Is a cookbook without photos so retro it's radical?
Good food writing can be savoured as much as the food
Back in January, I got a phone call from Paul Flynn, the beloved chef at the Tannery in Waterford and the Irish Times food writer from 2019 to 2022. He was ringing because he said it seemed like a shame not to do something with all those recipes.
Would I be interested in publishing a little book of his?
I had no hesitation in immediately saying no, I would not be interested in publishing a little book.
But I would be interested in publishing a big book.
I guess you can take the girl out of America but you can’t take the America out of the girl. Go big or go home, baby!
I didn’t realise quite how big the book would end up being. Judging from all my biggest cookbooks that I pulled off my shelves and an initial sample word count, I estimated it would be around 500 pages.
We briefly talked about publishing only a selection of the recipes, like a greatest hits compilation, or chopping up all the weekly columns and putting them back together into chapters like Pasta or Soups & Stews.
But how could we choose just 100 recipes and risk leaving out the very one that was someone’s favourite?1
And if we pulled all the recipes apart, we’d be divorcing them from the stories and ripping the heart out of the book.
So it was a case of all or nothing – all 152 articles and over 450 recipes.
In the end, it wound up being 728 pages. The table of contents alone is 20 pages!
But not only that – printing every article and every recipe also meant we couldn’t include any images or photos. Not a single one.
In modern-day cookbook publishing, would that be a death knell for the book?
This lack of photos was the only sticking point in the whole project. The last book I could think of that was published without photos was How to Eat by Nigella Lawson in 1998.
A call-out on Twitter for other examples threw up a few more – Completely Perfect by Felicity Cloake, Summer’s Lease and First Catch by Thom Eagle, Cook This Now by Melissa Clark.
I had to work hard to convince Paul that this was the right call. ‘It will be timeless and classic, like Elizabeth David or Jane Grigson,’ I said. ‘It will be so retro, it will be cool!’
Because that’s the thing about this book – it’s a cookbook, but its real heart is the stories. Paul has the rare gift of not only being an accomplished chef, but also an effortlessly talented writer, one whose warm, witty voice makes you feel like you’ve got a friend cooking with you in the kitchen.
From the start, I wanted Butter Boy to be the kind of book you could just as happily curl up on the couch with or read in bed as you could cook from in the kitchen, like Nigel Slater’s Kitchen Diaries books or Notes from a Small Kitchen Island by Debora Robertson (check out her Substack).
Our designer, Jane Matthews, even designed the book with that in mind. It’s squat and fat, just like a big block of butter, and the binding we used means it falls open flat on the countertop or in your hand.
In her review of Butter Boy, Georgina Campbell says:
Readers of the Insta generation may possibly find [the lack of photos] strange, but for the rest of us it’s a nice reminder of the days when cookery books had little more than a few line drawings or a little cluster of photos in the section breaks and reading them stimulated the imagination as much as the appetite.
The first cookbook I ever worked on, back in 2004 – Rachel Allen’s first book, Rachel’s Favourite Food – is one of those books that Georgina Campbell mentioned, with the colour photos all set together in a separate section.
Around that same time, though, advances in printing technology meant full-colour printing became more affordable, ushering in the age of the glossy cookbook as we now know it, where more often than not, every recipe gets its own photo. In fact, it’s an open secret that any recipe without a photo nowadays doesn’t get made.
And yet, cooks and readers up till the early 2000s were able to get dinner on the table without a photo. The first cookbook I ever bought – The New Vegetarian Epicure by Anna Thomas, published in 1996 – had no photos, and even as a complete beginner in the kitchen, I could follow along just fine.
I would argue that the lack of beautiful, highly styled photos was (and is) liberating. Whose heart hasn’t sunk a little when the food you put on the table bears no resemblance to the aspirational image in the book? (If you want to make yourself feel better/laugh so hard you’ll cry, go look up ‘Pinterest fails’ online.)
Sohla El-Waylly writes about a similar experience of learning how to cook without the pitfall of perfect photos:
You can instantly find thousands of recipes for a roast chicken online, but the internet is also filled with curated photos and videos of perfectly plated dishes shot during golden hour. It’s easy to get discouraged when there’s so much to compare yourself with. When I started cooking, I had only a couple of cookbooks, most without photos: I didn’t know if the dishes I made were “correct,” which meant I could enjoy the stellar accomplishment of making myself a meal. If you end up with anything edible, that’s a win.
Having said all this, we have a get-out-of-jail-free card in our back pocket. Every recipe was photographed by Harry Weir when it originally ran in the Irish Times, so if a nervous cook wants the reassurance of a photo, all they have to do is look it up on the Irish Times website.
Butter Boy has been out in the world for only a few weeks, so it remains to be seen if the lack of photos will be a deal-breaker for cookbook buyers.
But I still think my gut feeling that a cookbook without photos – one that puts the food writing itself front and centre, whose words are meant to be savoured just as much as the food – is so retro in the post-literate TikTok age, it’s radical.
Five favourite quotes from Butter Boy
‘One of the reasons I love Ireland is our penchant for giving people nicknames. My friend Crocker (remember Kojak?) is a repository of them. He drops juicy monikers without even noticing. His profession as a postman conveniently exposes him to every nickname in the area. There was a fella playing for a local GAA club years ago christened Soup by his teammates as he was deemed to be a thick country vegetable. I laughed quite a lot at that one. The poor fella.’ – 21 November 2020
‘I’d crawl over a mountain of nouveau riche club sandwiches to get to a nice toastie.’ – 26 September 2020
‘I can’t resist a good cookbook. I tend to go for the cheffy, nerdy ones as opposed to the glitzy lifestyle ones. I’m never going to have abs like Joe Wicks anyhow. I’d only end up flicking through it while double-jobbing crisps and chocolate in my jim-jams.’ – 16 January 2021
‘Eggs are our No. 1 purchase at home by far. Wait, sorry, that’s a lie. Eggs are our No. 1 food purchase. I’m not really privy to the others. All I know is that the DPD man will probably be having Christmas dinner with us this year as the ladies in our house have got to know him so well. They treat me like a mushroom and I’m happier that way. There’s less fluctuation of my blood pressure. Sometimes I think if we had more children, we’d have to call them Zara and Asos and the DPD man would be their godfather.’ – 10 April 2021
‘You can keep your baby vegetables and microleaves. Cabbage just makes me happy.’ – 15 October 2022
As for our initial worry about leaving out someone’s favourite recipe if we only included a selection of recipes instead of all of them? My favourite moment at the book launch last week was when a long-time fan, Caitríona, arrived with her tattered, stained printout of her family’s favourite recipe. ‘Pasta’ Paul Flynn signed it now that she can retire that printout and get the recipe on page 55 of the book.
Butter Boy is out now in all good bookshops here in Ireland or you can buy a copy at ninebeanrowsbooks.com – we ship worldwide.
Thank you, Mark! You and Paul are similar in that he is not only a talented chef but also an excellent writer, while you are not only an excellent writer but also a wonderful photographer. You both make doing two things masterfully look so easy when I know it's anything but.
It's such a great read as well as a fantastic cookbook