Interview with John Becker & Megan Scott | Joy of Cooking

Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book with Suzy Chase. She’s just a home cook in New York City, sitting at her dining room table, talking to cookbook authors.

John Becker: Hi, I am John Becker, I’m joined by my wife Megan Scott, and we are the most recent coauthors of the Joy of Cooking.

Suzy Chase: I’m so happy you said the Joy of Cooking because I’ve always called it “The Joy”.

John Becker: It’s come up a few times, and you know, we’ve always said it that way. The definite article was dropped, I think in the 60s, just at least on the cover.

Megan Scott: Yeah. It’s from the old books, and then the new one is just, it’s Joy of Cooking now, but I definitely know a lot of people call it, “The Joy.”

John Becker: Including us, I mean, you just have to add that. Maybe that was the whole idea is like, if people are going to say the anyways, so I don’t know. I’m not sure what the rationale is for that.

Suzy Chase: It’s crazy to think that it’s been nearly 90 years since the first 3000 copies of the Joy of Cooking came out. Your great-grandmother, Irma Rombauer, was not known for her skills in the kitchen. She was a socialite, not a domestic goddess. John, tell us the story of how she decided to self-publish this cookbook in 1931.

John Becker: Well honestly, it’s a bit mysterious that she undertook it. So, her husband unfortunately passed away, and both of her children, Edgar and Marion, at that time they had moved out. She had her savings and very little prospects professionally. I mean she was part of a generation where women were kind of… There just wasn’t as many opportunities or professional training, available for women.

So she, on a whim, she took half of her life savings and decided to embark upon writing a cookbook. Then had it privately printed and sold it by word of mouth, as well as just hand selling it to booksellers. It resonated with a lot of people. She had a very conversational, witty tone, that was I think a little bit… It was definitely unique in cookbooks at the time, which were either written by people that had come from a home economics background, or maybe from a more chefy perspective, as in chef of a great house perspective.

Suzy Chase: So when did you decide to embrace this family tradition?

John Becker: I mean it was always emphasized to me, that it was not expected of me, that I should follow my dreams wherever they took me, and blah-bidy-blah. So I did that for a while. I ended up, really contemplating going to graduate school for literature. Then I just had a kind of an epiphany moment, where I came across the dedication that Marion wrote to the 1963 edition, and it was her first edition solo, without the help of Irma. They had both worked at that point on the 1951 edition. It’s a really poignant, at least for me, dedication, and the ending of it really kind of got me right in the gut, was, “I hope that my sons and their wives continued to keep joy a family affair, beholden to no one but themselves, and you.” “You” being the readers, our readers.

Which is really, I don’t know, it was the first time I ever felt like I had been called to do something. It changed my life, it really did. It was the first time I really felt a really deep connection with Marion, and I decided that after all my messing around with publishing and kind of the literary academic arena, that I actually had something to offer to joy, and to my family’s multi-generational project.

Suzy Chase: I feel a kinship to your great-grandmother, because cooking really isn’t my passion either. I’m just trying to be a good home cook for my family. It’s interesting that she incorporated joy into the title. Do you have any backstory on the title?

Megan Scott: We don’t really, we don’t know why she decided to call it that, but I think it’s an interesting choice and I almost feel like it’s perhaps a little tongue in cheek, because Irma was not… I think in some ways she enjoyed certain types of cooking. Like we know she loved to bake and decorate cakes, but I don’t think she enjoyed just the day to day, like having to cook every day for people. So I think maybe it was a little bit of a, not a joke, but just kind of a-

John Becker: There might’ve been a twinge of irony there. But on the other hand, I feel like she really tried in that first edition, and subsequent ones, to lessen the burden, to kind of be a friend in the kitchen. To have that kind of casual intimacy with her readers. You know, I mean, it’s hard to read that title with a straight face sometimes, because she does have a lot of witticisms in the early editions. She just had a really sharp sense of humor.

