I'm writing a new cookbook!

...plus tips on how to write a collaborative cookbook

First of all, I'm sorry for skipping a post last week. Jet lag, a precocious little baby, a podcast script, and a new cookbook project have kept me preoccupied and pulling very late nights. Working from home with an infant in tow is such a privilege, but my brain is perpetually mush.

But yep, you read that right. I’m writing another cookbook!

And the topic is postpartum cuisine.

In the Chinese-speaking world, it is customary for a new mom to be confined at home and fed a specialized diet rich in rice wine, sesame oil, and ginger the month after giving birth. It’s a practice called Sitting The Month, and when I was in my second trimester of pregnancy, I wanted a book that could guide me through this tradition without being too preachy or speculative. But I also didn’t want something that strayed too far away from the tradition that it felt unrecognizable.

I couldn’t find any of the above, and so I got to work and put together a book proposal. After a couple of months, it finally sold and I’m currently in the R&D phase— my favorite part of the whole process.

Like with my previous cookbook, it’ll be a work of journalism, and I’ll be working with a team. My collaborator this time around is a Chinese medicine pastry chef, who, like me, is a new mom. Her family owns a Chinese medicine shop, and she’ll be helping me develop recipes using modern herbal formulations. This isn’t your ancestors’ herbal chicken soup, which was likely so bitter and intense that it wasn’t appetizing. This is confinement cuisine 2.0, adapted for the modern mom who wants to recover but doesn’t want to suffer.

I’m not reinventing the wheel here. Taiwan has one of the largest postpartum industries per capita in the world, and a whole suite of nutritionists, luxury hotels, Chinese medicine doctors, and physicians who specialize in recovery for the new mom. I’ve lined up a bunch of interviews already. I’m excited to digest and translate this practice for the English-speaking world.

And now to this week’s newsletter:

How To Write A Collaborative Cookbook

The other day I got an angry message from a relative of a home cook I had interviewed, alleging I had stole her aúnt’s recipe.