Rachel Belle Reminds Us To Leave the House
How building community led to a cookbook deal
Rachel Belle had dreamed of writing a book since she was 4 years old, but when she finally fulfilled this dream, it didn’t quite happen as she imagined it might.
“My story is hopefully a way to inspire people to continue to go out in public and to leave their houses,” Rachel explains at the top of this week’s episode, in which we talk to her about how she ended up writing her first cookbook, Open Sesame: 45 Sweet & Savory Recipes for Tahini & All Things Sesame.
Rachel spent much of her career in broadcast journalism, earning serious acclaim as a news radio feature reporter, and after 20 years on the news beat, she set her sights on transitioning into full-time food media. While Rachel had always been an avid home cook, she didn’t have a “hope chest of recipes” or a cookbook idea simmering away on the back burner — nor did she have a huge platform. But what she did have was a “say yes” mentality and an enthusiasm for building community.
“I was always doing something food-related on the side and said ‘yes’ to everything. I did a lot of food writing, I would judge a chowder contest, test recipes for cookbook authors, host food events. I met a lot of people along the way and built a community in the industry, so folks started thinking of me for jobs.”
Part of Rachel’s effort to establish herself in food media included creating and hosting her long-running podcast, Your Last Meal, on which she interviews celebrity guests (the likes of Jewel, Isaac Mizrahi, John Waters, Jenny Slate, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Japanese Breakfast’s Michelle Zauner, Jack Johnson, etc) and asks what they would chose for their last meal. The podcast is a great listen, and as free-wheeling as the guest lineup would suggest — and it became the catalyst for her getting a cookbook deal.
As Rachel tells it, a few years ago, while still balancing her broadcast journalism work with her burgeoning food media career, she had interviewed Jen Worick, the then-publisher at Sasquatch Books. The interview had nothing to do with food or cookbooks, but Rachel and Jen hit it off, exchanged numbers, and kept in touch. Three months later, Rachel’s name was at the top of Jen’s list when Sasquatch decided they wanted someone to write a tahini-based cookbook for them.
“The publisher of Sasquatch Books heard an episode of my podcast focused on tahini, and I was apparently so passionate that she contacted me and asked if I'd like to write a proposal for a sesame book they'd been thinking about.”
And just like that, Rachel was on her way to realizing that childhood dream1.
Links from today’s chat:
Rachel Belle’s website
And her Instagram
Your Last Meal podcast
The Nosh with Rachel Belle on Cascade PBS
Open Sesame, by Rachel Belle
Caroline Wright cookbook author
Tahini Baby, by Eden Grinshpan
Sesame, by Rachel Simons, founder of Seed & Mill
Check out the Everything Cookbooks Bookshop to browse all books mentioned in the show (purchasing books this way supports the show, independent bookstores, and authors. A win-win-win! 🏆)
Next up:
On next week’s show, Betsy Andrews, journalist, poet and new cookbook author joins Andrea and I to talk about the exciting new cookbook Coastal: 130 Recipes from a California Road Trip, which she co-created with chef Scott Clarke and photographer Cheyenne Ellis. Tune in to hear us talk about how Betsy’s hustle mentality and editorial background helped to craft the aspirational travelogue. We also get into the process of 'ventriloquizing' another voice and how the team turned a road trip into a full blown cookbook.
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Bye for now. I’ll be back here next week and hope to see you. In the meantime, keep on writing, reading, and cooking.
Molly and the EVCB gang
Of course, there were many, many steps between getting approached by a publisher and actually publishing a cookbook, and we get deep into the weeds on what it took during our interview. Some of the highlights of our conversation with Rachel include:
The 6-month timeline she had to write the book - even though she had a full-time job!
How she learned to be a recipe developer by working on a friend’s cookbook.
Some of the hurdles of writing a single-ingredient cookbook (i.e., how to “tahini-ify” favorite recipes).
That just because a cookbook concept comes from the publisher doesn’t mean you want to “Mad Lib” it.
Why writing a cookbook can be more about the journey than the destination.
How Isaac Mizrahi ended up writing the foreword to her cookbook.
And so much more.
Love that I get to hear from Molly and the gang on Substack now. I have sadly not had much time to listen to the podcast, but since I'm on Substack with two newsletters every week (Cook the Vineyard and Sixburnersue), I can now check in with what you're doing. Yay. Enjoyed this post.
Lots of really interesting ground covered here! I really appreciated Rachel's candor. And thank you Kate for following up on the question about whether libraries are good for publishers and authors (phew!).