The Art of the Cookbook

“I wanted this book to be more than just another collection of recipes …I wanted it to have a narrative that felt personal; to tell stories about food but also about people, places and traditions and snippets of life lived.”[1]

Cookbook Scotland celebrates the art of the cookbook. Cookbooks combine vivid, evocative writing with outstanding design and photography and essential cultural history and value.

We hand on cookbooks across generations, we give them as gifts, we cherish them when battered and used for decades. Like children’s books, in a digital age they speak proudly for the endurance of tactile – the practical, the beautiful printed books we love in our homes. Beyond the celebrity recipes, there is a genre of writing and production and design approach that is vital, exciting and hugely talented.

Cookbook Scotland wants to place Scotland at the heart of this celebration. Through a series of events, films and online promotion of cookbooks and their writers and creative collaborators in design and photography Cookbook Scotland wants to make Scotland the most welcoming cookbook bookshelf in the world.

Our recipe

Cookbook Scotland is planning an annual series of weekend festival events to celebrate the cookbook. Each festival will headline cooks, writers, photographers and designers – all book events will be teamed with food, music and good times. These festivals will move around Scotland rather than take place in the same location each year.

Cookbook Scotland will have an online portfolio, in particular concentrating on short form film. We aim to make a series of short form interviews with cookery writers and their collaborators, concentrating especially on the intersection of the books and the potential for the use of Scottish produce and location.

[1] Valeria Necchio talks about her cookbook Veneto, on North Sea Scullery.