The Cookbooks That Sustained Us

 The best sellers of 2020 were not thrillers or romance - although they certainly had thrills and love in them. They also had flavor. What sold during the pandemic year? Cookbooks. Thousands of them. They helped us get through some of the most difficult times.

Kim Severson wrote about this phenomena of sorts in today's New York Times Food section.Cookbooks were everyone's go to , starting almost exactly a year ago. They comforted us, taught us how to cook comfort food as well as exotic dishes,Best of all they were simply a friend to home chefs, looking for an escape from a scary new normal.It's no wonder that sales were up seventeen per cent from 2019. The stars were predictable. Joanna Gaines and Ina Garten were at the top. Samin Nosrat, a regular contributor to the New York Times Food section. Her Salt,Fat, Acid, Heat, (Simon and Schuster) was number five on The New York Times non fiction best sellers list. Others, like Claire Saffitz's Dessert Person: Recipes and Guidance for Baking with Confidence (Clarkson Potter) also rose to the top ten, speaking to our need for sweet comfort last year. Trends emerged too. Sales of vegan cookbooks soared as did  ones revolving around health. This was due to people concerned about the planet and their own Covid-19 threatened lives. Vegetable Kingdom: The Abundant World of Vegan Recipes by San Francisco chef, Bryant Terry sold 30,000. African American cookbooks like   Toni Tipton -Martin's Jubilee Recipes From Two Centuries of African American Cooking, a mix of history and cooking also sold.

Of course books about baking bread soared. People wanted to join the sourdough trend. Yet other trends emerged too. There was a run on canning and preserving books because many home chefs went out and bought canning equipment. The same was true for grilling. The sales of pellet grills and smoking cookbooks were simultaneous. That's why Franklin Manifesto : A Meat Smoking Manifesto written by Aaron Franklin and Jordan Mckay was a breakout hit. The book sold a whopping 360,000 copies with 500,000 in print.Pizza cookbooks were other big sellers. Flour,Water, Salt, Yeast : The Fundamentals  Of Artisan Bread and Pizza written by Ken Forkish and published by the food centric Ten Speed Press became the top selling baking book on Amazon with 600,000 books in print. Home chefs wanted to travel too and they did it through cookbooks.In Bibi's Kitchen: The Recipes and Stories of Grandmothers From the Eight African Countries That Touch The Indian Ocean shows  the different comfort recipes from Eastern Africa along with Dan Buettner's The Blue Zones Kitchen which combines lush photography from around the world with international recipes.

Cookbooks will always be a source of comfort. They not only teach us but take us away from what had been the scary normal. They were godsends in a truly turbulent year.