Writing That Passes the Test of Time
What a lovely coincidence that the 10th anniversary of Bake from Scratch is this year and The Cake Bible is celebrating its 35th anniversary edition at the same time! I am so honored to be a contributing editor to this wonderful publication dedicated to the home baker and will be writing a special essay for each of its bimonthly editions this year.
I’d like to share some highlights about what it took to give my book such long-lasting relevance and to become a book that changed many people’s lives and careers. When I approached Maria Guarnaschelli, editor at William Morrow, with my idea to write a book about cake, one of her first questions was how much money I hoped to earn. My unhesitating answer was that I would do it without any money if I could have a photo of every cake. And her response was that she could not accept such a generous offer. But I knew that I had gained her notoriously hard-won respect. And years later, Maria told me I was the only one who approached her offering to write the book without royalties, and ironically, I was the only one who was actually earning money!
In those days, cookbooks weren’t big sellers, and especially not baking books. William Morrow had just published two baking books by major food celebrities, both of which had failed. Maria asked me to make a lunch for her and the publisher Sherry Arden to impress her with my cooking and baking ability and try to persuade her to publish my book.
When they arrived at my apartment, I had Cordon Rosé Champagne waiting. Maria was so anxious to have the lunch be a success that she nervously asked Sherry if she would like to sit but it came out as “sh#t”! To my consternation, I was the only one uncontrollably giggling, while the other two were pretending nothing out of the way had happened. But the lunch resulted in the much-desired book contract!
Maria and I researched if there were any non-religious books with “bible” in the title, and all we turned up was The Gun Bible, which reassured us that it would not be high risk to use it for a gentler subject. So, she made a mockup of the cover, and one day, when she was carrying it in the elevator, all the other passengers looked at the cover and stood up a little straighter. I realized that if I called my book a bible, it had to be 100% free of error. So, after the final pass, I read the entire 1,000-page manuscript into a tape recorder and played it back against the original, finding many errors in numbers that the transcriber made when typing them manually. I insisted that the book not go to press until every error I found was corrected. By doing this rigorous proofing, anyone who followed the recipe was virtually guaranteed success. And that was how word of mouth sold the book.
Maria asked me if I had anyone in mind for the foreword, and my response was that Maida Heatter, the reigning queen of baking, would be the choice of my dreams. The fact that I didn’t know her and that she had just done a foreword for one of those two baking books that had failed didn’t discourage me enough from reaching out to her. Maida’s response upon seeing the manuscript was: “I see what you’ve done, and I will do it.” It was the golden seal of approval. The rest is history.
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