We often say that a good cookbook is more than just a collection of recipes, but what makes it more? One answer to that question can be found in the front matter. Welcome to Everything Cookbooks, the podcast for writers, readers, and cooks. I am Molly Stevens, and today I am very happy to be here with Andrew Nguyen, Kate Leahy, and Kristen Donnelly. Hello. Hello. Hey. Hello, everyone. Welcome to season nine of Everything Cookbooks. I never thought we could like count that high. We're almost, we're almost. Double digits? Double digits, yeah. Right. And are we beginning our fifth year? Yes. We launched in 2022? Correct. Oh my god. In the spring. Oh, I remember the spring launch. Yeah. So a huge shout out to our listeners and our community for being here, for telling other people about the show. And basically, I mean, we wouldn't be making it if no one was listening. Yeah. Today we are going to talk about cookbook front matter. But before we do, I thought we'd talk a little bit about this article that we shared around and a lot of our fellow cookbook authors have been talking about. But it's an article that came out in Taste not too long ago by either Sean or Shane. Sorry, I don't know how to pronounce your name. Shane Merchant. And it's Why the Cookbook Endures. And it's a great read. We'll put a link to it. But it starts talking about in 2011. And we all remember this. People were clutching their pearls about the death of the cookbook. because digital cookbooks were just coming out and they digitized Julia Child's mastering. Well, long story short, the cookbook endures. In a printed form. In a printed form, yes. Which is very exciting. It is, but you know, when that whole thing happened in 2011, I didn't ever think the printed form was going away because in 2010, my publisher, Tenspeed Press, came to me and they said, we've got an idea we're going to try doing enhanced cookbooks and you're our primo candidate with asian dumplings and then asian tofu coming up they said what do you want to put into an ebook and i said i want to put video yeah this was before qr codes okay and so we like on a very small budget taped a video how-tos basically the things that would replace all the illustrations and Asian dumplings. And we released that in like March of 2011. What did you release it in? Like what was the format that people could watch it in? Apple at that time had a digitized enhanced ebook version of books where it would look exactly like the print book, but it's in an electronic format. And then you could embed audio in there, video, you know, all kinds of different links. And it was just a beautiful digitized book, very different than what we have now. But you had to have a certain, you had to be on Apple, I think Kindle had a particular had it too, but it was very limited. And so we did that for two of my books. And I just, at that time, with Penguin Random House, they did a presentation and my publisher, Erin Wehner, comes back and my editor said this. And she goes, it was this you and George W. Bush that had the enhanced e-books that came out that we saw in the company's presentation. And I was like, cool. Do you remember how much they were charging for that enhanced digital edition? It was the same price as the e-book. Oh, okay. Interesting. We moved a lot of those. Really? And I had friends in 2011 who said, I don't want to have any more print books. I'm just going to buy e-books from here on in because I'm living in a smaller footprint. Yeah, I have a friend who did that too. He got rid of all his cookbooks and just got everything digitally. Yeah. And I said, good for you. Just keep buying my books. Yeah. So I never thought they were going to go away. But I mean, enhanced e-books, which is what is discussed, mentioned in terms of Julia Child's book, because Judith Jones had that retyped. And because you had to, if you did like this enhanced version, it looked exactly like the print version. It was so beautiful. But the moral of the story is it was not a great replacement of print. It was not supposed to be a replacement. It was supposed to be something that was complementary. tree. You can own both of those. I do remember going to conferences and reading articles and people were predicting that print books were gone, that there'd be a few artifacts, but that they would not stick around. And that didn't happen. And it was really interesting, the article, because I think we've talked, I know we've talked about this on the podcast, is how design is getting more and more important and elaborate and interesting, I would say. And this explains a lot that leaning into print books and making them things that people want to have. And yes, you can have an enhanced ebook that may look the same on a screen, but the article cites many people just talking about they want the books. They want the physical books. Yeah. And the thing is that When you look at e-books now, especially with cookbooks, they're ugly. Right. Absolutely ugly and difficult to navigate. Well, even for this podcast, if we're interviewing an author and we want to read their book, we often get an electronic, a digital version, and that's fine. But we prefer we have a better experience when we can flip through the book. I mean, it's hard to get a sense of what the book is supposed to feel like or how it's supposed to exist in the world when you only see it in a digital format. And I think what's interesting to go back to what was happening in 2011, that was also when self-publishing