What is a Legacy?

A consideration of long-term culinary impact in two listicles

Julia Child’s Joy of Cooking copies, on display at the Smithsonian.

As I’ve been preparing to teach the next iteration of my “Writing Cookbooks” class for Boston University (revitalizing my syllabus from Spring 2023), I’ve been thinking a lot about how a work finds its audience, and, eventually, its impact. Do authors know if what they’re working on will make a difference? How soon after publication do they know if their ideas have landed? And is it possible to locate an author, book, or recipe’s legacy before it’s aged at least 20 years? In the last two weeks, two articles seemed to say yes to that question, at least when the question was posed to a renowned roundup of culinary authorities. First, T: The New York Times Style Magazine published its list of the 25 most influential cookbooks of the past century, a collaborative effort developed by editors, bookstore owners, chefs, and home cooks. 5 days later, Slate published its roundup of the “25 Most Important Recipes of the Past 100 Years,” edited by Dan Kois and J. Bryan Lowder, an attempt to distill the most widely circulated dishes in American society into a tidy list. It’s no surprise that we see these lists dropping within two weeks of Thanksgiving, the holiday in which almost every household feigns an interest in cooking, yet when few are permitted to actually shake up the menu. When friends and family sent me ICYMI links to both articles, it seemed beyond necessary to weigh in.

In general, I like “best of” cookbook roundups, and I especially appreciate them as “year-in-review” documents, ones that offer historians and critics a snapshot of what was breaking out from year to year. But these two lists offer vastly different arguments and criteria for determining culinary impact, and both require a closer look. While both lists take the longue durée approach, thinking about how books and recipes changed the trajectory of American food culture, the Times list highlights titles that changed the cookbook form, rather than the broader home cooking public. While countless food writers (including myself) cite Mastering the Art of French Cooking as one of the most impactful cookbooks of the 20th century, we should ask: how many home cooks actually cook from it today? (Perhaps a good boeuf bourguignon on an annual basis, but I doubt anyone is regularly flipping to the section on aspics in search of a great weeknight dinner.) While Julia Child offered an unprecedented degree of precision and clarity in her recipes, she didn’t invent coq au vin or vichysoisse, but instead pioneered a way of communicating with American readers about these dishes. And while Julia’s cookbook was enormously popular among home cooks of the 1960s, it wasn’t until 2009 that the book actually hit the New York Times bestseller list. Securing a place in the culinary zeitgeist is a retrospective game, and commercial success in the long or short term wasn’t necessarily a factor in making this latest Times roundup. As the editors at the Times note, bestselling authors such as Ina Garten and Martha Stewart didn’t make the cut., and neither did titles from breakout online writers like Caroline Chambers and Tieghan Gerard (even though they’ve ostensibly found millions more readers than Julia Child ever has.) For the Times list, an “influential” cookbook offers narrative, rather than culinary, innovation, telling new and unexpected stories in a well-honed format. So it’s not surprising that the newest release on the Times’ list is Toni Tipton-Martin’s exceptional 2019 book, Jubilee, a deeply researched tribute to the vast knowledge of Black professional cooks, in restaurants and in the home kitchen. Like the other authors featured on this list, Tipton-Martin’s priority was not to offer catchy recipes or to “solve” the problem home cooking—it was to frame recipes and cookbooks as repositories of knowledge and storytelling, through which the home cook could cook and think differently. While the cookbooks roundup appears in T, it really belongs in the Book Review: a true consideration of cookbook as bonafide literature, not as commercial product. (I doubt Dwight Garner would object.)

For the recipe listicle, the criteria changes once again, but not necessarily to prioritize originality or novelty: instead, recipes that went viral said plenty, signifying what Kois and Lowder call “a clear shift in some aspect of home cooking for some significant number of Americans,” even as “American cooking” was “rightly and necessarily a sprawling thing.” American appetites are intensely shaped by regionality, by ethnicity, by local economic and political factors, by the proximity or distance between transmission sites of culinary knowledge. So when a book, or a recipe, breaks out across multiple zones of American eating and cooking, its ubiquity becomes the barometer for its impact. I agree with most of Kois and Lowder’s picks in terms of the dishes (and recipes) that became iconic—from iconic Americana (the Caesar Salad, “no longer history but a legend”, and the Toll-House Cookie, the first popular cookie to incorporate whole pieces of candy into the batter) to the expressive and eloquent (the distillation of the counterculture food movement in Anna Thomas’ zucchini quiche, or the handmade biscuits in Edna Lewis’s Taste of Country Cooking). An emphasis on the popular gives space to Ina Garten’s Provencal Potato Salad, a recipe that showcases Garten as “the figure who made the affluent aesthetic of elegance and ease around cooking and hosting feel accessible to the masses.” (They give this title to Ina over Martha, and I think rightly so—Martha wants you to be impressed by her skill, Ina wants you to take her guidance so you can discover your skills.) In many ways, this list is Kois and Lowder’s tribute to “the masses” as the true prognosticators of taste, as evidenced by their last pick, that of Logan Moffitt’s TikTok recipe, “Best way to eat an entire cucumber.” Whether or not it’s the greatest recipe doesn’t really matter, for as Kois and Lowder write, an important recipe is something else: “a pretty good idea, in the hands of a really great promoter” that “grows into a phenomenon the rest of us can’t ignore.”

