Cookery books are popular, especially titles that promise quick, healthy meals in 15 minutes. This can’t be true of course, as all good things generally take a little more time – as we will see here. At the time of writing this article, Switzerland’s list of best-selling books included two titles relating to cooking and one relating to food hacks. Cookery books may well be popular, but they are also extremely time-consuming to make.
Tanja Grandits is an experienced cookbook author with five books already published by AT Verlag. Her sixth book has just been released. She worked on this book for around a year prior to publishing. This included meetings – which tends to be how everything starts these days. Grandits wanted to create a personal cookbook – “my cookbook”, as she calls it. She didn’t want to portray herself as a top chef but rather as a mother, private host and cook who prepares meals for her daughter and friends and lunches for her colleagues.
Consequently, the book is called “Tanjas Kochbuch” (Tanja’s cookbook). And even this title was the product of lengthy discussions during the aforementioned meetings. Other fundamental issues included the colour of the border around the cover picture, whether or not Tanja should look into the camera, which picture is the right one to use, and so on. And this was all before the real work on the book had even begun.
At some point, all of these issues were resolved and it came to the “marinating” process. Tanja Grandits and Zurich photographer Lukas Lienhard arranged dates for the hundred or so recipes to be photographed. Around ten photo shoots followed. Each time, the ingredients for each dish had to be prepared in advance and tables were pushed together in the room on the first floor of “Stucki” restaurant so that the hundreds of bowls, trays and dishes required could be clearly laid out.