really took off. And there are people who made millions of dollars self-publishing rom-coms and thrillers and mysteries and genre fiction who aren't seeing as much success now. It's much harder to build up that kind of success. So it's interesting that I think Kindle really worked well for books that were meant to be enjoyed in black and white, where you can increase the font size. But anytime I've bought, say there's those, you know, $199, $299 digital sales for a cookbook. And I thought, you know, I don't have that book. I'm going to buy it just because I, you know, just so I have it in my library as a reference. Maybe I'll want to get the physical one. I have to say, like, it's rare I spend that much time with those digital editions. It's just not the same. It works for thrillers. it does not work for cookbooks where you're not reading it front to back in the same way. I do think it seems like as we're drawn to be online more and more for everything, like cookbooks endure is that one place people don't want to be connected, you know, whether it's they're reading the cookbook in bed or like on a couch or they're actually bringing it into their kitchen. It's an experience people want largely to remain offline, which it kind of gives me a lot of hope in a way because, you know, we didn't see that as much with magazines. Yes, magazines live on, but many of them are sort of a shell of themselves or they've gone more luxe, like they've just become this like luxury item. But it is nice to see that old school technology lives on. Yeah. And the more people want photography and illustrations and a lot of, you know, tables and stuff popped into cookbooks, that just doesn't work in the e-book format. It just is so difficult to use and to, you know, to embrace. Right. Yeah, literally. Yeah. I think about like the success of New York Times cooking. You get a recipe, you take it, you follow it in the kitchen, on your tablet, on your phone. Easy peasy, right? But the whole book experience as this, you know, creating worlds that we want to step into. I remember one of our earliest episodes, Andrew, you talked about cookbooks as these oysters that you open. And it's, you know, and I think part of how authors create these worlds is the content beyond the recipes, like everything else and whether it's tables and illustrations. But today in particular, we're going to talk about the front matter, which is kind of an unsexy term for what can be a lot of pretty interesting stuff. Yeah. One quick thing I was just thinking about, which is I feel like a cookbook that's like an album. You know, most of us probably subscribe to some kind of musical streaming service and don't buy as many albums. But I did see that vinyl sales, again, have been record breaking. So it's very hopeful to see that there's still space for people investing in. It's kind of a piece of art, right? Yeah, right. And even people who write genre fiction like romanticy, there's a lot of special editions coming out where it's sprayed edges, these beautiful books that people want to collect. And that's really boosting sales. So I do think there is this desire to collect beautiful things. It does become a problem when you have too many cookbooks, but that's a different story. Guilty. Right. E-books. I mean, my books are all available in e-books and I look at my sales reports and royalty statements and the e-books, you know, they chug along. People do buy them, but not nearly as many as the print, at least in my experience. Yeah. So I feel like the article could have been why the cookbook endures in print and electronic form. Because I think, you know, the sales for cookbooks has increased year over year, which is phenomenal for the genre. It is. Can we just talk about one point in the why cookbook endures article that just really caught my attention? I'm still not sure. I would love to see more of the numbers that it said in 2025, baking book sales were up 80% over the year prior. And that is based on Serkana BookScan, which is like, it's the only sort of tool we have to track national sales of a book. It's not perfect. It doesn't catch everything, but 80% growth. That number just kind of stalked me in my tracks, made me think, is it really true? I'm just curious what you all thought. I had the same reaction as you. I was like, what is their data based on? I had heard that number tossed around by a very influential, powerful person in publishing over lunch one day. And we were both like, baking? And he said, baking? Yeah, I want to know how that data was gathered and massaged and outputted, which the article didn't review, but I guess you could go to Surcanna and figure that out. But I think the bottom line is that people are into baking. Yeah, they're into baking. And I wonder if that like something where maybe they trust recipes in a book more than they would online especially where the recipes aren as vetted as New York Times Whereas with other types of recipes maybe people feel like they can wing it more Yes Yeah And baking books are more precise than ever Right Yes Often evergreen. Yeah. Yeah. And the front matter is extremely important. Absolutely. Yeah. Well, Christian, you bring up trust and expertise and authenticity and all these words that the front matter is, as an author, in many cases, how you establish that. So, I mean, a bibliophile will tell you the front matter refers to anything before the main content. But, I mean, obviously, there's the title page, copyright info, things