Behind the Scenes: Making a Cookbook
Kitchens are places of storytelling. Stories about family. Stories about food. Stories about the art of cooking. Tales of travels and yarns of home. Stories that are passed down from generation to generation that evolve with the faultiness of memory the way all oral histories do. Kitchen tales are told over bubbling broths, ladle sips and flour-dusted cutting boards. They are passed around alongside the work of following a recipe, listed on a worn page or spouted crisp from the mind.
What stories do the cookbooks of today tell us about our culture? This is the question at the root of Southern Cooking: Global Flavor. In June 2020, my dear friend and chef Kenny Gilbert was working wild hours with my husband, Chef Scott Schwartz – even wilder hours than usual for chefs. The two were catering COVID-19 testing sites throughout North Florida, providing doctors and nurses with hundreds of meals a day. Their restaurants were closed, with no idea as to when they would reopen. The two chefs spent the hours of 3 a.m. to 3 p.m. together most days in the kitchen, swapping stories for solace. It was in some wee-hour conversation with the world turned upside-down that Chef Kenny decided he was going to make a cookbook.
Most chefs hire a big team to execute a cookbook. The chef supplies the recipes and serves as an advisor on the project. But with a pandemic raging through society, it was no time to shop around for teammates. Chef Kenny turned to the talent he trusted best. Photographer Kristen Penoyer and I both have been a part of his journey as a restaurateur, using our skills to highlight his food over the past decade in media. Together we formed a pandemic project pod and hit the ground running. Chef Kenny created an extraordinary process of efficiency and expectations, and we learned quickly that you don’t need a big team to make something well-crafted and beautiful. The only ingredients necessary are talented people with a strong work ethic.
We set out to create a cookbook that celebrates the diversity of America and the flavors of world cuisines that can be found in kitchen pantries across our country. Chef Kenny selected recipes from his incredible repertoire of global cuisine, and we built a framework for the book. Over the course of more than 50 hours of Zoom interviews, I gathered the stories of his life experiences that inspired each recipe. While I worked to shape the interviews into stories over six months, Chef Kenny and Kristen enlisted Wes Edwards, a member of Kenny’s front-of-the-house team, and set to work on shooting photos for each of the ten chapters.
Chef Kenny devised a plan where he would cook every recipe onsite, refining the dishes as he prepped for the photoshoots. He and Kristen styled each shoot as they had styled his shoots over the past decade—an organic process that was less about strategic mood boards, and instead driven by Kristen’s artistic eye, found props and settings that are inherently linked to Chef Kenny’s life. Ceramic dishes his brother made by hand, tablecloths that hosted many a family dinner, the brick backdrop of the dining room of his restaurant Silkie’s Chicken and Champagne Bar, a palm frond from the backyard of his historic bungalow or a vase from his living room. Every Monday, Chef Kenny’s one day off a week, the three of them shot the entire cookbook over 12 weeks. Once the recipes were refined by Chef Kenny, we sent them out to home cooks and industry professionals to test again.
Resourcefulness, resilience and community can be found in this cookbook’s pages. Between the springs of 2020 and 2022, through the pandemic, the Black Lives Matter movement and the upheaval of our own industries and lives, we worked together to tell an important story on a shoestring fry budget. Southern Cooking: Global Flavor tells Chef Kenny’s story of learning from his mother’s kitchen as a child to cooking in restaurants around the globe. It honors the greatest lesson about cooking: it is a means to bring people from all walks of life together. As Americans, living in a country that feels more and more divided every day, we captured a moment in our shared history in this cookbook. And it’s our hope that it does a small part to help bring our neighbors to the table to share our unique stories in this crazy melting pot we call home.
Find a copy of Southern Cooking: Global Flavors here.
