Hey, I am Bruce Weinstein, and this is the Podcast Cooking with Bruce and Martin. And I'm Mark Scarborough. And together with Bruce, you know we have written 37 cookbooks, but you also know that our latest cookbook, cold counting is on sale now. Finally. Mm-hmm. Finally, we've talked about it enough. It is. Out there, small batch canning. It is a gorgeous book. Go out to our TikTok channel and watch me do an unboxing video of the first time we see this cookbook. It's kind of fascinating. I think I posted it on Instagram on my personal account too and on Facebook. Um, it's fascinating 'cause a, I hate. Author unboxing videos, but BI get to see it. And, uh, this thing weighs a ton. 425 recipes on really high gloss, beautiful paper. Tons of photographs. How many photographs? I

don't

even remember. A

2 25.

Yeah. Lots of photographs beautifully designed, beautifully laid out. The publisher. Little grounded. Uh. Bang up job on this book. When we turned in the manuscript, I never expected it to look like this, so go check out cold canning. But before that, we do have a podcast to do. We've got a one minute cooking tip. We'll tell you what we have learned after the publication of our 37th cookbook. What have we learned about this cookbook career? And I will tell you what's making us happy in food this week. So let's get started.

Our one minute cooking tip. Store garlic at room temperature, not in the fridge. I, I don't

think a lot of people know that garlic is a dried food product. Mm-hmm. It is dried. And you talk about that for a second. Well,

Gar, when garlic comes outta the ground as fresh garlic, it's very wet, very pungent, and it has to dry out. The husks have to dry out. The cloves shrink a little bit. Mm. I mean, they're not dried like gradable dried. No, but they are, they shrink, they condense, they get dried and is the real term, even though they're not. You know desiccated,

right?

They're not like dried oregano,

but

is a dry, you have to hang it and dry it. Yeah. My friend Rich has a beautiful garden. He grows so much stuff and he grows like hundreds and hundreds of garlic bulbs, and every spring and early summer he comes over and he brings me these. Beautiful braids as he's tied up of garlic bulbs and I hang them in my kitchen and cut them off as I need them. True. All

winter long. True. He also hangs onions. Yep. Right. I don't think a lot of people know that onions have to be hung for a while and dried out. I mean, you can't eat them right outta the ground. You can't eat raw garlic too, or raw. You can't eat fresh garlic too. But um, it's best to let it dry. It concentrates the flavor. There's a whole

reason for this. And garlic right outta the ground also can cause stomach distress. So there are chemicals in that that. Break apart that you really don't want to eat too much of when they're first fresh outta the ground. Not too much. I mean, you can eat fresh garlic, but you shouldn't eat a ton of it. But let me say, don't keep it unlike your window sill on a sunny kitchen. No, because then your garlic looks gonna sprout. It's gonna think it's time to grow, right? Keep it hanging where the sun don't shine.

If you buy garlic in a jar that is pre peeled, that should go in the fridge or pre minced even worse. Yeah. Garlic, as they call it, garlic should definitely go in the fridge once you open it. Okay, that's our one minute cooking tip. Um, before we get to the main part of this podcast, let me say that it'd be great if you could rate and like this podcast if you give it a review that's even better, and subscribe so you don't miss a single episode of cooking with Bruce and Mark. Okay, up next, what we've learned. Now that we're publishing our 37th cookbook,

I learned how exhausting it is that, I don't know, maybe it's, I'm getting older and the books are getting longer. Mm-hmm. So it's like, shouldn't it have gone the other way? Shouldn't the books be getting shorter as I get older, but they're getting longer and bigger.

Our agent always. Says about publishing that every year we get older and they get younger, they 'cause they get fired and a younger person comes in and takes their place. So, oh, it is

true when we were younger as authors. Our publishers and everyone who worked at the publishing house was like our age that we are now. Or older. Or older as we are now. Yeah. Yeah. And now it's flipped. Here we are at our age being the writers and our publisher and all the people working there are the age we were when we published our first book.