like that, maybe a dedication. But I thought we'd talk more about the preface, the prologue, the foreword, the introduction. I mean, you could put whatever you want. And I guess my questions are the purpose of that material. How do you decide what goes in there? What do you think? It's interesting. Front matter to me is such an inside baseball term because I think when we had our conversation ages ago about headnotes, a lot of people who don't work in the cookbook world know what a headnote is because they've seen so many online recipes. Front matter, though, is not a term that people talk about unless you are in the business of writing and publishing cookbooks, I think. Not just cookbooks, but primarily that's what we're talking about here. And so I do think it's a very unique problem to solve for if you're a cookbook author, because I think it's one of the most essential parts of the book, but it's also the part that no one really ever talks about when they're talking about a cookbook and how much they love it. They go, I love the recipe for blah, blah, blah. But they're not saying this book really brought me into the kitchen, I could trust it right away. They're not thinking that. It's like this front matter has to sort of be invisible, but really hardworking at the same time. Totally. Exactly. The contents of the front matter are sometimes put in the back as back matter. I have done this. I have done that too. The sneaky front matter, because you're like, I don't want to bore people. Because that's another thing. You want people to get into the book. You front load it and half the book is front matter. People are like, this book's going to be too hard if I have to learn all this before I make anything. So you got to get sneaky. Well, and the lines are blurred. When I started writing cookbooks, my first book came out 22 years ago, my first solo book, all about braising. My acknowledgments were in the front because that's what we did. That was traditional. I was looking and I, you know, have someone who knows the history of cookbooks better than I, but at some moment they started to switch to the back. And I wonder, to your point, Andrew or Kate, you know, there was too much. It was too fat. We needed to put some stuff in the back. So attention span economy. Right, right, right. But then like you start looking at the front matter and you just go, yeah, taking way too much space. And I remember having a conversation with Julie Sani about her first Indian cookbook. And she said that was the first Indian cookbook where the front matter was like 100 pages. How many pages was the book? Easily 350, 400. Yeah. Her front matter was masterful, but including ingredient, the glossary of ingredients, which for my first book, which came out, Lord, 20 years ago, into the Vietnamese kitchen. I was like, the front matter is getting too front loaded. you even thought that back then yeah even though there wasn't that like um tension of like i don't want to bore people yeah no no no i was like this is a glossary of ingredients glossaries in the back please right so what would go up front before anything obviously the title all that do you like a dedication do you want an introduction is there a preface is that different than the introduction a forward is that written by somebody else what are some of the things that you've done in your books or you'd like to see in the book? It's funny with Rice's Life, we turned in a fairly long introduction and the editor actually suggested separating it into a preface and an introduction where the preface was a little more storytelling, focus on like the brand a little bit. Whereas the introduction really was more about like the rice and the food. And if I remember correctly, but sometimes it's really clear to me, like what's a preface and what's an introduction. And in that case, I feel like she was just like, this is getting long, let's split them. And there was a natural differentiation. But do you have a feeling of like, what makes something a preface versus an introduction? I feel like a preface is, it's, it's different than an introduction. It's almost like this short thing of like, what you're getting into. Yeah. In this book, right? Whereas I've rarely seen a preface in a cookbook. We may see a foreword, which is like someone else introducing you. It's sort of like the person who would bring you in at a debutante's ball to sponsor you, right? My understanding of preface is that a preface is shorter. It's more origin, where this book came from, how this book came about, why I wrote this book, maybe. But it's just kind of less hard working, whereas introduction is where we get into something, Kate, you often say, how to use this book. I mean, I think about like, my book all about roasting, the introduction was defining roasting, talking about the various techniques, it was drilling down more into the content, how the book is going to be organized, more specific. I see. Yeah, I think that it's all mushed together. Sure. Yeah. The preface and the intro. To be clear, you don't need all of these. You don't need any of them. I mean, if you had something called preface, and then you had something called introduction, my eyes would glaze over. Honestly. Yeah. I've tried to do something where I get away from saying introduction, and I just have like the title of the little essay. Yes. And I've gotten pushback on that. Because cookbooks still, I think people really want you to be clear on what is what, even though for