Coward, Rosalind (1984) Female Desire: Women’s Sexuality Today Paladin
Contemporary recipe books, with their seductive photographs, high production and design values are often more about looking than cooking. At a fundamental level, what is a recipe book? What is its function? If many contemporary cook books consist of ‘nice photos with nice type’, can graphic design reveal the function of cook books yet still retain a visual appeal?
One of the functions of a recipe book is to act as an instruction manual that shows the reader not only how to cook but also what to eat. You could argue that the purpose of photographs in cookery books is to inspire the reader by showing them what to eat. Photographs are important but, as Rosalind Coward argues in the above quotation, they are at the root of the problem of cook books being about looking not cooking. I wondered if it would be possible to design a cook book that was purely typographic, that was functional, guiding the reader through the stages of the recipe, but that was also visually appealing, inspiring the reader to cook without resorting to 'food porn'.
Cook books that are text only are not unusual; as I've discovered while researching recipe books, lavishly illustrated and produced cook books are still a fairly recent phenomena, coinciding with the rise of cheap offset printing, the rise of celebrity chefs and, possibly, with new digital design tools and the potential for graphic designers to combine text and image in ways that were impossible even twenty years ago. In the 1950s, books by food writers such as Elizabeth David mainly consisted of text interspersed with a few line drawings. Katharine Whitehorn's seminal bestselling cookery book, Cooking in a Bedsitter, published in 1961 contains no illustrations and is still in print today which suggests that the reading public can embrace cook books with no images. Even the very first Nigella Lawson cook book, How to Eat, published in 1999, contains surprisingly few photographs: the book is a collection of Lawson's newspaper columns and, as such, is more about her skills as a (very good) food writer rather than the celebrity she later became, with all its attendant airbrushed imagery.
With my recent book project How to Cook & What to Eat I was thinking about the two sometimes opposing functions of a cook book: the functional instruction element and the visual appeal which inspires the reader to cook - and which when the book is placed in a bookshop, inspires the browser to purchase it. The marketing demands of commercial publishing obviously need to be considered: every publisher needs to sell books and sometimes commercial decisions can be prioritised over aesthetics or visual experimentation. As I've discovered when researching cook book design, publishers tend to take a winning design formula and repeat it until it stops working (or stops selling). However, with How to Cook & What to Eat, I do not have to think about commercial ends and I have been able to make a cook book that is more experimental in nature.
My aim was to animate the recipes, using typography in a controlled manner, one weight, one size, Roman and italic, to guide the reader through the various stages of the recipe in order to reveal the process of cooking rather than the instant visual gratification of most cook books. I placed one recipe on each page so that the reader, when leafing through the book got a clear sense of how long each recipe was and how long that process took in time. I wanted to show the complexity of a recipe by revealing the individual stages of the process which also, paradoxically, simplified the process for the cook, by breaking it down into manageable chunks. On the page, I wanted the reader, especially if they were consulting the book whilst cooking, to be able to easily see where they were in the recipe.
A further consideration is the visual appeal of the book. The use of design to attract as well as inform is something that I've recently started to think more about. It's difficult to judge how attractive or eye catching something is because it's very much based on personal taste. The three books that I've really enjoyed analysing for my cook book design blog are Living and Eating by John Pawson and Annie Bell, The Kitchen Diaries by Nigel Slater and Canteen: Great British Food by Cass Titcombe, Dominic Lake and Patrick Clayton-Malone. Although very different, the books share an easily understood typographic hierarchy that means that they function well as instruction manuals. All three are deceptively simple in their designs but, on closer inspection, are quite complex - the trick is to make this complexity seem effortless, invisible, so that the reader does not notice that they are being guided and controlled. The books have very different atmospheres that are created by their design: each one uses particular papers, covers and colours with typography, and, of course, photography, to amplify the authorial voice or brand. Of course, this is back to the idea of taste again - my liking of these books is founded on how I understand and interpret them and this is based on what I already know about a number of factors that include: the author; the publisher; and the choices and connotations of typeface, papers and style of photography.
With How to Cook & What to Eat, I decided to use Akzidenz Grotesk for all the text in the book. My original plan had been to use Garamond or Baskerville and to exploit how, when used at size as a display face, these typeface's friendly but authoritative characters are revealed - an element that is utilised in many contemporary cook books. I did some experiments with Garamond - and with Univers - but settled on Akzidenz as the utilitarian feel of the typeface suited the practical nature of the book. I had also used Akzidenz for the How Did We Do? project and I am interested in how typefaces behave in different contexts. On a purely intuitive level though, Akzidenz just felt right - I liked how it looked on the page.
A further element to the book is that the recipes are taken from my food diary so the recipes are connected to the day that they were cooked - I used this connection to give structure and variety to the book by using coloured pages and text that responded to the days of the week. Because there are not recipes for every day of the ten weeks that I was recording what I cooked, the placing of recipes within this system created arbitrary juxtaposing of colours which I hope is pleasing to the eye.
So, the question of whether How to Cook & What to Eat has achieved my aim, which is to make a book that is both practical and functional but also visually appealing is open to debate: the practical functional aspects of the book can be tested but in the end, the visual appeal of a book boils down to personal taste. Which leads me on to my next project - with this book I made a book that was purely typographic with no images; I've now started to think about a project that is purely image based with no text. Starting with the the idea of food porn, I have started to collect images of pork pies (which somehow feel vaguely pornographic anyway) as a starting point for thinking what the function of a cook book that consisted of images only might be. Pork pies are not generally made at home and, as lovely as a book of pork pies might be, I quickly decided that a dish that is actually made in a domestic setting might be more appropriate for this project. I've decided to look at Spaghetti Bolognaise, it's a recipe that, I imagine, most people have cooked; there are (obviously inauthentic) vegetarian and vegan versions of it; it's a student staple; and, looking at Google images, it's striking how different individual dishes are, reflecting the myriad recipes that must be in circulation.
It's early days yet but the results of my image trawls are below:
