How Did We Do?
My starting point for this project was thinking about how till receipts could be used to present recipes to supermarket customers, based on the information kept by supermarkets of customer purchases. It would be very easy to print – on or with the receipt – recipe suggestions based on these purchases and to propose alternatives for the next shop, perhaps adding other ingredients that might be off the customer’s ‘radar’.
I started to collect all the food shopping receipts and record everything that we ate – writing down recipes for the more interesting meals. Dismissing the idea of printing directly on the receipt as too obvious, I decided to use the newspaper format that I had used for Sunday Roast as I felt that the throwaway quality of the newspaper had much in common with the ephemerality of receipts. My intention was to highlight the relationship between what we buy, what we make and what we eat.
Tassajara Cooking – Edward Espe Brown
Tassajara Cooking
Edward Espe Brown
Published by Shambala Publications, 1973 (Paperback)
Illustrations by Zentatsu Baker-Roshi
Illustrations by Norval Delwyn Carlson
Cover drawings by Dan Welch
Originally published in 1973, this book is a reflection of the alternative lifestyles that were cultivated in the 1970s. Tassajara is the location of the Zen Mountain Center, a Zen Buddhist practice centre founded in 1967. The book is a reflection of the Tassajara approach to vegetarian cooking which emphasises the relationship between food, life and spirituality; preparing, cooking and cleaning not as a chore but as a daily ritual that satisfies and nourishes both literally and metaphorically. The design of the book emphasises this spiritual aspect with its calm and considered design.
The design of the book feels very of its time: the brown ink and cream paper; the choice of Baskerville and Antique Olive; and the simple line drawings all place the design of this book in the 1970s with its preoccupation with the hand-made and natural. This is a book that is a pleasure to read: the tactile quality of the paper and its relative lightness make it comfortable to hold; the clear typography and the charming line drawings invite the reader to read; and the rational hierarchy of the typography makes the recipes easy to follow. I would argue that, unlike many contemporary cook books, this a book that was designed for reading and for cooking: the tone of the book, amplified by the design, speaks directly to its audience, gently explaining the Tassajara approach to cooking, inviting the reader to share in the pleasure of preparing, cooking and eating food.
Front Cover
The cover is printed in one colour on an uncoated, textured mid-brown card. The card is fairly light and is pleasing to the touch; it feels like pastel or watercolour paper and brings connotations of art or craft and a sense of the homemade. The dominant element on the cover is a line drawing, by Dan Welch, of a skillet pan which, on first glance, appears to hold food with steam rising from it; a closer inspection reveals that the ‘food’ is, in fact, a landscape. The landscape contains what could be a farm – a collection of buildings with pitched roofs: a farmhouse, barns and outbuildings. A pick-up truck is parked in front of the buildings. The buildings are surrounded by large trees, with full foliage, which lead the eye into a landscape with more trees, a river and, in the distance, mountains and a waterfall. The peaks of the mountains are obscured by clouds: the ‘steam’ from the frying pan. The drawing subtly and cleverly links cooking to nature – and to the landscape in which food is grown.
The title of the book appears at the top of the page, arranged on one line and printed in black. It is set in a calligraphic swash typeface that mimics handwriting with an italic pen: initially, the title appears to have been handwritten but the uniformity of the characters suggests that this is a typeface rather than handwriting. The angle of the stresses of the typeface carry connotations of Indian or Arabic handwriting which, combined with the mountainous landscape, reminiscent of ‘Willow pattern’ china plates, gives an exotic Eastern flavour to the book cover.
A subtitle, ‘A Vegetarian Cooking Book’ appears at the foot of the page, set in uppercase Baskerville, at about 14 point and printed in black. There are no other elements to distract from the simplicity of the cover: the author’s name and the publisher appear on the spine.
