November is to culinary works what September is to novels: the month of an orgy of books, here on the art of simmering meats with the famous Ferrandi school, there of juggling with the flavors of the world like Yotam Ottolenghi, of succeeding your sugar detox with Jessie Inchauspé or become an airfryer ace, the new guru toy for cooking everything, everything, everything.
In this environment, it is not the Goncourt that we hope for but the Mazille prize, named after a famous culinary author of the 19th century. A prize which conveniently propels its winner to the head of the gondola for the holidays and which will be revealed this weekend during the sector’s flagship event, the Périgueux gourmet book festival.
Because if we eat a lot during the holidays, we also offer a lot of gastronomy books…
Yes, and more generally, the boom in the sector dates back around twenty years. If it crumbles a little, it remains impressive. In 2023, according to the independent NilsenIQ & GFK institute, 5,150,000 have been sold compared to just over 7 million in 2014 and 6.9 million in 2021… remember, with confinement, we were all crazy stoves. Despite the advent of blogs and social networks, paper resists. Until indigestion? This is what Déborah Dupont-Daguet, founder of the famous Librairie gourmande in Paris, thinks: “Publishers produce too many books, with too few human and material resources. We see more and more misshapes, typos…; We don’t have time to look at the books, to recommend them to customers,” she laments.
What types of books do we buy…
Mainly practical books. “However, the recipe book drives sales if it is carried by a legitimate author, if it follows the trend and even more if it comes from a TV star”, underlines Clelia Ozier-Lafontaine, director at Flammarion, who insists on the transmission value of these paper objects.
We brood over our Ginette Mathiot all the more because we inherited it from our grandmother, stained with indelible shards of sauce, little clumps of flour and butter that make it look like a Jackson Pollock painting.
But Jérôme, publishers have neither the means nor the desire to participate in this current race for the shallot. This is the case of Sabine Bucquet, founder of éditions de l’Épure, of her lovely collection on products and the 10 ways to prepare them. “Despite the frightening overproduction, I will not move one iota,” she tells us. This year, she published “Soviet Cuisine”, a popular work from 1939, introduced by Joseph Stalin and which reveals the horrors of a regime even in its domesticity.
And what book did you get the recipe from?
In “Our plates have power”, a work published by Editions Sud Ouest – small self-promo! – produced by Laurence Dessimoulie, very committed to the defense of peasant seeds and wild cuisine. Here is its zero waste soup with carrot tops. For 2 bowls, slice and brown an onion with a little olive oil and a pinch of powdered coriander. Add and sweat two sliced top carrots with their chopped leaves. Pour in 400 ml of water, bring to a boil for 15 minutes. Add salt and leave to infuse for 20 minutes covered. When blending the soup, add a tablespoon of olive oil, a new pinch of coriander, two turns of the pepper mill. Finally switch to Chinese to guarantee a wireless soup.
