her were great and she was the best building manager I ever had. But in the publicity around her trial and (and conviction, at age 75), it came out that she really was Hope Diamond, which only gave me more respect for her.

While we never shared recipes, I’d kill for that waist!

My people will call your people.

Rick

P.S. Want more of the good stuff? Paid subscribers get access to The Recipe Box, where I keep the best recipes I’ve collected over a lifetime in food and publishing. Pull up a chair, because there’s plenty more to dish.

Uncovered with Rick Rodgers is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

To get to the point where cookbook editors called me to help with their cookbooks, I had to develop the cooking skills that made me a valuable hire. My culinary adventures and training also helped me when it came time to write my own cookbooks. When I moved to New York (to become an actor, not a food professional), I became immersed in its celebrity culture. I was going to be cooking for the movers and shakers in the arts world, so I had better know the Who’s Who.

I learned that celebrities put their pants on one leg at a time, just like civilians.

San Francisco has long been one of America’s food capitals. Because I started working in suburban restaurants at age sixteen, it was easy to get a job in the city to help pay for college (since I spent my scholarship traveling abroad, to my family’s consternation).

My job skills landed me a job at The Haven, an extremely popular health food restaurant chain of seven locations in San Francisco and Berkeley. I was just nineteen, but because of my experience, I went right into management.

I had to learn all the different jobs, from barista to sandwich maker to cashier, short order cook, and dishwasher. One of the daily duties was to peel three cases of ripe avocados—I never had a hangnail for the five years I worked there. It was a great job with hard work but flexible hours that allowed me to rehearse and perform in shows. We’ll get into my show business life in another post.

The Haven was at the forefront of the health food fad. What started as a trend eventually became a revolution and changed the way people ate then and now. In the early 70s, the books of Adelle Davis and Francis Moore Lappé were the lodestones for healthy cooking. However, often their actual recipes were more inspirational than practical. No one ever said the words, “Mommy, can we have that yummy soy loaf again for dinner?”

The vegetarian movement changed dramatically with the publication of The Vegetarian Epicure, by Anna Thomas, with dairy-heavy but utterly luscious recipes. Her Pizza Rustica became one of my go-to party recipes. There were subsequent books by Tassajara and Moosewood collectives (the latter headed by Mollie Katzen), but Thomas really set the first high bar. Vegan? It didn’t appear for quite a while. Macrobiotic was the buzzword, not the least reason that it allows some dairy and fish, and it is more pescatarian than vegan. In 1979, Greens, a vegetarian restaurant with a woman chef, Deborah Madison, set an even higher standard. With its spectacular views of the Golden Gate Bridge, it became the place to be seen, as well as dine. But I was in New York by then (although Deborah and I shared a cookbook editor later)

The Haven and restaurants like it attempted to change the icky soy-loaf image. There may have been the devil’s white sugar in the brownies (if not cannabis), but the juicer ran 24/7, as we were open overnight. There were seven Haven locations throughout the city and Berkeley serving up “healthy” food. The specialty was the avocado-and-bacon sandwich on Giusto Bakery’s famous nine-grain bread. No one seemed to care that the bacon bits were real pork and not imitation soy bits. Hey — we didn’t promise to be vegetarian. Having your sandwich on whole wheat bread was enough of a statement, a toe dipping in Lake Lappé.

POLK GULCH: THE GAY GHETTO

Another attraction of The Haven was the large flagship store on Polk and California, smack dab in the sequined heart of the très gay Polk Gulch district. Well before the gay meccas of The Castro (then an Irish Catholic enclave) or Folsom Street (where you went to get the car repaired), there was the mile-long stretch of Polk Street from City Hall north towards the bay, which was lined with Gay establishments, including some romantic, candle-lit “date restaurants” like the P.S., where hand-holding was allowed by the staff, if not the law.

With an influx of enlisted men and women after WWII, San Francisco was a wide-open town. Many thousands of military personnel had experienced same-sex relationships in the service. Decommissioned in San Francisco, most were far away from their hometown, and the sense of sexual freedom was palpable. This was the beginning of the sexual revolution and gay liberation, two “wars” in which I happily enlisted.

You didn’t grow up in the Bay Area without exposure to drugs, sex, and rock and roll. So when I moved into the city proper, I was a seasoned observer of alternative lifestyles, being a deviant-in-training myself. But as I found, there were deviants and DEVIANTS.

Therefore, when confronted with the parade of humankind that passed through The Haven’s doors, I was a seasoned observer. But there were still a few surprises in store.