Inside Pages
The book measures 15 cm by 22.5 cm, a size that is more often found in paperback fiction. It is printed one colour, a subtle brown, on a cream uncoated paper with a slight texture; like the choice of cover paper, this paper carries with it connotations of art and craft. The book is set in Roman and italic Baskerville with Antique Olive for chapter headings: a calm and considered typographic hierarchy has been set up throughout the book with Baskerville used in just three sizes. The largest size of Baskerville is used to mark the sections in each chapter – these sections are about techniques or types of food – vegetable, fruits, grains, pulses etc. Ranged right italic Baskerville is used under the section headings to list varieties within the types – ‘Cantaloupe, Honeydew, Casaba, Crenshaw, Watermelon’ appear under ‘Melons’. Within the sections, Baskerville at a smaller size than the chapter headings but bigger than the body text is used to highlight each recipe. Baskerville has a warm and friendly appearance – it also, as a san-serif, largely used for books, carries connotations of authority: as readers, we can believe that the information contained in the book has validity.
As you might expect from a Zen cook book, the recipes themselves are very simply written – and the typography reflects this: beneath the title of the recipe is a short, usually one-line commentary, about the dish followed by a list of ingredients which is set in italic Baskerville and centred (a subtly different treatment to differentiate between ingredients and varieties). The method appears beneath the list of ingredients, it is not ‘announced’ in the traditional manner with the word ‘method’ nor are the stages of the recipe numbered or bullet pointed: the recipe is written as prose, in short, precise sentences and the typography reflects this. Beneath some of the recipes are suggestions for variations which are highlighted with indented em dashes; this highlights the information as different but does not shout its presence to the reader. All text – body text, chapter headings, section headings – is ranged left, ragged right with no hyphenation, creating a ‘natural’ reading experience akin to reading handwriting.
There are no photographs in the book, instead line drawings are used extensively throughout to illustrate the type of food being discussed and, importantly, to show techniques – how to correctly hold a knife to finely chop herbs, for example. The drawings punctuate the text and are usually printed at a fairly small scale – generally not bigger than 5cm. The images are sometimes inserted into the text with the text wrapped around the image; this adds variety and rhythm but it disrupts the reading experience with oddly hyphenated words and very short sentences. The images are visually appealing – simple line drawings with no shading; they contain just enough detail to reveal a particular technique or the peculiarities of a type of food; and they have a quiet confidence that, along with the considered typography, helps instil confidence in the reader, suggesting that the writer is an authority on his subject and that the recipes will work.
The book contains a wealth of material other than recipes: a ‘Beginning’ section outlines how to use and care for knives with illustrations that show the correct way to hold a knife and how to slice different vegetables. A further section explains different cooking methods. A chart with a nicely considered typographic hierarchy shows when vegetables are in season; in the book, vegetables are grouped first by the season in which they reach maturity and secondly by what part of the plant is the edible portion: root, stem, leaves, fruit or bud. Further sections deal with planning meals and with organising and cleaning a kitchen. All are written in a tone that is calm and respectful to ingredients, utensils and to fellow humans; this tone is amplified by the considered simplicity of the typography of the book and through the choice of paper which is soothing both to the eye and to touch.
Caslon
Reviving Caslon
by William Berkson
Part 1: the snare of authenticity
How much should a revival of a typeface look like the original? Well, just as with performing an old song—an analogy Matthew Carter has made—there is something you have to like in the original in order want to revive it. And you can’t depart from the original too much, or you lose the charm of the old song that appealed to you in the first place. But if it is too much like the old versions, it might be stale and dated, irrelevant. So what do you keep and what do you change? And change in what way? That’s the challenge every revivalist faces.
In the process of working on my own revival of Caslon—Williams Caslon—I came to two conclusions about revivals generally. First, the pursuit of authenticity is a snare and a trap. Don’t go there. Second, particularly if it’s an old typeface, it’s going to be harder than you imagined, and you can lose your way in the process. So you’d better start with a very clear goal for your revival, and stick to it.
Numbers
A series of typographic experiments as part of my visual research to find a graphic language suitable for a cook book aimed at men who can't cook/won't cook. Although the end result will be a black and white newspaper, these colourful and playful experiments look at the different characters inherent in the numerals of different typefaces - especially interesting when the forms can not be read as words. From top to bottom: Bureau Grotesque, Bureau Grotesque, Akzidenz Grotesk Buch Stencil, DIN Schablonierschrift and DIN with DIN Alternate.