Even with their limitations, I love both these lists, and only wish I’d been called to contribute to them. They’re clearly informed by people who love cookbooks, who value the distillation of cooking for textual transmission, whose curiosity is piqued whenever a new trend or ingredient becomes impossible to ignore. But I also like that, though the creators of these books and recipes are clearly talented, they’re only as good as the audiences that engage with them. The idiosyncrasies embedded in American food culture are what make it such a joy to study, that both The Joy of Cooking and Diet for a Small Planet have shaped our thinking about food without canceling each other out. As regressive as American culture can sometimes seem, these lists testify to home cooks’ constant forward momentum, as they adopt restaurant cookbooks and international cookbooks, and prioritize quality printing and full-color photography in their newly acquired titles. (It still surprises me that Jerusalem, a cookbook from the owners of a London restaurant chain, had such a profound aesthetic impact on home cooks, and jumpstarted the transition from glossy jacketed hardcovers to paper-over-board bindings, as well as drool-worthy photographs of vegetable-centric dishes.)

Yet there was one title I was surprised that didn’t make the cut on the Times list, or make at least a subtle appearance on the Slate list: that of Peg Bracken’s “Skid Row Stroganoff,” from her 1960 cookbook The I Hate to Cook Book. Unlike many of the cooks featured in both of the listicles above, Bracken wasn’t a domestic goddess or an aspiring gourmand: she was a copywriter at an advertising firm, a biting satirist and an inadvertent contributor to the great literature of the feminist revolution of the 1960s. In her recipe, she wrote of the realities, not the aspirations, of home cooking, with instructive and illustrative honesty:

Start cooking those noodles, first dropping a bouillon cube into the noodle water. Brown the garlic, onion and crumbled beef in the oil. Add the flour, salt, paprika and mushrooms, stir, and let it cook five minutes while you light a cigarette and stare sullenly at the sink.

For all the brilliance of the writers featured on these lists, and of the many recipes that become staples of home cooking, I for one would love to see a worthy inheritor of the Bracken method: a style of cooking that honors both good and bad taste, that meets us exactly where we live—staring sullenly at the sink, waiting impatiently for dinner to be done.

Recommended Reading: I’m moving back and forth between two titles this week: first Robin Wall Kimmerer’s The Serviceberry, a brilliant and bite-sized follow-up to Braiding Sweetgrass, and a continued meditation on environmental reciprocity and sustainability and the possibility of revitalizing the gift economy. The second read, one that I hope to write about soon, is Patience Gray’s 1986 masterpiece, Honey from a Weed, an exploration of the author’s local and seasonal eating across southern Italy. I can’t wait to share more of my thoughts about this book with you, but for now I’ll leave you with this one perfect quote from her notes on her batterie de cuisine: “The merit lies not in the possession of the object but in putting it to use.” Wise words, and when read alongside Kimmerer, a valuable reminder as we enter the consumerist frenzy of the holiday season.

The Perfect Bite: Two weeks ago I was in Houston to work a fantastic SAVEUR event, but couldn’t leave town without some superb Tex-Mex. In between visits to local bookstores (thanks Basket Books & Art and Kindred Stories for the warm welcome), I grabbed lunch at Cuchara, a lovely spot not far from Montrose Blvd. In addition to a beautiful salad of grilled chicken and greens with sliced pears and peaches, pistachios, I sampled a small batch of their “Tía Martha” salsa, a silky-smooth puree of roasted tomatillos and peanuts that absolutely blew me away. As we head into the colder months, it seems like a homemade salsa quest is in my future, with Cuchara’s version as my inspiration…

Cooked & Consumed: A few recent hits on the home cooking from: of course, Smitten Kitchen’s skillet macaroni and cheese, Julia Turshen’s roasted veg with carrot-miso dressing, and a nice homemade chicken soup with stelline pasta. But I think the best might have been a batch of short ribs stewed with carrots and leeks and seasoned with tons of gochujang. One of my 2025 resolutions is to turn my favorite cuisines into home cooking projects, and it’s high time I learned how to cook a broader array of Korean dishes (including, I hope, a homemade batch of kimchi).