Cook Up a Novel

Without exaggeration, cookbooks are practically the only still-profitable category in book publishing. With steady sales growth every year, too. It’s hardly surprising that publishers are looking for ways to sell even more culinary reading pleasure. Enter the culinary novel. 

Why shouldn’t the success of cookbooks, for example, be extended to literature? The culinary novel has existed for much longer, but is rarely seen as a separate category. A missed opportunity, someone must have thought. People who love cooking and books surely love reading. And the last time we checked the facts, 1 + 1 was still 2.

The Dinner
Novels such as The Dinner by Herman Koch and Troost by Ronald Giphart, in which food and/or cooking played a major role, sold like hot cakes. And these days, a cookbook is quickly called a ‘Bible’. So why not?

Do you love cookbooks? Then you’re sure to enjoy a culinary novel too.

This spring, a considerable number of books are appearing on the Dutch market—mostly translated—explicitly as culinary novels. And culinary detective novels and thrillers in particular—two subgenres of the subgenre. Including Tongue by Jo Kyung-ran (about a South Korean chef’s revenge on her boyfriend) and Recipes for Love and Murder by Sally Andrew (about domestic violence, with recipes).

Narcos
The fact that the thriller category is seen as particularly promising is probably because Netflix detective and thriller series à la Narcos are devoured here with dinner on our laps. Even though, unfortunately, there is mainly a lot of drinking and too little eating in them.

Chef
Has Chef, Jon Favreau’s 2014 food-truck film hit, actually already been published as a culinary novel?

Tongue and Recipes for Love and Murder will be published this spring by Orlando publishing house.