Megan Scott: Yeah, I definitely agree with that assessment. Also, the cover illustration on the 1931 edition, if you’ve ever seen it, it’s a paper cut. It’s a woman who has a broom, and there’s a dragon next to her, and she’s fighting this dragon. That’s the story of St Martha of Bethany, who is the patron Saint of Home Cooks, fighting off the medieval dragon called a tarasc. So in Irma and Marion’s minds, it’s like the home cook is fighting off the dragon of kitchen drudgery, with this friendly cookbook.

John Becker: Well, and a broom, and what looks to be a pretty menacing purse.

Megan Scott: Yeah.

Suzy Chase: So Megan, you and John developed more than 600 new recipes for this edition. What other changes are in this edition?

Megan Scott: There’s so many things. So when we first started to think about doing this revision, we created this… So we went through the book line by line, and created a huge outline, where we detailed everything that we felt needed to be fact checked, or changed, or improved upon, or things that we felt were missing. Recipes we thought were outdated, or ones that we felt maybe needed to be revised in some way.

So we started out with a pretty good idea of what we wanted to do, but some of the changes include, like everything from the actual trim size of the book. So the book is actually wider now, it’s the same height, but kind of a wider format. So it lays flat when you open it, basically to any page, which we love. We brought back paper cut illustrations for every chapter heading. We added new sections on fermentation, sous vide cooking, new ingredients.

John Becker: Yeah. Speaking to what you started talking about, we really did… I mean, joy is a cookbook of many parts, and we basically examined each one of those parts, just to see where we could improve. If there was anything lacking in our coverage, either of culinary technique, or ingredient information, or actual recipes that we felt like, “Oh my God, I cannot believe that this isn’t in joy.” A lot of that response we had to “classic American recipes”, like a Chicago style deep dish pizza, or say the St Louis specialty gooey butter cake. Those were ones where we were kind of scratching our heads like, “Oh, I cannot believe that we do not have this now.”

But also including more international recipes, things that really kind of, I wouldn’t say that they capture the changing demographics of America, but it’s a gesture towards that. We really tried to be as inclusive and respectful as possible, with that aspect of things, adding new international recipes that have been brought here.

Suzy Chase: Did you retest existing recipes?

John Becker: Oh yeah.

Megan Scott: We did. Yeah. We had tested, by the time we actually started the revision process, we had probably tested 1500 existing recipes, and then we continued to test more as the process went on.

Suzy Chase: So Megan, tell the story of the pancake batter, and the difference you found between 1975 and 1997.

Megan Scott: Yeah, Well this happened when we were very new working on the book. So this was probably 2010 or maybe 2011, and we were just testing the-

John Becker: Well didn’t we get a… We received a complaint from a reader about our pancake recipe. It’s like, Oh!

Megan Scott: Yeah we did. But I think I had tested the recipe before, and I thought the batter seemed runny, but in my naivety I was like, “Oh, I’m just going to add more flour and get on with it.” But then we got a complaint from a reader who was like, “This pancake batter is way too runny.” Then I was like, “Okay, well this is obviously a recipe problem that we need to fix.” So we have all these recipe test notes from when the book was professionally tested back in 2006 and 1997, and we found probably about half a dozen test notes for the pancake recipe alone. It was really interesting because they found the same problems that we had, in that the batter was too runny. The 1975 edition recipe for pancakes was better, but for some reason the change was never made in the manuscript. So we, in this edition, we took the pancakes back to the 1975 quantities, and have restored it to its former glory.

John Becker: That’s basically one of the reasons why we wanted to do all of the testing in house, and wanted to kind of take it back to the methodology that Marion and Irma used, to produce what are best-selling classic editions. There’s very little opportunity for something getting lost in communication, when the same people that are testing the recipes are the same people that are writing them in the book, or in the manuscript. I think that the distance between kitchen and manuscript, was kept to an absolute bare minimum. I think it’s very important, especially for a book of this size, where it definitely seems like something that you need to live and breathe in order to do right.

Suzy Chase: What sorts of recipes did you remove and why?