me, I'm kind of like, it's obviously it's the introduction. Can we just call it the bread bakers or something? Question I have for all of you about forwards. One of the most common questions I get as a cookbook collaborator when I'm working with a chef or personality is, do we need a forward? And if we do need a forward, who writes it? And I always push back and say, yeah, I don't need a forward. You don't, you're special enough. people know who you are. You don't need somebody to like introduce you into this world. But sometimes people really feel like they need somebody who's an authority. Yeah, I got my hands on Ron Su's new cookbook. He's a chef. And his book's called Down South Plus East. And he's a very well established chef in the Atlanta area with a restaurant called Lazy Betty. But he worked 10 years at Le Bernardin. And so he had Eric Repair write the forward. And I was like, Ron, you don't need a forward, you know, but Repair wrote like the most lovely short essay. And it was just a joy to read what, you know, someone else who helped Ron along for 10 years when he was at Le Bernardin, you know, had to say about Ron to vet him as a legitimate person. And I remember from my first book, we had a forward by Bruce Cost. And Bruce actually was suggested that he write the forward. And I turned to my editor and my editor's like, you really don't need a forward. And I was like a brand new writer in 2006. But we had one. And I think it's because I was a little gun shy. Got it. There is like a social proof aspect to it, I think. For example, The Chef's Garden, And we had a foreword by Jose Andres, who also wrote The Loveliest Thing. And it had this great like storytelling about when they first met. And it was just very funny. Jose is really well known, you know, in the food world, but also beyond because of all of his humanitarian work. So, for example, somebody like my aunt had never heard of The Chef's Garden or Formerly Jones, but she had heard of Jose Andres. And she's like, oh, Jose Andres did the foreword, So it just brings that little extra level of social proof. I hate saying validation because, again, if you're writing the book, you are the experts. You don't necessarily need validation, but it might just help raise the profile of the book. It's an endorsement. Yes. Very much. More than a blurb. More than a blurb. Yeah. When I worked on those Best American Recipe series, which were compilations, We were compiling other people's recipes. We had a different, you know, well-known person write it forward every year. And it was, it seemed to make sense for a compilation like that. It brought another voice in. And I could see it working really well, too, in specialty diet cookbooks. I hate the word, but like special, when your book is about a specific way of eating for your health and say maybe it's a SIBO book or anti-inflammation book. Maybe there needs to be some sort of nutritional doctor, somebody who's going to put something on the book that makes it feel like, oh, these are hardworking recipes that have been vetted by a professional. Yeah. But I mean, beyond that, the introduction is sort of the preface, introducing yourself, introducing your concept, and then why that book matters. The introduction, that essay is like the hook right but sometimes it can also lead into history you want to weave that in as part of like why you're interested in this book and why you're interested in this cuisine or this method of cooking so that's all part of the front matter yeah or your personal relationship to it why you were writing a book about x y and z right and i remember with into the vietnamese kitchen i had no history about cuisine in Vietnam. It was just about my family coming to the United States initially, that essay. And they came back, they said, you take a week and you write up the history of Vietnam vis-a-vis food. Wow. Wow. Maybe they gave me two weeks. I hope so. And I said, all right, I thought you'd never ask. It's one of my favorite parts of that book to represent the cuisine with depth of knowledge and research because, you know, it's like, wow, I get to do like really geeky, quasi academic stuff. Thank you. Yeah. That brings up a question I have for all of you is when do you decide what you need besides the recipes and when do you write it? Everyone has a different way of working. But something that I think I've learned that works for me is it's never too early to start on the front matter. And it's also the last thing I finish. So if I am writing up recipes and I'm thinking, gosh, I'm talking about, you know, habanero chilies versus serrano chilies and the different heat levels, it's like, ah, this could be something that needs to go in the front matter so I can explain that and have something I'm calling back to. Or a book I'm working on that's coming out this fall, there's a lot about kimchi and buying Napa cabbage. And we always have to reference like how you buy Napa cabbage and the size it comes into. So that's like definitely something that needs to be in the front matter. so it easy to reference So I just have a document sometimes like maybe it Google Docs or Word where sometimes I just pasting in bullet points of things I need to go back to So I not starting the front matter with a blank page It usually something that very much interwoven with what I already worked on that in the recipe portion of the book. And then anytime there's an idea for the intro, it also goes on a document. So again, you're not starting from