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Humble Pie
That homemade approach goes beyond the kitchen. Before the idea of Starbucks hawking CDs was even a caffeine-induced glimmer in a marketer’s eye, Paré more or less invented lifestyle cross-selling by dropping her humble spiral-bound cookbooks into grocery aisles along with beauty parlours and gas stations. “My son said, ‘Think of a drugstore; when you’re waiting for a prescription to be filled, you walk around and look at things.’” The Best of Bridge women, who dreamed up their series over cards, dealt with the fact that they couldn’t get a publisher by printing and marketing the books themselves. The 3 million copies in sales since trumps almost every Canadian celebrity chef cookbook. David Chilton, the self-publishing phenom behind The Wealthy Barber, tells me how he got involved with the likewise grassroots Podleski sisters, Canada’s answer to low-fat home cooking. Their now famous first cookbook, Looneyspoons, had been rejected by every publisher, and the St. Thomas, Ontario, pair were getting desperate when they read about Chilton in a magazine article. “They begged me for help. I told them to send me five recipes, which I asked my mom to cook. She loved them.” With Chilton’s help, they published Looneyspoons themselves and sold over 850,000 copies. That book has now spawned two successful follow-ups – Crazy Plates and Eat, Shrink and Be Merry – a new line of kitchen gadgets and a television series that will air on the Food Network in 2007. Chilton calls Greta Podleski “the Rain Man of low-fat cooking, except she’s not an idiot.” If glossy celeb-chef cookbooks are the culinary equivalent of fruitcake (often given, rarely opened), then these books are their dog-eared, stained antithesis. For readers of Staebler and her ilk, it may just be about putting the comfort back into food. Write to us: letters@enroutemag.net |