Megan Scott: It kind of runs the gamut. There were some recipes that we tested them, and we’re just like, “This is just not very good.” For example, there was a sweet potato stuffing, it was called a stuffing, but it was really just mashed sweet potatoes with sugar and some stuff in it, and baked in a dish, and it was just kind of gummy and not very good. So we cut that. Another example is that we did try to streamline some things. So for example, again in the stuffings chapter there were six different variation recipes on the basic bread stuffing. So what we did was we made the basic bread stuffing kind of the master recipe, and then we include a list of editions that people can play around with, to add to the stuffing, instead of providing six different specific options. Then there were some recipes that just kind of felt outdated, kind of like the golden glow salad. We had to get rid of that one.

John Becker: Yeah. Something about, what was it? Pineapple, lemon gelatin and chicken stock.

Megan Scott: Yeah. It was like chicken broth. So it was like a sweet and savory gelatin. I don’t think that… I mean cool if you like that kind of thing, but I don’t think it’s as relevant to these days.

John Becker: But then there were even some more contemporary recipes that were added later, that were not like 1950s jello mold throwbacks, that we felt like just had to become a little dated. For instance, this edition, we don’t have any recipes in the sandwich chapter for wraps. We don’t have, there was a pesto cheese cake that was added in the ’97 that we decided, you know, this feels a little, I don’t know, we just-

Megan Scott: Yeah, it felt dated.

John Becker: It felt dated.

Megan Scott: Also that we got rid of the recipe for tequila shots, because first of all everyone knows that, also there’s a lot of really great tequilas and mezcals, on the market that you can just sip and you don’t need a chaser. Like not everything has to be a shot.

Suzy Chase: I read that you took out shrimp wiggle. What’s that?

John Becker: It’s an odd one, it was actually brought back. So our last edition, the 75th anniversary edition that was released in 2006, there was a concerted effort made in that edition to bring back some of the recipes that had disappeared pretty early on from our publication history. Ones that were taken out by the 60s even, so shrimp wiggle, I want to say that it’s a bechamel that has been fortified with ketchup.

Megan Scott: … and clam juice.

John Becker: … and clam juice.

Megan Scott: … and it has peas, green peas in it, and obviously shrimp, and then it’s served over toast.

John Becker: Yeah.

Suzy Chase: Oh!

Megan Scott: Yeah, exactly.

John Becker: Yeah, that did not test well.

Suzy Chase: Irma fought tooth and nail, not to publish photos in this cookbook. How come?

John Becker: Well, at the time, so this was in the lead up to the 1951 edition. At the time the person that the publisher at the time, Bob’s Merrill, had decided that they wanted to do the pictures, had absolutely no experience with food photography, and actually happened to be, I think a brother of one of the editors that was working on that edition. So that was definitely part of it, is that they felt maybe this wasn’t the right guy to do it. But also, they resisted it later. Marion especially resisted it later, just because she felt like it would date the book. I mean, you look at older Betty Crocker editions, and you can kind of see the validity of that concern.

I mean even in the 90s, well in the late 90s early 2000s, we actually did come out with a series of single subject books called the All About series. There was food photography done for those, the smaller volumes. Even that photography it’s still fairly decent. The color temperature seems a little off. You could definitely tell, even books that are really not in the large scheme of things, that old, that the aesthetics of food photography, or even of props and all of that stuff, it changes so fast. We only publish every 10 years or thereabouts, I mean, ideally every 10 years. So it definitely seems like by the time a new edition rolls around, that food photography is probably going to be looking a little stale. Plus, we have so much to communicate.

Megan Scott: Yeah. If we did have food photography, which we did actually, we talked about for a hot minute for this edition, but we ultimately decided against it because it would have been just a couple small sections of the book, with a handful of photos that can in no way represent an 1100 page cookbook like Joy of Cooking.

Suzy Chase: When you’re out and about, what are some fan favorites that you hear over and over again?

Megan Scott: Well, definitely the pancake recipe is a big one. We actually have a friend who has memorize the pancake recipe when he was a kid, and still can do it from memory. But yeah, we hear about that one all the time. Then the chocolate chip cookies, the brownies. What are some other things that we hear about?

