According to the Times, food editors in New York and elsewhere have run into problems with “Great Good Food.” Though some critics praised the book, others found the recipes confusing and the results inedible; and some accused Rosso of recycling other people’s ideas. Food experts contacted by NEWSWEEK agree that Rosso was never much of a cook. Her skill was marketing. It was her partner Sheila Lukins who had the talent for food. “Great Good Food” is Rosso’s Trial and so’s first solo project, and if nothing else it shows her marketing touch: its design makes it a near clone of “The Silver Palate,” right down to the pages littered with aphorisms. Rosso delivered the manuscript-including some 800 recipes-less than a year after signing the contract. Several food experts told the Times they doubted anyone could produce a good cookbook at such speed.
Rosso’s publisher told NEWSWEEK she could not be reached for comment, but the flap raises questions about how cookbooks get to market in the first place. “Whenever you crash a book, you have problems,” says Maria Guarnaschelli, cookbook editor at Morrow. Standard publishing contracts place the responsibility for testing recipes with the author, not the publisher. When corners are cut, both suffer. Susan Loomis, author of “The Great American Seafood Cookbook,” says she tests each recipe three times and then hires someone to test it again. “That’s my safety net,” she says. “But it comes out of my pocket, not the publisher’s.”
Oven tested: Cooks acknowledge that no two people will ever come out with exactly the same results from any recipe. “There are variations in stoves, in the lemons they use, in the salt,” says Barbara Kafka, author of “The Microwave Gourmet.” “But the author has an obligation to make sure it works for her.” Unfortunately there’s no way for a buyer to know how trustworthy a cookbook is going to be before trying it. That’s one reason such impersonal tomes as the Better Homes and Gardens cookbooks and the Betty Crocker cookbooks are perennial best sellers: they work no matter what you do to them. According to General Mills spokesman Barry Wegener, recipes for the Betty Crocker books are tested with the oven turned up way too high, again with the oven way too low and again with the amount of liquid doubled.
Just why Rosso and her publisher were in such a rush is not clear, but Lukins is coming out with her first solo book next year, and Rosso may have wanted to corner the market early on Silver Palate cachet. If so, her plans may have been too ambitious. Now home cooks control the book’s fate: if the recipes don’t hold up, the excitement will fall like a souffle in a draft.
