The Queen of the Cookbook

by Sarah Whitman-Salkin Info

Sarah Whitman-Salkin is an editor at Cookstr.com. She lives in New York City.

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Richard Drew / AP Photo Barbara Kafka talks to Hungry Beast’s Sarah Whitman-Salkin about breaking into food writing, her partnership with James Beard, and her new book, The Intolerant Gourmet.

In veteran food author Barbara Kafka’s apartment, cookbooks are stacked in the kitchen. They fill the shelves of the living room, and the basement is reminiscent of library stacks: rows and rows of cookbooks, stretching to all corners of the room. “I don’t believe in reinventing the wheel,” she says. “There are cultures that are not mine. And in order to learn about them, I read.”

The statement is perhaps a little too modest: For the last 30 years Kafka has been, if not reinventing the wheel, at least drastically redesigning it. For the most part she’s tackled single subjects—soup, vegetables, roasting, microwave cooking—and in the process has changed the way we think about the way we cook. The proof? She has yet to write a cookbook that hasn’t been an award winner or bestseller, and in 2007 she received the coveted James Beard Foundation lifetime achievement award. Her next cookbook is called The Intolerant Gourmet—a reflection of both her dietary choices made necessary by celiac disease and her strong personality.

“When I sell a book, which is what I do, not only does it have to work because people are putting out money for ingredients and they’re putting out their time, but they’re buying my palate.”

Hungry Beast caught up with Barbara to talk about her past, her friendship with James Beard, garbanzo flour, and what makes a great recipe.

How did you get into cookbooks?

Well, I didn’t start out in cookbooks, nor was it ever my intention. I needed a job, so I went to work for Farrar Straus right out of college, and then I got married and moved to St. Louis, where my husband was in medical school. I started taking a doctorate—I wanted to be a poet—but it was the worst doctoral program I’d been near in my life. So I got a job copy editing medical journals—nothing to do with anything I wanted to do. But it was wonderful! I was a copy editor, which is work women were allowed to do. It was wonderful training for being a cookbook person, because you have to be very exact or somebody’s going to die! Then we came back to New York and I got a job working at Mademoiselle.

As a copy editor?

Yes, and Leo Lerman was a contributing editor. One day he called me into his office and said, “Sit down, darling.” It was the era of “dear” and “darling” and hats and white gloves. And so I sat down and he said to me, “You want to write, don’t you?” And I said, “Yes, yes, yes!” “All right, I’ll send you to see Talmey at Vogue, she’s the features editor at Vogue.” I said, “OK, when do I go?” He said, “Slow down. What are you going to tell her you write about?” “Mr. Lerman, I’ll write about whatever she wants me to write about, that’s what I do.” “No dear, that’s not what you do. You have to tell her you write about something. Write about cooking, you cook divinely.” I thought I wanted to write about art. It was the most exciting thing happening in New York. “No, dear,” he said. “You are not going to write about art.” “Why, Mr. Lerman?” “Because, darling,” he said, “she writes about art for Vogue!

So I had an appointment with Ms. Talmey, who said, “So tell me, dear, if I let you”—operative word—“let you write for Vogue, what would you write about?” “I would write about food, Ms. Talmey.” I gave her two ideas and she said, “I’ll see them both.” I got up to go, and the voice behind me said, “I find it often helps to start with a quotation.” I had never written about food, but I sure as shit know how to do research! I went to Fourth Avenue and I bought books of quotations. And I read quotations and about two months later I get a call that said, “My dear, this is Ms. Talmey, when am I going to get those articles I commissioned?” There’s nothing that concentrates the mind so much as a deadline. I went in, I wrote two articles, I submitted them, and she printed them without changing a word. I was in business!

And then I was called by Harper’s Bazaar. Naïve, dumb little me: I didn’t know you couldn’t write for Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar at the same time. They said, “Oh, we’d love to have you write for us.” Gee, I’m in demand! That was the end. I didn’t write again for Vogue for 20 years.

What did you do in the meantime?

I quit to have children, and then I began doing freelance stuff. This guy, Burt Wolf, was doing a book called The Cooks’ Catalogue, along with Milton Glaser and James Beard. I asked for $500 a week and he said yes.