THE NEW NORMAL, SAN FRANCISCO STYLE

I noticed some strange blips on the staff schedule. For example, one sandwich worker, Tom, was allowed to take his break during the busy lunch rush when his boyfriend, Bob, a three-piece-suit business executive, came in on his lunch break. The pair would mysteriously disappear into the basement, where a warren of rooms lay. One of these was a typical employee lounge, but another room was mysteriously equipped with a bed.

When I asked my colleague Wendy why Tom’s break was allowed during the rush, she just said, “Believe me, you want Tom to take a break at noon.” I still didn’t understand. As delicately as possible, Wendy explained their Daddy-Son dynamic to me. (To be more precise, this was infantilism, which was probably not covered in your college Psych textbook). You see, noon was when Bob changed Tom’s diapers in the employees’ “lounge,” which had a bed. I thought the bed was for sexual activity because there were certainly guys on the staff who were so randy that they could not be expected to go without sex (or drugs) for eight whole hours! It was a rare time when I was speechless. But I had to admit, it was hard to work the lunch sandwich station with diaper rash. Recently, after seeing the titillating BDSM antics in the recent movie, Pillion, I could only heave a bored sigh and say, “Oh, dahling, leather is soooooo Old Skool.”

The Haven was open ‘round the clock, and I occasionally had to work the overnight shift. It was hardly a graveyard, so we never used that term. After the bars closed at 2 AM, things really got interesting. Almost every night, some horned-up guys would unscrew the lightbulbs in the men’s room, and the orgy would begin. I could tell that something was up (pun intended) when suddenly the packed dining room thinned out, and only a few women were left at the tables. I eventually got an air horn and blew it in the restroom to break things up, yelling, “RAID!”

You may wonder what happened to The Haven. Well, healthy eating became so mainstream that The Haven had to share the marketplace with competitors. But in their case, it was more of a personal decision. The owners just happened to be the sons of the original owner of Mel’s Drive-In, the place made famous by the film American Graffiti. The Weiss brothers, Steven and Michael, were young businessmen with longer hair, but not hippies, and they saw that the nostalgia for a good juicy burger was stronger than the desire to eat alfalfa sprouts. So, they closed The Havens and divested the fresh money into a new chain of Mel’s, now numbering over twenty around California and the Nashville area.

I bet if I opened a Haven now, it would be a smash.

My people will call your people.

Rick

P.S. Want more of the good stuff? Paid subscribers get access to The Recipe Box, where I keep the best recipes I’ve collected over a lifetime in food and publishing. Pull up a chair, because there’s plenty more to dish.

Someone recently asked me to compile a complete list of my book projects over the years. It took some doing, as the final count is about 110 books in various roles. My first book, Best Brownies Ever, with Joan Steuer, came out in 1987. From the very start, I began collaborating with other food professionals to help them write their books, a move that did me very well. Most cookbook wannabes wanted their own turf and wouldn’t have dreamed of working behind the scenes, but I grabbed the opportunities to learn from the best people in the field.

I began with PBS cooking show stars like The Frugal Gourmet (also known as Jeff Smith, who had a well-earned reputation as a snake). I am currently working on a cookbook with an influencer track record of hundreds of thousands of copies. (I am often asked to sign nondisclosure agreements, and even when I am not, discretion is the better part of valor. I am such a gentleman!)

Each one of these books carried a different job. I have been a co-author on many of them. In a few cases, I ghostwrote the entire book, but usually the nominal author has some hand in the process. However, that amount changes from book to book. Celebrities (and I have had my share, from pop icons like Patti LaBelle and Frankie Avalon to reality TV stars from Bravo’s Housewives series like Teresa (four books) and Lisa, and the mother of them all, Kris Jenner. Sometimes I only test and write the recipes, and sometimes I write the text. I’ve consulted on how to finish the book, working with the publisher to do so.

But before I was of any value to cookbook editors, I had to gain the culinary experience that made me a worthwhile hire. Ever since high school, I had worked in restaurants, gourmet shops, and ice cream parlors, so when I wanted to move to New York to become an actor, I had a decade of food work behind me. I didn’t go to culinary school until I was in my thirties. (And no one has ever asked to see my AA in Restaurant and Hotel Management from New York City Technical College.)

When I showed up in New York at the ripe old age of 24, I had a mountain of training to draw on.

I got restaurant jobs easily, and ended up on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, which may as well have been the Upper West Mongolian Steppes to me, as I had never been east of Lake Tahoe. But because I arrived in NYC with $300 in my pocket, I looked for day work to supplement my restaurant night shifts. The lifestyle I had in mind (Studio 54 played a part in my goal set) was not going to work on one salary.