Spaghetti Bolognese
A poster that explores the graphic language for the cover of a book that I made about Spaghetti Bolognese. The book grew from an idea that I had to make a purely visual cook book about pork pies. After realising that pork pies were not something that were generally cooked at home, I decided that spaghetti bolognese was a much better idea as this was a dish that most people had heard of, could cook and whose authenticity was in dispute with many recipe variations. I used Google to collect many images of spaghetti bolognese, editing them down to 30 distinct images with the idea that this visual overload would - or could - act as a 'recipe'.
The cover was a challenge. I wanted the cover to be quite different from the content: because the images together represented an idea of spaghetti bolognese - a kind of visual recipe, to have one image of spaghetti bolognese on the cover would prioritise that version of the dish. I initially worked on a typographic version, using Georgia and Bureau Grotesque; in this context, using images that were found on the internet, Georgia, as a system font, designed for the web, seemed a perfect match. I had wanted to use Bureau Grotesque for some time and thought that it would combine well with Georgia for this project. I wasn't totally happy: I felt that the wobbly quirks of Bureau Grotesque needed a more elegant match. After some experimentation, and initially working on the interior text pages I found that Caslon was surprisingly pleasing with Bureau Grotesque (the text pages are an account of the tricks of food photography and a recipe for the perfect spaghetti bolognese - so not a totally visual book as I had originally planned).
From here I worked up the idea of the Italian flag - a hackneyed idea, possibly, but one that hinted at the inauthentic internationality of spaghetti bolognese. As a way of moving away from a flat image, I tried layering photographs under the colours of the flag eventually settling on a found image of a fork twirling spaghetti. Because the images inside the book are all full colour, I made the image grayscale so that it became more like an illustration and less in competition with the images inside which, for me, exist in a different space and carry a different meaning.
For the poster version above, I added another recipe for 'perfect' spaghetti bolognese, different from the one in the book, on what would have been the back cover of the book (the image wraps around with red on the front, white on the spine and green on the back). I like the way that the design feels slightly out of time, like something from an analogue past, which I think works well as a foil to the digital roots of the images.
Guilty Pleasures
A taster for a book that I have just sent to print. Guilty Pleasures is an assemblage of 40 found images of pork pies, one of my guilty pleasures. The book itself is also a guilty pleasure, an indulgence on my part as I thought it would be fun (and interesting) to make a book that was purely visual, as a parallel to my purely typographic cook book, How to Cook/What to Eat. Inevitably, typography won over and I sandwiched the pork pies with a text about the history of pork pies by Alan Davidson with a recipe for pork pies by Nigel Slater.
As a way of thinking about and investigating the graphic language for my final project, a cook book for men who can't cook/won't cook, I decided to juxtapose Adobe Caslon with Cooper Black, a typeface I have used before (in small amounts) and have been eager to use again.
Cooper Black is a heavy, old style serif typeface that was designed, in 1921, by Oswald Bruce Cooper. It has loads of character and, as well as feeling essentially masculine, it perfectly expresses the cheeky, guilty pleasures of a pork pie. Cooper Black has been used in lots of memorable contexts: the title sequence of Dad's Army; the EasyJet logo; the cover of David Bowie's The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars album; and more recently, by Oxfam in their Be Humankind campaign.
Caslon is a number of serif typeface designed by the Englishman William Caslon I (1692–1766). Adobe Caslon was designed by Carol Twombly in 1990 and is based on specimen pages printed between 1734 and 1770. Because I wanted to contrast the chunky cheekiness of Cooper Black with a more refined and formal typeface, Adobe Caslon was perfect as it includes refinements such as small caps, ligatures, fractions and oldstyle numerals. Caslon has an interesting character, it is very pleasing to the eye with good readability but it also has a nice quirkiness, a playfulness, that is somehow amplified by juxtaposing it with Cooper Black. Although Caslon was based on Dutch letterforms, it feels very British, perfect for a book about pork pies.