scratch. So it's not scary to write the introduction. Yeah. I actually almost always include the front matter in the proposal. Oh, sure. Really? You do? Yeah. Oh, God, I never do. I mean, you know, it changes, but I was just thinking through the proposals I've done and it often includes some version of the introduction, even if it gets rewritten. Sometimes a pantry section or like I know in the chef's garden, there was a lot of little like subheaded parts about like various kinds of agriculture and that was all in there. But yeah, I remember actually with Turtle Island because Kate Nelson did all of the writing of the essays, but I did the pantry chapter. And when I finally like went to do it, I was like, oh, yeah, this is like all in the proposal. So it's just a matter of like editing it and bringing over stuff the way you talked about, Kate. Yeah, I start the front matter upon the time that I write the well, the front matter, actually, for me, when I started the proposal level to Kristen. Because in the proposal, I always have like an overview of a project that's a seed that seeds certain elements in the introductory essay. Right. But then for like discussion of ingredients and various methods and stuff, that actually begins when recipe testing happens. so like with cooking thai which is coming out later this year in august we had to really tell people how to buy certain ingredients for thai cooking that were going to work so i have like a little one or two pager on ingredients and how to source them and what brands and all that and that started out as the front matter and i sent that to the recipe testers and then they would send feedback, and then that would bulk up the ingredient section. And for me, all of that, because I'm oftentimes dealing in cuisines and with ingredients that people are not so familiar with, and they may have a hard time getting them, that front matter is really, really important. Because for me, it is where, in this case, Chef Pim Teshamamivit and I were able to establish what I oftentimes jokingly call the rules of engagement. Yes. That's a great title. It is. Yeah. I think it'll be in my next book. I love that. Yeah. It's like, this is what the ingredients that you need. Here are substitutes. Here's what it's called in English Thai Romanization, Thai script. This is maybe some Vietnamese, you know, because we're dealing with all of that. And then also how to read our recipes, how to decipher, decode them. Right. How to use this book. How to use that book, yeah. Two things from what you're saying, Andrea. One, audience, again, who is this book for? Are they familiar with this cuisine, this style, this technique, these ingredients? And if not, where and how are you going to tell them about it, right? And then I love what you said about having your recipe testers look at your front mat or your pantry, because if you're writing from a place of knowledge, you know these things, it's going to be harder for you to see where, you know, there's things that aren't explained enough. Exactly. I mean, you're dealing a vacuum, you know, we were like telling them to go out and buy Mexican chilies to substitute for Thai chilies. They went out and they found Thai chilies. And I was like, what? And sometimes they use the wrong ones, like the really hot ones when they shouldn't have. But no one burned up. But I mean, it's just like, it's a learning process. And you're kind of like, I figure that during recipe testing and during writing, that's when I get to stress test that information. And for the books that I put together, that's a really important section. But Lord, I would love to get to a point one day when I didn't have much of a front matter in terms of a glossary of ingredients or discussion, you know? Yeah. So we spoke with Alison Roman. We'll come out in a couple of weeks. her book that just came out, Something from Nothing, There's No Pantry Section. She writes an introduction about how this book is a moment in time and where she is and what to expect. Just a nice couple-page introduction about what the book is and then goes right into the recipes. And we asked her about that. And she says, my readers know what my pantry is. I don't need you to tell you to go get olive oil, salt, cumin. She'd be repeating herself. She knows her audience. I thought it was a very interesting choice and makes sense. Yeah. So Andrea, this is the goal, the one page. Oh my God. How many working years do I have left in my work life? Oh my gosh. I hope I get there. Yeah. And it is true when you're working in a cuisine, that is not the dominant culture. It does require so much more explanation. Working on a Korean book and not being Korean and going to H Mart and trying to figure out like these are the roadblocks that are keeping me from getting the right ingredient at the right time. These are things I need to put in the book so other people will be able to find it. There will be Korean Americans who don't need that help. There'll be other people who do need the help. So it's that balance of not talking down to people, but also giving them the information they need. It's tricky to get, but you kind of have to have that information in the front matter or somewhere that's easy to reference. And that's something that maybe that's when the front matter can shrink in size and you have a reference like the glossary in the back or someplace where people can find the information. Because that's something I always worry about. It's like you get too