Cookbooks are a lone shining light in all of publishing at the moment. Last year, more than 60 million of them were sold, but many of the bestselling titles were written by celebrities. What are we getting from our cookbooks? Do we read cookbooks to actually learn something or to live a vicarious life? Cookbook author Michael Ruhlman and food writer Kelly Alexander join host Frank Stasio to ponder those questions and talk about how America eats. Ruhlman, a writer and cook, recently released “Ruhlman’s Twenty” (Chronicle Books/2011) and Alexander contributed the introduction to “The Great American Cookbook” (Rizzoli/2011), a reissue of Clementine Paddleford’s classic cookbook from 1960.
How America Eats
