: Re: Injecting creativity into a cookbook I'm a chef. I'm also a writer. It's inevitable that I would want to write a cookbook. In fact I've probably started a dozen that I just never got around

@Annie587

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What sort of creativity would you like to add?

Yes, most reference-style cookbooks are pretty straightforward: Here are the ingredients, here's how to put them together, cook for this long, etc.

I suppose you could add rambling discussions on your philosophy of life or your difficult childhood, but I suspect most readers would find something like that distracting and annoying.

More seriously, you certainly could add discussion of cooking techniques, helpful hints, etc. Maybe you could think of hopefully-interesting things to say about each dish? I'm not sure what that would be. Lots of cookbooks say things like, "goes well with a red wine" or "people with high cholesterol might want to substitute ..." and that sort of thing, but that doesn't sound all that creative either. ChrisSunami mentioned saying something about the history of the dish. I suppose it might be amusing to read, "this recipe goes back to the 1500s" or "this was served at the first White House dinner with Thomas Jefferson" or that sort of tidbit.

I'm very much an amateur at cooking myself. When I read a recipe, I'm looking for the hard facts: here are the ingredients and here's how to make the dish. If the cookbook writer included a lot of discussion about his life or philosophy of cooking or whatever, I suspect I'd just skim over it. Maybe you could make it interesting enough that people would really want to read it.

Every now and then I see a cookbook that includes rambling philosophical discussions, and my thought is usually, "yeah, whatever, get to the recipe". But maybe I'm not typical or not your target audience.

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