British Food – Mark Hix
British Food
Mark Hix
Published by Quadrille, 2005 (Softback)
Creative director Helen Lewis
Art direction Vanessa Courtier
Design Ros Holder and Claire Peters
Photographer Jason Lowe
Food stylists Marx Hix and Stuart Gillies
Props stylist Jane Campsie
This is a concise book about British food and contains quintessential British recipes such as Cullen skink, Roast Rib Eye of Beef, Fish and Chips, and Spotted Dick alongside guides to British ingredients and the availability of seasonal British foods. It is written by Mark Hix, a respected chef and writer who worked at the Ivy and now runs several restaurants under his own name but the design of the book does little to establish the character of the author. On the surface, British Food ticks all the criteria for a good cook book: it is well-designed, with considered typography that aids the understanding of a recipe; it has attractive photography that serves a purpose of showing what the finished dishes look like; and it contains functional recipes that extol the virtues of British food. But, there is something missing: there is a generic feel and a blandness to the design of the book that makes it difficult to feel excited about. The design is competent and attractive but it does not amplify the idea of Britishness that is at the core of the book nor does it amplify the ‘brand’ of Mark Hix. The problem may lay in the fact that this book is part of a series: buried in the back flap of the cover is a list of other titles in the series: Smart Food, Easy Food, Easy Indian, Easy Italian etc. A quick scan of Amazon - as I finish writing this piece - reveals that the books in the series do, in fact, share a common design which may explain why the design is so bland: the design has to communicate so many disparate ideas that, by nature, it has to be nonspecific. I’m all for formatted design but, without a unifying raison d’être, a series of books is just a collection of books that all look the same.
Front Cover
The cover is a full-bleed photograph of Lancashire Hotpot: a roasted crust of sliced potatoes over a succulent lamb stew. The hotpot is photographed very close-up with a shallow depth of field: a serving spoon of the hotpot has been lifted from the serving dish close to the camera. Only the food on the serving spoon is in focus, the rest is blurred into abstraction. The dominant colours in the photograph are golden yellows and rich browns; most viewers will associate these colours with food that tastes good so the photograph communicates directly to the viewer’s sense of taste through the eyes. At the bottom edge of the image is the curve of the white baking dish which offers a contrast to the dark browns and blacks of the lamb stew and also makes for a pleasing abstract composition. The book has been laminated with a high gloss varnish with the title and author’s name unvarnished to create a contrast of textures.
The title of the book appears at the top of the page, arranged across two lines, reversed out of the photograph, in white. The author’s name appears at the foot of the page, at a smaller point size, ranged right and printed in a chestnut brown. The title and author’s name are set in Clarendon, in a mixture of bold and regular; the typeface was created in 1845, in England by Robert Besley. Although Clarendon carries connotations of Englishness - the typeface was named after the Clarendon Press in Oxford - it also has international associations: it has been used for logotypes of corporations such as Sony, Pitchfork Media, Wells Fargo and the Spanish newspaper El País.
The title is set in lowercase only; given that countries and nationalities are usually set in titlecase, this is an unconventional choice. Titles set in lowercase are visually appealing as they have connotations of informality - but they also feel childish and naive and transmit less authority than a title set correctly in titlecase or uppercase. This lack of authority could be interpreted as a lack of conviction, subtly engendering in the reader a lack of confidence in the book and its recipes. When combined with the abstraction of the cover image, the general feeling, to this reader at least, is of vagueness verging on blandness that reveals little about the contents of the book.
Inside Pages
The book measures 16 cm by 21 cm, a fairly compact size for a cook book. It is printed full colour, on a white matt coated paper with lots of body. The book has been designed with one recipe per page, usually with an accompanying photograph, although, to add variety, this format is not strictly adhered to: occasionally a photograph will occupy a double page spread with two recipes side by side on the next spread and sometimes recipes will extend over two pages. The body text and recipes have been set on a simple one column grid with equal margins on the inside, outside and top and with a deeper margin at the bottom containing page numbers and footers. The recipes have been designed with a very simple typographic hierarchy: the title, set in Clarendon, at a larger point size, is at the top of the page; the yield line, ingredients and method are set in Clarendon with bold to highlight the yield line and the numbers that show the stages of the method. Ingredients are set in two columns to save space. Page numbers and footers are set in Clarendon at the bottom of the page on the outside of the page and outside of the main column; like the title on the cover of the book, they are set in lowercase only.