long in the introduction and then how to use this book. And then this is all the techniques you need. And by the end, like people, they're just like, I'm out, you know. Right, right, right. I just want to cook something. Yeah, right. Yeah, I'm going to go to the New York Times cooking app. You know, I don't need all this front matter. How about basic techniques, building block recipes? I know sometimes, Andrea, you have a chapter of those. Yeah. Are you cross-referencing those or telling people the page number? Always. You always want, yeah, because you always want to cross-reference within the front matter, even in your introduction. Because the goal there, the strategy is to slide some very exciting sounding recipes in there so that people understand that you're writing about something that's of worth to them, of value that is contained in the book. Marketing in the introduction. Exact, man. You know, you're just always like marketing communication for me. Dangling that carrot. Exactly. But Molly, to your point about basic cooking techniques and stuff, in Cooking Thai, we moved them around the book because certain things, it was just like, if we put them all in the front, people aren't going to see it. And so we did some things that are fundamentally wrong. We went rogue. And we just placed them close to the recipes. It was like, why do they need to know that in the front matter? They're just going to skip it. Then they get to the recipe and then they won't go back to the front matter because they don't remember it. But if it's close enough where they're paging through a book, which is why a print book really still matters, they see it. Right. Yeah. Oh, actually, I'm thinking about it was Ozaz Soko's book, Chop Chop, about Nigerian food. And instead of having this large pantry section, she did sort of a couple pages at the beginning of each chapter where some of the ingredients might be more used in that chapter compared to others, even if they might be used throughout the book. But like this chapter, these are going to be your most important ingredients. And it was it was an innovative way to do it just to break it up both visually because she did take these beautiful flat lays of ingredients, but also, you know, just so you don't have that large chunk to weigh. Yeah, and what we spoke to her about it was exactly that. It was because the front matter had gotten just too unwieldy, and you're doing the opposite of getting people excited. They're like, whoa, this is too much. So there are creative ways, and even though we call it front matter, it doesn't have to be in the front. Maps, I often think, I don't know, menu planning, but meal guides, helping people figure out how to put together a meal from this book, things like that. But I've seen that in the back now. Yeah. Yeah, more in the back, I think. Yeah. When I did All About Roasting, a number of the recipes had sauces, and whether it be a pesto or vinaigrette, there was any range of them to go on various roasted meats and fish and vegetables. My editor suggested sort of 11th Hour that I create almost a chart of the sauces and different ways they could be used. That's fun. It was fun. It was a nice idea. I don't know if anybody uses it, but that you could take the sauce that was like a chimchurri with a steak and you could put it on the roasted cauliflower, which of course, so it was just a kind of a mix and match situation, which I think can be super helpful with some cookbooks where you, there are recipes that would go together from different parts of the book and a place that, and that could be in the front or the back. Molly, you were like totally like ahead of the game, man, because you know what? You know what? In 2026, that's called now, baby. A matrix. Right? I mean, you see those charts and you're like, I can be overwhelmed by those things. I really, you know. Yeah. And I think in hindsight, I love the idea of it. I think it could have been better executed had I thought about it sooner. Yeah. And worked it in in some way. And I get a little cross-eyed around too many cross-references. Oh, yeah. Because they busy the page. And so it's something I'm not always sure how much to cross-reference. But you want to be able to find the information. Right. Yeah. I think a lot of this comes down to design and design choices. and working with a graphic designer who really is trying to accentuate and has the reader in their head when they're designing the book. Because there's like two things, you don't want things to look boring, and you don't want them to be too like dense or hard to figure out. And that's a kind of a delicate line. And I think the front matter is sometimes where the design is made or broken. Because if you do have a lot of useful information in the front matter, but it's designed in a very, very sleepy, stayed way, no one's going to look at it. And so then you can have these great recipes, but people are like, I don't understand that thing. Oh, there's a cross-reference like, ah, but that page, it was just like text and was so boring. So I think having a visually stimulating, for lack of a better way to talk about it, Front Matter really does help people pay attention to the stuff you want them to pay attention to. Or a way to find, like I think of Suzanne Goins' Sunday suppers. Favorite. love this book but I don't go to it that often and when I do sometimes I forget that the recipe yields are all the same and so they not listed in the recipes because every menu