Right. They're all at 40 or under. Yeah. Which is really wild. So here's some of the things we've learned about this cookbook career, and this is not about cookbooks in particular, but I should say that this seems really funny. We learned to not give up on the dream. Mm-hmm. We wanted to write cookbooks. When we first got together, Bruce and I did, Bruce had published a drink book with Clarkson Potter, an imprint of Random House, and then he kept trying to publish books and nothing ever happened. And then I got involved and we must have written. I can't even tell you. 30, 40 proposals for cookbooks. We kept trying to sell a book. Mm-hmm. And we just kept at it. And I think a lot of people that I've met in my life who have tried to get into publishing, have written something, submitted it, gotten a rejection, and then never done. Another thing

I wanna say, this goes for. Any creative career, not giving up on what you really want. Shit, when we go out to a restaurant and if we start talking to the server and they say they're really an actor or a dancer, my first question is always, where are you taking class? You know? 'cause clearly you're not in a show 'cause you're in the restaurant, right? Okay, so where are you taking class? Where are you dancing? Where are you acting? If you're not doing that, then you're not an actor, you are a waiter. So when we said to people, well, we want to write cookbooks. The answer is, well, what are you doing about it? Endlessly writing cookbook proposals endlessly. Trying endlessly. I've got an agent. We are working on it. We are always writing.

I mean, really, honestly, we cranked out for about a year and a half, two years. Yeah, we cranked that proposal after proposal after proposal for various cookbook ideas. Nothing came of it, but we just wouldn't take no for an answer. I

will say that. It got to a point where I did almost give up on this. You did. And we were running out of money and two years of this, we were, I had been an advertising creative director before this future year, Anna. I mean,

honestly, we were counting Nichols at this point. Mm-hmm.

And I had left my last advertising job before I met Mark when my book came out. And now it was like, I need to go back to work. So I did. I actually got a job as a creative director again at a small ad agency, and the day I accepted that job. Our agent called and said she had a book offer for us. Yep. So it was an interesting moment, and we did both. I kept the job and the book, and we did it all together. Well, we needed a

few more nickels even as we were writing that book. Yeah. So fortunately you kept that job, but I should also say that we've learned that you have to be realistic about this dream. Whatever your dream is in. You do have to really be realistic about it. You can't just be a cockeyed optimist to quote South Pacific. You have to be, uh, realistic about it. So, you know, I can tell you over the years we have written books that we might not otherwise have written mm-hmm. On our own, because the publisher have has that. I have said we want this book. Yep. And so we have written, I, I would say that when we jumped from Rodale to. Uh, Clarkson Potter to Random House. Mm-hmm. Together years later, I don't think either of us wanted to write a slow cooker book, but Random House wanted us to write a big slow cooker book. Yeah. And we did. We threw ourself at it.

It was nothing I would've. Ever thought I wanted to do it. And it took me a while to figure out how to make food in them really good. And in the end, we did a book that was so full of recipes that were delicious and so successful. We sold out on QVC and that book became a bestseller, right? So be realistic. Sometimes you're gonna do things you don't want to do, but you're gonna do them anyway. Take the role you don't want as an actor. Work backstage as a dancer. Do what you have to do to get in that theater. Be part of your industry. I think

Old Cold Canning is a grand example of this because we met with our publisher, uh, before, this is a year and a half ago before we even started on cold canning, and we were talking about what our next book would be and he said, I would really like a canning book in my list. So we went away and we thought about it and we saw a billion canning books of for ball canning and all the. Big giant bestsellers, the homesteading books and all this kind of stuff. And we were like, well, how can we compete in that market? And we tossed it around between us enough that we came back to him with this idea of cold canning, canning without a canner where you just put it in the fridge or the freezer and for storage. And he loved it and bought the book. So it, that isn't an idea that Bruce and I generated. It's an idea actually that it began with him and then morphed. To by us. I will

say that unlike the slow cooker book, though, it resonated with us because I had been making jams and jellies and pickles and canning the, you know, with processing for years and years. So at least when he brought that up, it was something that resonated and excited us. Yes. So it wasn't a hard stretch to say, Ooh, let's figure this out.