Full colour photographs appear throughout the book. The photographs were taken by Jason Lowe, and concentrate on the food which is usually shot close-up, at an angle, slightly from above, with little or no background. Unlike the blurred and abstracted cover image, the majority of the shots inside the book adopt a naturalistic approach, with finished dishes that are plated up on neutral white china bowls, against white or neutral backgrounds: these are photographs that are intended to show, as clearly as possible, what the finished dishes look like as an instruction to the cook and as an incentive to cook them.
Most images are presented as full page and full bleed with occasional double page spreads. In places, a pair of smaller images are shown, side by side, fitted into the column width; these are usually accompanied by a commentary from the author that is printed in 50% black at a larger point size than the body text; these details help to create variety in the pages and break up the uniformity of the rather simple and somewhat static grid.
The book is divided into sections: British Soups, British Fish and Seafood, British Meat, etc. The section openings are marked with a full-page spread: over a photograph, that has been printed in a single tint from a limited palette of muted colours, one for each section, the title of the section is printed in black, lowercase Clarendon, ranged right with the first line aligned to the middle of the page. The following double page spread features the same full bleed photograph but, this time, in full colour. Like the image chosen for the cover, these images concentrate on details of food and are aiming for abstraction; but they don’t always succeed in their aim nor are they consistent: an image of uncooked cod is neither beautiful or engaging and the use of onions to open the section on meat is a little puzzling.
Andrew Shanahan on the tricks of food photography
Take your chicken. Baste with wood varnish ...
Those yummy pictures in cookbooks aren't always what they seem.
From The Guardian, Friday 13 October 2006
Here's a great kitchen tip. You know how bowls of soup in food magazines always have a few bubbles rising artfully to the surface, giving that freshly ladled-from-the-tureen appearance? Well, you can recreate this effect quite easily at home by lightly drizzling some washing-up liquid into your soups but, please, only use the best stuff; this is no time to cut corners. Next, take a plastic straw and gently blow into the soup, creating an entire bowlful of bubbles. Using a pin pop away until you are left with just those few artistic ones that will survive for hours. The taste might not be to die for but at least your bowl of soup will look just like it does in the food magazines.
In the curious world of food photography this is the sort of advice that passes for normal. After all, this is the industry that firmly believes that the first taste is with the eye. The importance of culinary aesthetics cannot be overstated. Humans are predisposed to assess food's nutritional value, or lack of it, by its appearance - so get the pictures wrong and you could be conveying the message that this food is not fit to eat. Besides, aspiration sells. Who would buy a book of recipes for dishes resembling what they usually have for tea?
It takes a lot of people to get food looking its best. There can be up to five bodies beavering behind the scenes with their various flexible roles and responsibilities. The photographer and stylist will compose the contents of the dish and decide exactly how they want the picture to work. A props person will source, say, the perfect cake-stand and a home economist will buy ingredients and prepare the food. Finally, the client is often present to make sure that the money they are forking out - a food photographer alone can charge thousands of pounds a day - results in a drool-inducing image.
The simple reason so much work and personnel are involved is that producing beautiful images of food is not easy. For starters there is the small matter that cooked food gives off steam, which can fog up a camera lens. "Lots of things can go wrong," says Georgia Glynn Smith, who has been a food photographer for 10 years and has worked with Nigel Slater, Gordon Ramsay and has just completed work on Allegra McEvedy's Colour Cookbook. "Lighting is probably one of the easiest things to get wrong. If you light a plate of food wrongly then you can make it look grey and cold. Light it wrongly another way and you see the fat and skin forming on sauces. Aside from the lighting there's the problem that if you use the wrong [type of] film then meat comes across as too red."