serves I believe it six if I haven used the book in a while and I go back to it and I like oh I know the number and I know it four or six and I know it's somewhere. And of course I could figure it out, but I can't find it. And she says it somewhere in the front matter, but I can't find it. Yeah. That's a really good point where sometimes you just, it's okay to be repetitive. Why not just put the yield? But maybe they didn't want to use this space you guys you know it all depends on the trim size yeah yeah but i mean you can have a yield serve six that's pretty easy i know i know no i don't want to pick on that book because i love that book but i also think you the design and people we see a lot of creative titles amy thielen a few notes before we begin just a very gentle inviting and then i think her other one is um what food bunker basics yeah which is very on voice for her too um david tannis a few good ingredients you know so like you can have a little fun although maybe not too much right you still need the introduction molly you like an opinionated pantry i think is yes that's great quite good yeah i borrowed it but i can't remember the source or where i got the inspiration so it's Yours now. Yeah. I think I remember Diana Kennedy in her last book. She wanted to have something like her bet noir or her pet peeves. And her editor wouldn't let her do it. Do you remember like in the French cookbooks of the days of like the battery of equipment? Yeah. You see that too. But that was like you need a saucepan. Give me a break. Yeah, I know. I know. But then once they would get to like a saucier, you know, you're like, what is that? Yeah. Here's something, though, I always think of. And I know, Andrea, in your books, a lot of times you're very clear in the front matter of saying, you know, a medium skillet is 10 inches. A large skillet is 12 inches. That kind of stuff. I'm just always thinking of like somebody's cousin who's cooking from a book. They grab whatever skillet. For them, it's probably large because they only have one and it might only be eight inches. Because, you know, so at least like I think something that the front matter or someplace in the book can do, it's kind of like if the recipe doesn't work, it might be because something is fundamentally fine with the recipe, but somebody just didn't follow the instructions. They used the wrong size pan. It's almost like it's your insurance. It's like, this is my insurance. I told you how to do it the right way. It's not my fault you used an eight inch skillet when it couldn't all fit in there, you know. That is a good thought, though. You think of like you would see in cookbooks, eggs are always large. Butter is always unsalted. I feel like at this point, you just put the large egg in every recipe. Yeah, you do, because you don't want to misguide people. But I do, you know, again, the rules of engagement. You know, and I did those charts for equipment because I included the equipment sizes in the instructions. And I had this one copy editor who I didn't like, but I did like him for this. He said, get rid of all that. Yeah. Because it was just like making the... Spogging it down. Yeah. Yeah. And I said, fine. Beautiful. I'm taking it all out and go through the manuscript and take it all out. But it is, you know, it tells people this is what's standard. But if you happen to use a larger skillet, that's not a problem. You're just going to have to adjust the heat. And it's just like about telling people how to be a good cook and a good recipe user. I had the opposite happen where I had to go back and add all the pan sizes. For braising or roasting or braising? Braising all the skillet sizes. And I think it's in line with that book because that book has a very high level of specificity. But it bogs down the page. I don't know if I were going to do it again because, like you say, somebody's small is somebody's medium. But a large egg, man. There was a time when the publisher was like, an egg's always large. And I'm like, I don't know. Yeah. Yeah, and then nowadays, like with the price of eggs, sometimes like the mediums are a lot less expensive and you can like do some math, you know, if you got a scale, you can get up to large. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Something that I struggle with when I think about front matter and how it relates to the recipes. Can someone cook a recipe from the book without reading the front matter? Ideally, yes. But will their experience be enhanced if they do read and comprehend the front matter? Yes. So that's the tricky part for me because I just always want to give more information. And if you pack it all in the recipe, the recipe just becomes bloated and not readable. And so... But it depends, right? Yeah, of course. So in like Alison Roman's book, they're using pretty mainstream ingredients that are relatively well known. And in my writing, the only time that I got to do that was with Vietnamese food any day, because all of the ingredients were sourced from the grocery store, like an American supermarket, chain supermarket. You know, we're talking Kroger's here. And so I kept the front matter with the ingredient discussion very, very short. And it was such a joy. But I also thought about like the trim size of the book, you know, the trim size of the book along with the price of the book really was is going to constrain you in terms of what you can put in the front matter and the whole vibe you know you're trying to like say it's easy