Yes, that's right. And I think that that's been, you know, largely what a lot of the things we've done in our career, and not only the books we wrote, but the books that we fixed for other people, they're not necessarily books we would've touched. We, over the years, have fixed and even written celebrities books and, um, some of them we would never have touched before. I can't talk much about them. Well, some of them confidentiality agreements, but we would

never have written Dr. Phil's diet. Oh, there's one without

a confidentiality agreement.

Ew. It was not a good experience working with a celebrity like that who was so full of himself. No, it was terrible experience. No, it was not a good experience. The book was great. We did a great job on the book, but it wasn't a good experience. So I

think we've also discovered that over the years that food is very personal and it's very divisive. Mm-hmm. And when you're a food writer and you write a book or you write recipes and then you tell someone about it. Sometimes you get the idea response of oh, or Wow or that kind of thing, but you get a lot of ew. And um, that is a really interesting problem for a creative because I don't think a lot of people who dance or sing or write novels, I don't think they often get the. Ew factor from it, right? I mean, somebody might write a nasty review online of a novel. Well, that's refuse, but gently not to your face. Mm-hmm. I've never seen somebody at all the book events we've ever been to with novelists sitting around. I remember seeing somebody come up to a novelist and go, I really hated your book.

No, it's about food. It's 'cause it's about food. If someone says they dance with a certain dance company and you don't like that kind of dance, you're not gonna go ew. Right. But if you Exactly. If you were to say to someone you're writing a book about, I don't know, casseroles, and they had a terrible experience with casseroles as a kid, they're gonna go, Ew, because it's food. And food triggers all of these

emotions. And I think one of the big changes that has happened in all these years of writing cookbooks for us is that cookbooks have gone, and I'm gonna use weird words here, but they have gone from content. Based to vibe based. I explained that. Okay. So when we started writing cookbooks, cookbooks were compendiums of recipes. So you get a book and the whole point of it was that it was all this giant encyclopedic list of recipes. But now a cookbook is as much about its design and it's vibe and it. Feel right, the current word, the style vibe, that it gives you a certain feeling, a certain emotional landscape. You look at it and you think certain things. I think that one of the things that's changed huge over our career is this shift toward vibe based books. It's really bizarre, uh, for people who came up in the era of like the joy of cooking. When you have these books or you know, the big Julia Child mastering the Art of French cooking that are. Encyclopedias.

Well, you know who did that? I mean, that was Martha Stewart. She did that single handedly. She

was one of the people who started the vibe trend. Yep.

She did that with her book Entertaining. It was all about, oh, it's not just that I'm doing a clam bake. I'm doing a clam bake at my beach house. Right. And these. This is the way I should decorate it, and this is the music that should be played and the drinks served. It was a lifestyle. She turned content into lifestyle, and she

also turned herself, I mean herself, former Wall Street Trader and all that. She was into this, um, to use the current word, tra wife into the traditional wife. She turned herself into a character in the same way that Paul Rubins turned himself into Peewee Herman. Mm. There's this way that especially in the late eighties and early nineties, people were creating characters. And the characters were actually in front of them in terms of the fame. And I would argue that Martha Stewart was a character of Martha Stewart. Oh

yeah. That wasn't really who she was. No,

not

at all. But she did something else with books. She's the one who started the trend for photography. She did. 'cause before then. Cookbooks didn't have photography, or if they did, they were very few pictures. That's usually, it was just on the cover. Our first 13 books that we published had

no photos and, and that's none. Sorry. I was gonna say, and that's part of the vibe thing. Yeah. Photos are the prime way that vibe gets. Uh, communicated when you flipped your book in a bookstore as if you do this anymore, as if anyone goes to a bookstore and flips through a book. Um, I went to Barnes and Noble the other day and, uh, I don't know, it seemed like a greeting card store to me. Mm-hmm. But anyway, like anybody goes to a bookstore and flips through books, but, um, uh, when you do, you're looking at the pictures, you're not reading the recipes. Sara, you're getting this vibe sense outta the book. And

