How many cookbooks has annabel langbein published

Travelling around the South Island on my book-signing tour this month, I've been reminded of how many passionate book lovers there are behind the counters at bookstores around the country.

Today is New Zealand Bookshop day, so it's the perfect time to celebrate the important role that bookshops and their dedicated staff play in our lives. I have more reason than most to be grateful to our country's many wonderful booksellers.

It's 30 years since I stood in my garage looking at the thousands of copies of my first book that had just been delivered, hot off the press, wondering how on earth I was going to sell them.

Since then I've been lucky enough to be strongly supported by bookstores across the country, and together we've sold literally hundreds of thousands of cookbooks and helped put millions of tasty meals on the tables of New Zealanders. When I look at the cover of my first cookbook, with its bowl of green-shell mussels sitting on a balcony looking out past banana palms to Auckland Harbour, everything about the making of that project comes flooding back.

And that hair! Oh yes, I remember that hair, and all the padded shoulders that went with it! Just like that, I'm back in , sitting on the floor of my living room with designer Sally Hollis-McLeod, surrounded by layouts, undertaking the painstaking process of cutting out strips of copy that had typos or grammatical errors, and pasting new ones back on to the layout. It's hard to imagine now, but before the digital era, that was what we had to do!

Deciding which recipes to include from the columns I'd written for the NZ Listener, and curating them into chapters around events and rituals, was a giant, complex jigsaw puzzle. But I was hooked - from that moment on all I wanted was to make cookbooks.

Between book number one and number 26 my latest annual, Cheap Thrills there have been some amazing moments. It's a bit like the genre formerly known as chick lit. Cookbooks are the same.

They can be cultural and historical artefacts. One of her favourites is a Plunkett book from the s, Triple Tested Recipes. A funny thing happens, Annabel Langbein reckons, when we use a recipe that turns out to be a dud. We take it to heart. You feel personally a failure. Langbein thinks the accessibility of recipes online might have played a part in lowering the status of cookbook writers. A well-written cookbook, far from being dashed off, has been truly crafted.

The pages you see are the end result of months, if not years, of work by a huge group of people. Langbein describes her writing process in similar terms: working and re-working; collaborating; crafting. And then it's quite iterative; you come back to it and you go, okay, I'm going to make that again, from a written recipe.

Iterations continue, she says, tasting and honing along the way. And then it goes into an editing process, usually with two people who will look at it and make sure it makes sense. There are actors and reactors and a narrative arc from beginning to end and hopefully a happy ending".

A recipe is essentially a narrative tale. There are actors and reactors and a narrative arc from beginning to end and hopefully a happy ending, or a spectacular ending, even. A good recipe writer needs to not only explain the characters and really step the reader through what all of those things do and why, they also need to do it in a way that has a bit of personality.

A good cookbook, Corry reckons, is one you refer back to over time, and over time it becomes part of your own cooking history; your own story. Langbein thinks deeply about her role as a recipe writer, seeing it as not only inspiring her readers and creating confidence, but also creating connections. And it connects you to your own culture and other cultures; and it connects you to your family and friends. And it also connects you to your creativity. She is so extraordinarily erudite, the master of weaving stories about life and food and recipes — often detailed from her own rich life from the late s to the s.

Amazingly researched, passionate, authentic writing and food, and the first to introduce us to a magical world of flavours from the Middle East.

These days I find this food too rich and too fiddly, but these two volumes were the first cookbooks I owned, gifted to me by my mother when I was just She knew I was a cook well before I did. The lobster thermidor is a well-marked page from my days as a lobster fisher — I think it has 23 ingredients and seven different steps, and about as many calories as you need in a whole week! We cook over the fire three or four nights a week, even in the winter, and this is a really inspiring book of ideas and recipes.

Fish around the world have different names so it's useful to be able to identify the varieties you know and love and discover new ways to prepare them with Mediterranean flair. This is the most extraordinary resource on modern cooking techniques developed by former Microsoft strategist and all round clever guy Nathan Myhrvold, along with Chris Young, Maxime Bilet and a team of more than 50 staff and freelance contributors plus 14 outside experts.