going yeah so you want to think about that and work with your designer to communicate all of that and the front matter in that book at first I was like it's so spare and I was talking to my designer and I was like yeah it just looks like it's kind of lacking but it all worked because the point was to just say, you can make Vietnamese food anytime you want. So it really ends up being about your end goal. And I think that's what you're saying really nicely there, Andrea, is the front matter is really the promise of the book. What are you promising people? What are you inviting them to do? What challenges are you inviting them to take on? And that's what you need to think about. Like, who's your audience? And how do you get them into this book in the gentlest or the most fun or the stimulating way possible. Do you think front matter is becoming, is there less emphasis on it as recipes are becoming voicier and more personalized? It used to be that all the voice was up front and the recipes were rather standardized. And now you can do more within the recipe, perhaps? One thing I've noticed is it's maybe not because of the voicing nature of the recipes, but I just think front matter is getting shorter because of attention spans. And in the past, when I've co-written a project with an introduction that talks about, say, the author's backstory, how they got to this point in their career, what they love to cook or bake, I had a little bit more of a long leash to go all out with those stories. And lately, it's more kind of like to Kristen's point about chopping up, you know, making a preface in an introduction. It's like, we just want people to get into the story faster. So if you can put some sort of like little story, maybe sneak it into a sidebar later in the book, don't bog down the front matter with it. So I think introductions are getting shorter just because more of a tension span than it is about having voice up front and not as much voice in the back. Yeah, most definitely. If you can like move information about something to where it's relevant, you know, and I always think like the stuff that goes in the front matter it's stuff that's used over and over and over yes that's a great way to think about it yeah and if you've just got like one ingredient one spice that's used once maybe twice or even three times you know in a book that's like 300 pages long move that sidebar it making a note i have i love recipe and notes a burst a burst i think of There was Korsha Wilson talking to us about writing Ghana to the world. And the chef's story was in the front matter. His entire story was in the front matter. And they chopped it up and put a section as the introduction to each chapter. And it's just the way people read now. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You want to make the front matter grab the reader and cook's attention. So like in Cooking Thai, what I suggested and we ended up doing was like these two page photography spreads. And then we dropped the copy onto those pages. So it looked more like a magazine spread. Cool. So then it's like you cannot pass it up. I mean, this is the thing when you're writing during the front matter. It's like this is like the most important information in the book in many ways. Right. And you don't want it to be overlooked. Exactly. And so often in the past, it got a bad rap because it was boring because people were going through all the equipment you needed. And they're like, I like to use half sheet pans, which are 12 by 18, 13 by 18 inches. A tablespoon is nice to have. It's like, no kidding. We don't need that information. Right, exactly. But then I remember like in Eric Kim's first book, he said something about front matter or things just being so boring. And I was like, he's all right. How do I make it exciting? How do I strategically do that in a book so that people will get it and they learn something? It can be a fun challenge. Just like, don't be boring. I love it. Yeah. Yeah. Well, thank you for talking about one of my favorite parts of writing cookbooks. I love Don't Matter. Thank you for listening. Thank you all for speaking with me today. Thank you, Molly. Thank you. To season nine. Cheers. Cheers. Before we sign off, I want to tell you about Food Friends, Home Cooking Made Easy, a podcast for anyone who enjoys shows about cooking and baking. The hosts, Sonia and Carrie, are former professional chefs and longtime friends, and their show delivers both inspiration and lots of practical kitchen tips. And what I really love is they often talk about their favorite cookbooks, new and old, and the recipes that they've tried from them. New episodes come out twice a week, and I like to listen when I'm on my way to the market or looking for fresh kitchen inspiration. It's kind of like hanging out and chatting with a couple of friends who love to cook. Find Food Friends wherever you get your audio, and you can get more information at their sub stack, foodfriendspodcast.substack.com. Thank you for listening to Everything Cookbooks. For more about each episode, subscribe to our newsletter at everythingcookbooks.substack.com. Here are some other ways to support the show. You can go to everythingcookbooks.com and check out our totes, t-shirts, sweatshirts, or other merch, or just buy us a round of coffee. You can also leave us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your audio. Thank you as always to our editor, Abyser Kotele. 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