“You Pay, I Sauté”

There was an entire network of “foodie freelancers” at the time, and there still is, but to a much lesser extent. The food business was taking off in its own Golden Era, and the industry needed young, strong, cheaply paid bodies to pull it off. Assistants were needed behind the scenes to support food stylists (in print, TV commercials, and movies), caterers (kitchen prep, cooking on site, and/or cater- waiter), TV show prep kitchens, cooking schools (wash dishes and you could take the class for free), and the growing number of food writers around town (most of whom had second incomes).

Through a friend, I heard about the phalanx of food freelancers who bounced around town in a posse. I ended up working in the test kitchens of the culinary travelogue producer, Burt Wolf. I had to research and cook the recipes for that weekly show’s location, and it gave me terrific exposure to the recipes from Afghanistan to Zanzibar. From there, it was easy to find work. Eventually, I ended up in another test kitchen at Food & Wine magazine. Testing other people’s recipes turned out to be invaluable, especially when dealing with difficult, multi-layered ones from chefs who loved to show off and judged their cooking by how many ingredients, pots, and pans were required.

Soon, I began catering on my own. I had fallen in with Martha Stewart’s company as one of my gigs. She did not make it look easy, but this was the 80s, and there was plenty of work for everyone.) At one dinner party (which was almost canceled when the hostess’s dog fell out of the window, but emerged from a dumpster shaken but alive), I met the director of protocol at the French Embassy’s New York offices. Taken with my cool and my menu, she asked me if I could do a cocktail party for Yves St. Laurent in five days. When you are young, it is easier to say yes than no. So… I did the event and ended up cooking for the French government for over ten years.

My Very First Cookbooks

My gigs at the French Government put me in a position to meet French food and beverage executives. At one party, I met the marketing team from Grand Marnier, who hired me to work for them for a decade as a brand ambassador. I also met food editors at New York publications.

I tested many recipes at home, but I also went into their offices to work in the magazine kitchen, where I learned the fine points of getting a recipe down on paper. My boss was Adrienne Welch, one of the great unsung heroines of the food revolution. Adrienne had developed many recipes for Bloomingdale’s, which made the department store a player in the gourmet products world. Eventually, I did a couple of chocolate cookbooks under Chocolatier’s auspices. I’m not proud of these first efforts, but I doubt that any writer loves their early work. I met a lot of freelance food writers at Chocolatier, and most were very generous with advice.

Another food editor, Susan Wyler, was also a mentor. She was leaving Food & Wine magazine work at a new cookbook company and asked if I would like to write for her. That was 365 Ways to Cook Hamburger, which almost made me suicidal, and it is a miracle I can still enjoy a cheeseburger. Nonetheless, the 365 series was a smash, and it was a great resume booster to be involved. Next, she asked me to write The Turkey Cookbook, as in the poultry, which was just beginning to show up as a chicken alternative in markets. “Turkey” turned out to be a keyword in my life.

A few months after The Turkey Cookbook was released, I had a call from the poultry manufacturer Perdue Farms. They were starting a turkey line and asked if I would come in for an interview as the product spokesperson. Why not?

When I went to their office, they were backed up. Also in the waiting room were two colleagues, Peter Kump and Richard Sax, two of the most respected people in the business. The fact that I was already a turkey “expert” gave me a slight edge over these two pros. I got the job and went on the road with Perdue for a decade, which meant juggling travel for Grand Marnier and Perdue.

Brand ambassadors, as you can see, were cookbook authors. Now many social media posts are sponsored, but back then, these transactional cooking demonstrations took place in TV studios around the country. Soon after, I closed the catering business to focus on my books and media work. To the point where publishers began calling me directly with book ideas and requests to help other writers with their stalled projects or ideas they came up with.

One editor at William Morrow, Harriet Bell, saw a need in the market for a Thanksgiving how-to book. Who better than the guy who wrote The Turkey Cookbook and could swing a sponsorship deal with Perdue? I wrote Thanksgiving 101, and it is still in print, over twenty years later.

It only took me ten years to become an overnight success in Manhattan. And to learn how to juggle multiple projects under tight deadlines. We can talk about that another time.

So, a career was born. I thought I wanted to be a stage star, but I learned that helping the stars was the better deal because there was always work. My motto became “You Pay, I Sauté.” If you care to see my entire list of cookbooks, click here.

My people will call your people.

Rick

P.S. Want more of the good stuff? Paid subscribers get access to The Recipe Box, where I keep the best recipes I’ve collected over a lifetime in food and publishing. And you can join in the conversation at Rick’s Kitchen Table, where we’ll have a roundtable discussion about the food business. Pull up a chair, because there’s plenty more to dish.