you can't have a book without photography these days. So when you make a book proposal and you're trying to sell a book, we have to even put in there how many photos we think the book should have to really get the vibe going. Right. And our books tend to get more. And more and more photos in them

and, and that's also part of this trend over the years of that, we've published 37 books that recipes have shifted and nobody really wants to know the how. This is really interesting. I think when, when we got into, I mean people still wanna know the how, 'cause they wanna see the recipe, but when we got into writing cookbooks, the head note, that is the note above the recipe. The head note was all about the how. Well make sure that your temperature of your custard is blah, blah, blah. Was all the tips as you're going through the recipe, right, of how to make it better. Now that has all changed and the head notes to recipes are all about why. Mm-hmm. Why should you make this recipe? Why is this a good recipe? Why does this recipe beat other recipes for, I don't know, blueberry preserves? Mm-hmm. And that change, it may sound subtle to you, but it is. Huge in terms of how we approach books because

it's part of the whole pitching a book idea to our publisher in the first place. Right. Not only why this recipe, why this book? Right, right. Why should somebody buy this book? The thing we always hate to hear from our publisher is. Your book is the answer to a question

nobody's asked. Yeah, that's his, that's his constant comment is that a book has to answer a question that people are actually asking. Mm-hmm. And so, uh, this is why Google Trends searches are really important. Google keyword searches are really important to sell a book because, uh, the people, he wants people to see an answer to a question they're asking. I, I should say that when we first got into this business, uh, we wrote the ultimate candy book and we turned it in. This is. 2000, we turned it in. Mm-hmm. And, um, the head notes were full of stories about Bruce's, uh, relationship with Kandy as a kid. His grandmothers going to candy stores. The head notes were all full of hiding

it under my

bed. Yeah. Rotting my teeth out. All bits about. Candy from his childhood, and that book was kicked back and we had to rewrite it because the publisher had a strong dictum at Harper Collins that no personal information can ever appear in a recipe. So a recipe had to almost be like a science experiment. It had to be. Clean and objective. These days there was no vibe, right? No. These days, what everybody seems to want is personal information like, oh, Bruce made me this the other night for dinner, and la da da da. People seem to want the story. Now I can argue, and this is bigger than this podcast, I can argue that part of why we were told to take. Out personal material is the fear of homophobia in the year 2000. But I think it was also a part of a general trend. A lot of those books made a heater's books. They don't include, I made a heater making this and how she made it. Mm-hmm. Now she found this recipe. Mm-hmm. And yada, yada, yada. It's all about how to make this right. The tips to make these cookies right.

But she did have this interesting thing going on in her books. A lot of her recipe titles. Were sort of personal and no one knew what they meant. Yeah. Like 22nd floor blondies. 'cause some woman in her condo in Florida on the 22nd floor gave her this recipe.

Yeah.

So it's like, what, what a 22nd floor blondies. But,

but it still, her head notes were not. Very personal or I think about Marcella Hasan. I mean, yes. Did you know about Venetian cooking and Marcella Hasan and her experience? Maybe you knew, maybe you knew about her experience in the war, but maybe, maybe not. No. Um, and it was a, it was a whole. Different vibe to the Cook Bowl. Well, in a vibe, it was this idea that a recipe's supposed to be something objective. This is the best way to make roast land. I still think that over the years we have discovered that US citizens are not afraid of metric measurements.

