The podcast Everything Cookbooks started as a conversation between friends and colleagues—cookbook authors Molly Stevens, Kristin Donnelly, Andrea Nguyen, and Kate Leahy, who are divided between the East and West coasts, started having video chats regularly (pre-Covid) to talk about projects, contracts, and deal news—and to connect. In 2022, they decided to start recording the calls to turn it into a resource for others. What started as a 12-episode experiment is now on its eighth season and 150 episodes strong and the team has found an avid audience, made up of cookbook writers, editors, designers, and publishers, as well as home cooks and fans.
If you’ve ever thought about writing a cookbook, go back to Season 1 and start from the beginning—between their conversations with authors, agents, designers, and book editors, as well as their own “break it down” style of trend episodes, the collection is a full-on master class on the cookbook industry and process. (Even if you don’t see a cookbook in your future, you’ll appreciate conversations with stars like Jacques Pepin, Dorie Greenspan, and more.) They also share more about each episode through their free Substack newsletter.
We sat down with co-host Kristin Donnelly, an author and cookbook collaborator who also teaches courses on how to navigate the industry, to learn more about the pod and her most recent projects.
The Local Palate: How did you first get into cookbooks?
Kristin Donnelly: For eight years, I worked as an editor at Food & Wine magazine, and we produced books there annually so I got to see a little bit of the book production process. Then I left to freelance in 2013 and while I had always wanted to write a cookbook, I never felt like I necessarily had something to write about. I had my daughter and when she was about one, I realized I wasn’t throwing the kinds of dinner parties I used to but I was doing potlucks with friends, just like, hey, come over, I’ll make something, you make something, and we’ll make it a meal. That’s when I thought, oh, this could be a really cool book. I did have an agent at that point, so I floated it to him. When we finally got [the proposal] into a shape that we thought was good, we took it around and sold it. So that was my first book, Modern Potluck, which came out in 2016.
The Local Palate: You’ve also worked on three collaborative projects including your latest, Turtle Island, with chef Sean Sherman. How did you get into collaborating?
Kristin Donnelly: I kept trying to do collaborative work before I had my own book—what often happens is that an agent or publisher will suggest to an author, hey, you should hire a writer, and will give them a list of writers to interview. So I was doing a lot of interviewing, but kept not getting jobs since I didn’t have a book yet. Once I published my cookbook, and, you know, crossed that threshold, it became easier to get those jobs. Plus, along the way, I had been testing recipes, doing a lot of project management, or just filling the gaps for others working on their own books.
The Local Palate: Tell us more about teaching and your online courses.
Kristin Donnelly: I had a lot of really good coaching from my own agent on writing proposals and I realized that that wasn’t necessarily common, because there’s this chicken-and-egg problem for a lot of authors, where you need a proposal to get an agent. So an agent’s not necessarily going to be coaching until they sign you. But then how do you get your proposal in good enough shape if you’re not totally aware of what that means? I [realized] I could probably help other authors do that. So I teach a class where we break a proposal into individual pieces and use a method to handle each piece; we start with some of the easiest pieces to get them out of the way and then we dig into the harder pieces. I’ve taught that proposal class in person but I also have a “Operation: Find an Agent” class that is available online that you can go through at any time. It’s been really gratifying to share those.
The Local Palate: That’s a good segue into the podcast, Everything Cookbooks, because you are teaching a lot of people how to not only get into cookbooks but the technicalities of working on them. Talk about the dynamic of the four hosts and what everyone brings to the table.
Kristin Donnelly: We all bring pretty different perspectives. Molly [Stevens] has published some really legendary books, including All About Braising and All About Roasting. And Andrea [Nguyen] has done so many books; she’s on this cadence of a book about every three years. And she still works without an agent, so she brings that perspective. They both have real longevity in the industry. And then Kate [Leahy]’s been collaborating for a really long time, and she has done her own book. And I come with the New York media experience. The conversations are fun because they’re not totally scripted, so sometimes we just kind of let the conversation go and see what happens. And we have a great editor, Abby Cerquitella—we couldn’t do it without Abby. And this is not everybody’s primary career, right? It’s a side hustle, but necessarily a money-making one. It’s a fun thing we do, and sometimes we’ll do events like we’ve done pitch slams with an agent or other bigger events. We do make a little money but that all pretty much goes right back into production.