It's not only technical issues that hamper the shoots. According to Glynn Smith, some foods simply do not have what it takes to make it as a model. "Sausages are these rude, fatty, obscene things. I did a whole book on sausage and mash once and that was a challenge. Then there was an entire book on soups and that was logistically difficult because there's really only so many ways that you can photograph soup."
Perhaps because of these associated difficulties, the industry has developed an impressive repertoire of tricks to enhance the appearance of food. "Let's say you wanted to photograph a roast chicken," says Maureen Murray, a food stylist with more than 10 years' experience. "You can't use a normal roast chicken because from the second that it's out of the oven it starts to go wrinkly, so what you do instead is plump up an uncooked chicken by injecting it with boiling water. Then you either use wood varnish or a mixture of honey, Fairy Liquid and gravy browning and you paint the bird to achieve the roasted colour you want."
Washing-up liquid is by no means the stylist's only secret ingredient; if you have ever wondered how the breads and pastries in photographs get such a beautiful shine and want to replicate this look then you need to go to a DIY shop and ask for some button polish.
Murray also has the answer to one of the most pressing riddles of modern life - why does food never look the same when you cook it as it does on the front of the packaging? The answer is because the food in the "serving suggestion" photo might not even be cooked. "A blowtorch is a very useful tool for a food stylist. Say you were doing a photograph of a beefburger for a restaurant, you might use your blowtorch to cook the outside of the burger to get it looking really crisp and nice but the inside wouldn't be cooked at all. It's easier that way to get it looking absolutely perfect. You can even use the blowtorch to melt the cheese on the burger."
Although these shortcuts are still regularly used, Glynn Smith has pioneered a more natural style of food photography that dispenses with the trickery and fakery and instead relies on capturing the attractiveness of freshly prepared, beautifully cooked food. "I fell into food photography really and I would photograph very much off the cuff. Because I was new to the field it just totally never occurred to me why you would do these fake things to food. I only learned why you might have to do some of them through talking with home economists afterwards. But it's becoming much more acceptable to see food looking real in photographs now." One of the perks of this natural approach, he says, is that you get to eat the food after you have photographed it.
Along with this shift towards a more natural style of photography, greater policing by the Food Standards Agency has also led to the industry adopting a more honest approach. "There used to be a lot of cheating with the photographs for packaged foods," says Murray. "But nowadays you have to be absolutely spot on, so stylists have to work with what you get in the package. That can be quite difficult if you're just working with a basic supermarket lasagne say. You would love to be able to put a bit of parsley or basil on the top to improve the look but you can't, because you would end up with customers coming back into the shop saying, 'Where's my bit of parsley?'".
Food Photography
Summer 1965: Paul Levy on how we began to eat with our eyes
From the Observer, 30 July 2011
Food photography has changed a good deal since that old rogue Clement Freud was the Observer Magazine's cookery writer and people like me read him compulsively. But it hasn't got any wittier than this people-free image of a deconstructed picnic, with only the shooting stick and binoculars to tell you that we're off to the races. I don't believe we at the Observer ever used any of the shoe polish/gelatine/shaving foam for whipped cream tricks of the food photography trade. But like every article or cookery book published in the Delia era, we did go through a didactic phase when the purpose of the food image was not to amuse but to tell you how the finished recipe should look. We grew out of that when Angela Mason joined the magazine as food editor in the 1980s, and Ann Barr and I coined the word "foodie". Suddenly we began to acknowledge that food existed to be eaten, and people began to appear in the food pages, along with mangoes and radicchio. (I appeared on the cover a few times, once as Bacchus and once as Henry VIII.) At about the time that photorealist painting was in vogue, our food photography became hyperrealist. When Jane Grigson did her delightful last series Slow Down, Fast Food, we photographed a gigantic hamburger with an implausible bite taken out of it, our tasteful riposte to the cigarette-stubbed-out-in-the-fried-egg school of lurid food photography.
Paul Levy was the food and wine editor of the Observer for more than 10 years and wrote a prize-winning column for the paper. He is also the editor of The Penguin Book of Food and Drink.
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