John Becker: For some reason, the pot roast and the beef stew recipes have a big following. I’m really happy that people enjoy those recipes. But yeah, it definitely seems like, people get really excited about the basics. Oh yeah, the banana bread.

Megan Scott: Oh yeah banana bread and carrot cake.

Suzy Chase: I was wondering why this edition was so massive. It’s much larger than past editions. Then I read about the task of your father, Ethan, updating joy in the mid 90s, and the regrets after that was released. Talk a little bit about that.

John Becker: So Ethan had been wrangling with publishers, primarily McMillan, for years. He actually in the mid 80s I think that he had a manuscript for a new revision, that was pretty close to being finished, but was unable to publish it because of disputes with the publisher. This kind of thing continued for quite a while, and I’m sorry to say, so I guess it was the cookbook section of McMillan. I’m not exactly sure how, unfortunately I was really young at that point, so I’m not exactly sure what the machinations were, but we ended up with a new publisher, Simon & Schuster/Scribner imprint.

Our agents at the time were really trying to make sure that the book got the revision that it deserved. So a very well known, well-connected, very talented editor was brought on, Maria Guarnaschelli, and she commissioned quite a few of food writers that she knew, up and coming as well as established food writers, to help revise the book. It was a massive undertaking and they really tried to, let’s just say that they started from scratch in some areas, where they just made it very hard for… They set themselves a very difficult task. By the end of it, the manuscript had just ballooned to a ridiculous length, and a lot of stuff got lost when it had to be edited down.

The real problem was that we lost the canning chapters, we lost the frozen dessert chapters, we lost the cocktail chapter. Which is really sad, because the first recipe in the first edition, was actually for a gin cocktail. Irma published during prohibition. A little bit of the spirit of the book was lost there and then-

Megan Scott: Essentially it was just, it was more of a rewrite than a revision. So I think a lot of joy readers were really disheartened, because the book seemed to have lost its personality, which is something that really resonated with a lot of folks. So I think there were just a lot of disappointed people with that edition, in spite of the fact that a lot of really talented people worked on it.

John Becker: A lot of the recipes that were added during that edition are some of my favorites. You know, it was a necessary update. The book hadn’t been given any TLC in over 20 years by that point. A lot of the international recipes that were added in the 90s are really, really wonderful. So with the 2006 edition, the last one, Ethan and the editorial team, tried to bring back the best of the ’97, well to incorporate the best from the ’97, but also bring back a lot of that older legacy material from the 1975, for the 75th anniversary edition.

Megan Scott: But something we tried to do in this edition was, we didn’t want to rewrite the book, we wanted to modernize it without making it too… We didn’t want anything to be too trendy or of the moment, we wanted it to be what the older editions of joy are, which is really classic and kind of timeless. We want people to be using this edition, you know, 20, 30, 40 years down the road. So we tried to update it in a really thoughtful, measured way. We weren’t interested in going back to a bygone age, nor were we interested in doing something so trendy that it will be a little bit out of date in five or 10 years.

Suzy Chase: In 2017 Bon Appétit wrote an article entitled, the obsessive sport of shopping for a vintage Joy of Cooking. People obsess over finding old editions, a first edition can fetch anywhere from $1500 to $15,000. Do you have a particularly interesting story of a first edition that someone found, or has been handed down over the years?

John Becker: Actually, my father Ethan recently visited, and brought with him two first editions, first printing, the original printing. One of which was signed by everybody, it’s signed by Irma, by Marion, by Ethan. Really did feel like kind of a passing of the guard moment. It’s just something I’ll treasure forever. But yeah, I mean we really don’t have too many stories regarding first editions, because they are super rare, as their prices would seem to indicate.

Yeah, I mean finding one with a dust jacket intact, is extremely difficult. In fact, we have a fragment of a dust jacket for only one of our copies. Luckily, there was a facsimile of the first edition that was published in 1998. So for those that are curious as to what Irma put into the original edition, those are available for a much more reasonable sum. I mean most of the interesting stories that we have about older editions of joy, are not like the collector’s type stories.

