Monday Mix 5/6/24

On Wordloaf and book recommendations

some ryes I made over the weekend

Happy Mondays everyone! Those of you who have been here from the early days will know that I used to send out an email every Monday morning containing more casual information—announcements about classes, new products, future posts, questions, etc. While I don’t have the bandwidth to bring it back regularly, I am going to start sending out the occasional Monday Mix now and again, including today.

I wanted to just give you all a heads up that you are going to see your inboxes flooded with posts from me (and others) here over the next month or so, as I strive to catch up with the backlog of items that have accumulated while I was off toiling in the flour mines this winter. I’m going to send out the Wednesday & Friday posts as usual, but also ship at random some recipes and excerpts from books that have come out in the last six months or so that I want to get on your radar. Most of them are by friends of mine, and a few even include recipes and intel from me.

At this point it should be clear that the books I recommend are not reviews, per se, since I often have a personal connection to the author. And in any case, I don’t have the time or bandwidth right now to give them the rigorous recipe testing that a true review would require. I try to test at least the recipes I share, but even that isn’t something I have the time to do.

Reviewing cookbooks is something of a lost art, because no outlet can really afford to pay someone to do the weeks or months of work a single review really deserves. If you are interested in reading more about the sorry state of cookbook reviewing, I highly recommend

Tim Mazurek

’s (aka Lottie and Doof) recent essay, Cookbooks and Criticism, which sparked a lively debate online:

All of which is to say that you should know that when I recommend books to you here, they are recommendations, not reviews. I don’t have nearly enough room to talk about all of the interesting books that come across my desk, so the ones that I do make space for are ones I like (or love) myself, even if I haven’t spent very long with them. After some 30 years of working with cookbooks and 15 or so working on them, I have a good sense of what makes one worth adding to a collection and another not. Fortunately, I also have a lot of talented, smart, and creative friends in the baking world making books, and I’ve yet to find myself in the position of wanting to promote their work without thinking the book is also objectively great. (I dread the day that happens.)

This week happens to be pasta week, as I am going to share excerpts from two wonderful new pasta-themed books, each of which covers the subject from a very different angle. So stay tuned for those to drop later this week.

More soon, bake on.

—Andrew