A couple of weekends ago, Traverse City hosted what’s become the largest cookbook event in the US. Essentially, it’s a food and wine festival. Chefs and sommeliers come from all over the country to cook and teach; guests come from as far away as Phoenix and Southern California to learn and sample.


Flower arrangements waiting to be placed on tables.

But what the two founders, Mark Dressler and Matt Sutherland (Mark is also Director of Education for BEA), discovered during the five years they’ve been running the event is that chefs can’t really get away from their jobs – unless it’s their job. And promoting a cookbook is their job, whether they own a restaurant or freelance.



Raghavan Iyer, IACP Teacher of the Year and author of 660 Curries: The Gateway to Indian Cooking.

Consequently, most of the chefs and wine experts who participate in the Epicurean Classic have books recently published, and more and more often, they have books published the same month as the event. The Epicurean Classic has become the premier launching point for chefs with new books. So what began as a food and wine festival has become an Eat, Drink, and Read party.



About 100 books per author are ordered from the publishers for the event. Guests attend the demonstrations, then come down to the main lobby to purchase the chef’s book and get it signed.


Antonio Curti, author, chef and co-founder of Trattoria Grappolo, Santa Ynez, CA.

I say that, but really, the bookstore was crowded from 8 o’clock in the morning until 8 o’clock at night. (Some people don’t care about signings. Some people spend an hour perusing the materials, even taking notes, until they settle on the perfect book.)



And we did, actually, have a “perfect” book this year. It’s called Small Plates, Perfect Wines: Creating Little Dishes with Big Flavors (Andrew McMeel), by Lori Lyn Narlock. It was a hotcake from the moment it hit the tables. With its photos on every page, well-explained recipes, and paperback price – not to mention, perhaps, the suggestion of “small” and “perfect.” Women in particular decided to take it home with them and I sold out a whole day before the show ended.



The Epicurean Classic is held annually in mid-September in Traverse City, Michigan. Traverse City is also the home of the National Cherry Festival and the Michael Moore Film Festival.

I didn’t cook as a kid living at home, and I didn’t cook when I went to college. I think I may have started to think about cooking when I tried to make an omelette from romantic description in Alejo Carpentier’s City of Light. Awful. Oh, and the nostalgic tuna noodle casserole (forgive me, I was pregnant). Revolting.

Coming of age in Mexico and handicapped by my feeble reading skills, the books in my house were all there because I’d heaved them down from Michigan. Initially, I had one cookbook, The Joy of Cooking. The old blue hardback edition with the very fiftyish line drawings, probably snitched from my mom’s kitchen. I recall that the page with the spaghetti recipe was stained with tomato sauce—not my tomato sauce. (I don’t remember my mom ever making spaghetti, so maybe the book wasn’t hers after all.)

Anyway, I read it cover to cover. Can you believe it? It’s quite chatty and there are little tips and asides on nearly every page. I also learned about canning, pickling, natural pectins, and yeasts at high altitudes. It wasn’t McGee, but it was thorough for its time. I did learn to make a great Devil’s Food cake by reading and experimenting.

I don’t remember actually buying Molly Katzen’s Moosewood Cookbook, but the objectness of it, the color of its cover, the illustrations and handwritten text, are forever integral to falling in love with cooking. I’m sure I cooked every single dish she recorded, and some of them became standard fare—Tuesdays for samozas and Thursdays for lentil burgers. The book had multiple uses also as the best recipes became translation exercises, and I even created a flipbook for my daughter on the right-hand pages.

And there were the salads. Who knew? Back in my growing-up house, we had two kinds of everyday salad: cottage cheese and canned peaches on iceberg and iceberg with Wishbone Italian. (On special occasions, we had frozen marshmallow salad.) Molly Katzen’s simple Garlic & Herb Vinaigrette was a revelation. And remember White Rabbit? Or Alfa-Romaino?

If your Moosewood Cookbook looks anything like mine (how can I toss it with the flipbook, the notes), you’ll appreciate Ten Speed reissuing in a compact form Mollie Katzen’s Recipes: Salads (978-1-58008-878-7). You never know: give it as a gift and twenty years from now that person might say, This is the book that started it all.