Not anymore. They were, it was terrified of it were they were, oh my goodness. It meant you were communist, but now people are weighing their flour. Mm-hmm. Weighing their sugar. Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

You know, sugar's one thing, this is

particularly a millennial and Gen Z thing, they are not afraid of the metric measurements when

it comes to cooking some things. Weighing is not that crucial, in my opinion. If I am pouring oil into a wok to stir fry a dish, I'm not gonna measure out or weigh my oil by the milliliter or the gram. It's not that important. Right? But if I'm baking bread, I am so weighing that flour because four of us. In this house can take up a measuring cup, dip it into that pot of flour, and each come out with a different weight of flour for that one dip.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, in cold canning. Uh, we put all the ingredients in both, um, volume amounts, like a cup and a tablespoon, but we also have every single ingredient in a metric amount, 15 milliliters, 50 grams, 190 grams. And that's because people are not afraid of the metric measurements anymore. Mm-hmm. Many people do have kitchen scales, and it is a far more accurate way, particularly when you deal with things like sugar, where the grind of sugar in North America, what we call granulated white sugar, is different than castor sugar. In the uk the grind is different. So you really have to buy the weight of the sugar involved to make the recipe work.

Absolutely. Because you're canning, right? You're preserving, so you want your ratios. Sugar and vinegar and salt and all of that to be precise. So it comes out and it stays fresh.

Right, exactly. And so what's the most important thing about this career?

Oh, keep things new. Keep things fresh. Yeah. Keep things exciting. Yeah, absolutely. Which is funny because for years. Like we did instant pop books. Right? Right. And so we did four instant pop books in a row. It's so hard to keep that fresh and new. Oh my gosh, that's so crazy. And we were desperate to do something else. And the publishers, no, your books are successful. Let's do another one.

The the worst was writing what? A 350 recipe instant pop book. And then having our publisher say, I want another 350 recipe to follow it. To follow it. And I was like, oh my gosh, how are we? We thought in 350 recipes, we had killed it. We thought we had done everything you could do in an instant pot and now we gotta do it again with new things. It was an insane, daunting task. It was

hard to stay fresh and exciting and new, but we did, and we made a really good book that was new, but keep things new. Change your style, change what you're doing. Learn a new language. Learn a new dance step. Yeah. Yeah. Take up a new instrument. Yeah. Walk a different

path to the store tomorrow. Yeah. Yeah. It's really important, especially as you age, because as you probably know, um, your memory is encoding where you go, let's say, and it's holding those memories sacrosanct. So this is why you can drive down the street and not realize you have driven down that. Street because you've driven down it so many times that you get home to your driveway and you're like, wait a minute, I don't even remember driving on the freeway or on the surface streets. Mm-hmm. To my house. And that's because you're not actually registering it anymore in memory. Your memory is holding that. And so what your census are picking up are not necessarily going into your hippocampus and into your memory at that point. You're just, um, you know, we would say doing it by rote, but you're, you're sensing it. Mm-hmm. You know what you're driving down. While you're doing it, but it's not being laid down as a memory. So as you get older, this more and more happens and you need to go different directions. Mm-hmm. And you need to take different, uh, approaches to life and you need to watch different shows, and you need to read different books. And you need to read, eat different foods.

Absolutely.

Because it's the only way you can keep from petrifying as you age. And it's the truth of a creative career too. Right. You

gotta keep moving. You do have to keep me. We watched. You did lose

it. Watched a fabulous documentary last night. It's only 30 minutes long on Netflix. About the only woman in the orchestra. That's the name of the documentary. It's about this woman who was the first woman who got a seat in the New York Philharmonic. She played the double

bass, actually, wasn't it called The only girl in the orchestra? Maybe The only girl at the time. She was the girl. Okay. And back when she got in. People like Zubin Meda, who was then at the La Philharmonic were saying women have no place in the Philharmonic.

That's right.

And that by the time they reached 60, they're no good anymore. While men are still good as musicians. Right. It's

horrifying. So it was this whole thing about her, and it was basically about her retiring at like 87 or 89 or something like that, 80. From the New York Philharmonic. And what was interesting to me about that, she was moving out of her New York apartment into a smaller apartment. And you know, I mean she had these four, um, antique double bases. So one, one was made in the 17 hundreds, right? Mm-hmm.

