GenresNon-fiction
Food & Drink
Appetite, craft, and the table as culture.
Food books have to make a reader hungry, curious, or both, and the route there is detail. A cookbook needs recipes that work, instructions a sensible person can follow, and a point of view about what is worth cooking and why. A food history or a memoir needs the same respect for the actual thing on the plate. Vague sensuality, all velvet sauces and memory, gets tiring if we never learn what was in the pan or who taught the cook.
Culture is already in the subject. Ingredients travel, labour is involved, and taste is not a purely private miracle. You can write about that without turning dinner into a seminar. Credit the traditions you are drawing on, test the recipes, and be honest about time and cost. A reader at home with an ordinary shop nearby should not be made to feel that the real version of the dish lives somewhere they can't reach, unless the book is frankly a work of history rather than a set of instructions.
The kinds of book inside it
Cookbook
The recipes are the promise, so they must be tested, clearly written, and introduced by someone whose taste the reader can learn.
Food memoir
A life is told through kitchens and meals, and the food should be specific enough to carry memory rather than stand in for it.
Wine & drink
Drink is a craft and a business and a pleasure, and the book should help the reader taste more clearly without bullying them.
Food history
What people ate, and why, is the plot, with trade, class, and invention doing as much work as the famous dishes.
When you want a first sketch, Storywell can draft a contents list in this vein. You are still the one who writes the book. Compose an idea.