They’re more like, for instance, I think it was maybe last year or the year before, we received a paperback edition, which it’s the 1963 edition. That was the one that was turned into a paperback, a two volume paperback as well as a single volume. It was in a Ziploc, I mean it was just completely destroyed. It came with this incredibly sweet note from someone. She was about ready to go into the nursing home, and she wanted us to have the book because she said that it had seen three marriages, and help her raise six children. She just detailed what this book had been through with her.

Megan Scott: She was worried that her children wouldn’t know the value of it, and they would just throw it away. So she wanted us to have it. That was a really, that was an amazing thing to receive.

Suzy Chase: This week I made two recipes out of the cookbook. Wanda’s Stewed Cranberry Beans on page 212, and Rombauer Jam Cake on page 732. Can you describe these recipes and the inspiration for them?

Megan Scott: Well the Wanda’s cranberry beans, Wanda is my grandmother. So I have come from a farming family, and my grandmother and grandfather grew cranberry beans every year, and they would shell them. We would all get together in the late summer, and shell them and freeze them for the winter. So she would cook these beans every single Sunday for as long as I can remember. It’s really just a ham hock in it. Really, really, really simple, but kind of one of my favorite things to eat. Then the Rombauer jam cake is an older recipe, and it’s kind of like a spice cake, but it has raspberry jam in the batter. Usually when I make it I like to use, there’s like a brown sugar icing that you can make to drizzle over it, that I really love.

Suzy Chase: Now to my segment called my favorite cookbook. And this, it’s crazy asking you this, but what is your all time favorite cookbook and why?

Megan Scott: I don’t know if I can pick one because there are a few that I’m thinking of, that were some of the first cookbooks I ever bought, and that really taught me a lot, or that I just really loved reading through. One of them was Wild Fermentation by Sandor Katz. That is an amazing book, and I think it was just recently revised, like maybe last year. But also I remember getting A Platter of Figs by David Tanis, and that kind of… I grew up in the South, so I didn’t really have any experience with California cuisine, and that book was really influential for me.

Suzy Chase: And John?

John Becker: You know I, again, our cookbook library is gigantic and it’s really hard to pick a favorite, but I am going to have to say A Super Upsetting Book About Sandwiches, just because it’s really, really funny. Obviously the recipes are fantastic, but yeah, by Tyler Kord of №7 Sub. Is it №7 Subs?

Megan Scott: Yeah.

John Becker: I remember, not knowing what to expect when I picked it up, but it was definitely one of those ones that I kept on going back to, to read.

Megan Scott: Yeah, it’s pretty delightful.

John Becker: I’m surprised you didn’t say Joy of Cooking for your favorite cookbook. Oh, I thought that, that was off limits. Otherwise I would have to say that, because not only family loyalty, but it’s also the one I know. I mean it’s obviously we know that book really well. I guess we didn’t touch on this, but when we were testing recipes when we first started, we were doing for each one that we tested, we did these genealogies for each one to see like what edition it was added to. Yeah. I mean it’s definitely our favorite. I mean, it’s my favorite cookbook because I just have so much invested in it, and I know it so well. But yeah, for some reason I thought that was off limits.

Suzy Chase: Well, I usually say, what’s your favorite cookbook other than this cookbook? But I thought, come on. I mean.

Megan Scott: Yeah, I didn’t think we could say Joy of Cooking, but joy was one of the first books that I ever bought for myself, and I did not grow up in a Joy of Cooking family. So my mom never had, she didn’t have the book. I just kind of, when I moved out, I knew that Joy of Cooking was this amazing kitchen resource, that I just needed to have. So I bought it for myself, and yeah, loved it. That was before I met John.

Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media?

Megan Scott: We are on Instagram at The Joy of Cooking, and Twitter The Joy of Cooking, and on Facebook it is just Joy of Cooking.

Suzy Chase: What a treat it was chatting with you about the most popular American cookbook. Thank you so much for coming on Cookery by the Book podcast.

Megan Scott: Thanks so much for having us.

John Becker: It was a pleasure.

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