The Local Palate: What have been some of your favorite episodes?
Kristin Donnelly: I loved talking to Dorie Greenspan. I’ve met her before, but she’s such a ray of sunshine and a really, really generous person. David Lebovitz, too. I loved doing that interview because he’s hilarious and just a great writer. And then Andrea and I did an interview with Emily Meggett, who wrote Gullah Geechee Home Cooking. She unfortunately passed away not too long after we interviewed her, so that was just really special to be able to do. What was interesting with that interview was the audio: When we were interviewing her live, it felt like the audio wasn’t very good, so we actually interviewed her twice. But then when we got into the files, it sounded much better than it had to us live. So we had all this really wonderful material that I feel like we edited into this great, great interview, and her story of getting published is just kind of amazing. That was just a very special episode.
The Local Palate: What have you been enjoying from this season?
Kristin Donnelly: We have Jenna Helwig coming on, who is an editor at Real Simple and she has a new newsletter on substack called Cookbookery Collective. She’s always watching trends, so that’s fun. There is also one with agent David Black and author Peter Kim, and they’re talking together about a book called Instant Ramen. We’ve talked to agents and we always talk to authors, but this one is a really good pairing. It’s great to get these insider conversations. I like that we bring in these new ways of looking at the industry and I hope that’s what listeners get from those kinds of conversations.
The Local Palate: Tell us about your latest project.
Kristin Donnelly: I worked on a book called Turtle Island with chef Sean Sherman. He’s an Indigenous chef in Minnesota, and I think we started working together on the proposal about five years ago. And the idea is to take all of North America, so including what’s now Canada, the United States, and Mexico, and look at it as if it had no colonial borders to understand the foodscape of those regions. Journalist Kate Nelson also worked on the book and she did these really amazing essays at the beginning of each chapter—more than essays, really, they are several thousand-word pieces about each region, so the land, the history, the people, and the food, of course. The recipes are a mix.There are traditional dishes and others where it’s really about what the food of that region looks like. In Sean’s work, he eschews European-centric ingredients, specifically beef, pork, chicken, dairy, and wheat; a lot of it is gluten-free, dairy-free, and plant-based. I just found it fascinating, and as somebody who is not Indigenous, it changed my entire way of looking at where we live.
The Local Palate: What can we expect from the recipes?
Kristin Donnelly: The recipes are really cool. I cannot promise that every single ingredient will be available at your local market. But there are plenty of beans, there’s squash, there’s corn, of course, but we do use a fair number of wild plants. And the meats are more like game meats, many of which are commercially available. They’re just not in every single store. That’s part of Sean’s work. When people would ask, like, can you substitute rosemary? He says no no, so he really draws the line.
The Local Palate: What was your role in the project?
Kristin Donnelly: I was often the glue, so, project manager, recipe developer with Sean. He has a really amazing database of recipes from his restaurant and from every single event he’s ever done. So I could often start with that, but those recipes are written for professional settings and the quantities are huge, the methods are very sparse. So I was doing a lot of pulling together recipes from that and from our chats. I managed the recipe testing, and then the photo shoots. And making sure every ingredient that was needed to be there got there—that was a lot. I also wrote the Pantry section, and many of the culinary sidebars, again, usually with Sean. And Kate, just her experience as an Indigenous journalist, she would take the essays and just run with them. It was actually such a great team and we worked really well together.
The Local Palate: Any other projects in the works?
Kristin Donnelly: To be honest, that book was one of the most intense projects I’ve ever worked on, so after it was handed in, I was like, I don’t know if I can do it again. I’m sure I’ll feel differently in maybe six months to a year. Plus, as my agent reminded me, most books are not like this one.
Note: Everything Cookbooks is currently running an affiliate program with The Local Palate Cookbook Club. A portion of proceeds from any memberships that come through Everything Cookbook channels goes back to the podcast.
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Erin Byers Murray
Erin Byers Murray has been digging into stories about food and wine for more than twenty years. Based in Nashville, she is the editor-in-chief of The Local Palate and has authored or co-authored half a dozen books, including deep dives into oysters and grits, as well as several cookbooks. Her work has been published in multiple publications, including Food & Wine, Wine & Spirits, the Boston Globe, and three editions of Best Food Writing.