And the Steinway Grand, right? It was,

she was a huge apartment, right? And she was moving to a smaller place, but. She was not stopping teaching new students at 89. She had a whole coterie of double base students who came from all over the world to study with her,

and she taught group classes at the Manhattan School of Music, and she just kept. Ongoing.

That's right. Even beyond retiring from the New York Philharmonic. So it was really fascinating. She also talked about how she finally got to go to concerts instead of having to play the concerts, she was actually going and sitting and listening to the music, which is really a fascinating thing. Um, check out the documentary. The only Girl in the orchestra, only about 30 minutes long. It's really fascinating. Okay. That's what we've learned over the years in writing. 37 cookbooks, some advice, maybe things that we faltered on or that we've learned and gotten better at. It's all part of the process, I guess, of being human, of learning and learning and learning and adapting, and adapting and adapting. Before we get to the last segment of this podcast, let me say that there is a TikTok channel called Cooking with Bruce and Mark, and on there you can find all sorts of videos of, um, making. Food, talking to each other, talking about our relationship, how we met, all kinds of, uh, stuff is on there. We also have a Facebook group cooking with Bruce and Mark, and of course we have our own Instagram and Facebook feeds, and I have my own Blue Sky feed, so you can connect with us in all sorts of places. Okay. As these traditional, the final segment of this podcast, what's making us happy in food this week?

As often For me, it's a kind of melon. I love these hammi melons, HAMI. It's a Korean melon. It looks a little like cantaloupe, but it's not quite as sweet and it's got the crunchy. It's not nearly as sweet. No, it has a crunchy texture of cucumber. So it is so. Freshing and Delicious and Mars. Them. I, I know. I don't

hate them. I just don't like them

because

they are very vegetal.

Mm. I love them. It like,

and it is like eating a cold cucumber, but sweeter but orange.

Mm-hmm. With a slight hint, hint of cantaloupe flavor.

Yeah. It's not my favorite. I like the gushy soft, super sweet cantaloupe. 'cause that's what I grew up with, so that's what I like. But, um, trying something new. Remember that's what we said. Well, I have tried it and, uh, I don't like it. So there you go. Uh, I, I went outside once and it scared me so I sign. Uh, so, uh, there you go. Um, I guess what's making me happy in food this week is. We had friends over for dinner this last weekend and Bruce slow roasted a leg of goat. And if you don't know, we wrote the first ever goat cookbook all about goat meat, milk and cheese. Several years ago. I think that book is still out there. Mm-hmm. And um, it was the first ever all goat book written and published in North America. And we, uh, became very fond of goat. Bruce sources goat from a local farm, so he slow roasted this leg and it was really tender and delicious. We had it with Tahini sauce and Pita, and a very simple Palestinian tomato stew. He. It was a really nice fine meal and we sat at the table till like after 11 o'clock. Mm-hmm. It was really nice talking. Yeah. Yeah. It was really nice and it was a beautiful thing. How long did you roast that thing For? Six hours. Yeah. See, a long, long time. I gave it. I don't have the patience to get through a podcast, so Okay.

I gave it. Palestinian Rub. I used raw hannu and garlic and olive oil. What is raw?

Han

Hannu is a blend of spices. It means top of the shop, so every shop in the Middle East, it's gonna have their own version of it, but it's Middle Eastern spices. I mixed it with garlic and olive oil. I put some sumac in for sourness and some salt, and I rubbed that in and then I shoved it in a covered casserole. That's great. About six hours

and kept it out on the grill so it didn't heat up the kitchen. Mm-hmm. Which was also really great

to keep it on a low grill, a slow grill, as they say, and not heat up the kitchen. Okay. That's the podcast for this week. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for being a part of this journey. We appreciate your being with us and we most. Appreciate that you connect with us in some way,

and I've said this before, I'm gonna say it again. No AI here on cooking of Bruce and Mark. You know that the internet is full of ai. You don't know what's real and what's not. Videos, podcasts, everything you see, you will always get. Bruce and Mark here on cooking of Bruce and Mark. No Ai.